dovegreyreader scribbles

Reading Gallimaufry

Here it is again, a brief gathering of a few books I have read recently that don't make it into longer posts. No reflection on the quality of the book in any way. I just don't have quite as much I want to say about them. Notes taken from my notes as I read ...

Transcription ~ Kate Atkinson

'In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies'.

The quote at the beginning of the book by Winston Churchill is a fair indication of what to expect in this novel of espionage and undercover agents in wartime London, and I was on the alert for things to watch out for. 

What to believe...

Who to believe...

Keep an eye on the timelines..

Expect to be duped because this is Kate Atkinson after all and things are never what they seem...

Expect red herrings and the rug to be pulled from under my reading feet...

Expect a surprise and unpredictable denouement other than the certainty that something unexpected will happen...

I wasn't disappointed, I didn't see it coming even though there were plenty of clues and warnings along the way ... 'We believe what we want to believe'...'Never take anything at face value'... and so yet again, another excellent read from Kate Atkinson.

  

Wild Woman Swimming ~ Lynne Roper

Lynne Roper and her family are well-known locally, indeed Bookhound did a lot of work for them back in the 1990s. Sadly Lynne, a paramedic. died of a brain tumour in 2016 and this book is a tribute to her, and to her passion for wild swimming. The book takes the form of a journal logging Lynne's regular excursions (often with her dog Honey) to many of the most exciting wild swimming places on Dartmoor and around the south west coast. Here's a flavour...

'It's December, the air temperature is 7 degrees, and the water half a degree less. Honey and I stride through the woods, dead leaves squidging underfoot like soggy cornflakes...I dive forwards and the river slashes me like a blade. In her winter guise she has lost her silky, peat-scented enchantment and become a steel-hard witch with the taste and texture of bootleg vodka. My hands, face and neck burn with cold and I feel my blood freezing. A flock of kayakers zip by, one of them shours " People think we're mad!"'

It is 2011. That could so easily have been our Kayaker who regularly paddled the Double Dart in winter. 

If you love swimming you will love this book. If you love Dartmoor you will love it too. So many of the places favoured by my Walking Friend and I...Spitchwick, Foggintor, Sharrah, Tavy Cleave, though maybe not always to swim.

'It's a spiritual experience, sliding through wild water. Worries dissolve, my mind is liberated; thoughts flow and glide and play like dolphins. My souls swims wild.'

Here meanwhile is the necessary proof that I did actually get wet this summer, and with my Walking Friend's collie on stand-by as lifeguard...

 

Bluets ~ Maggie Nelson

240 numbered observations. Snippets about blue embracing both the end of a relationship and a friend's serious injury, Maggie Nelson examines  her obsession with the colour and its many connotations. The cover alone will make any blue-obsessive buy the book.

Bluets, visceral in places, touches something deep and often unrecognised by the Blue Obsessive and this (and the cover) may have been why I was drawn to it so immediately. Grief, loss, love and learning are all explored via Joni (Mitchell) Leonard (Cohen) Bille (Holiday) and Andy (Warhol) amongst others and in small increments that create a whole. I need to read this book many more times to really grasp the full extent of its reach.

'And so I fell in love with a colour - in this case, the colour blue - as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay under and get out from under, in turns.'

 

The Children Act ~ Ian McEwan

I am way behind the curve with this one. In fact about four years behind. But my Reading Friend and the recent film both reminded me that I needed to catch up. Everyone is saying that the film is Emma Thompson at her finest, and I can't go and see it until I've read the book, so I did.

There must be few jobs in life that have the potential and the power to skew perspectives and mess with your personal life as much as Fiona May's as a Judge in the Family Division. Surrounded by conflict, abuse, violence and having to regularly exercise the wisdom of Solomon, it is little wonder that Fiona's marriage is flailing and she is emotionally susceptible to the fatal mistake of becoming too personally involved in a case that comes before her. 

I'm still not sure how I felt about the ending...but it did make me realise that I still have a few unread McEwans from his oeuvre to tackle... The Innocent, Black Dogs, The Daydreamer, Saturday, Solar, Sweet Tooth, Nutshell...

Your thoughts...

 

If Cats Disappeared From the World ~ Genki Kuwamara

One of those little Japanese gems of the philosophical variety that make you see the world at a slant.  Entering into a pact with the devil is never going to end well, and when a young man is given months to live  and the devil appears in a Hawaiian shirt and makes him an offer it is too tempting to refuse so the consequences become apparent. In return for each extra day of life he must choose to make something disappear from the world. Phones, clocks and movies go and with it come all sorts of previously unconsidered outcomes. It's a bit like the Un-Creation, the creation in reverse, as the consequences of  each absence are explored. But then on the Fourth Day it is cats who must disappear and this obviously needs much more careful thought. There is the most delightful insight into a cat's real thoughts...you know when we talk to them and think we know what they are thinking or want. No, we don't have the first clue..

'And what you realize when you've lived with a cat for a long time is that we may think we own them, but that's not the way it is. They simply allow us the pleasure of their company...'

Of course Magnus was completely in accord with all of this when I discussed the book with him...

The Otterbury Incident ~ C.Day Lewis

Last but definitely not least. The Endsleigh  theme for October was 'Tribes' and I could think of no better book than one of my childhood favourites, The Otterbury Incident by C.Day Lewis. Published in 1948 this is the post war England of bomb sites and children having plenty of freedom whilst being in awe of authority. The boys in rival gangs play war games and get themselves into all manner of scrapes, but when a crime is suspected they join forces to defeat the baddies and end up heroes. 

I read my ancient copy, sent by one of those unofficial aunties we seemed to accumulate as children. This one was a teacher at Delabole Primary School and knew just the right books to send us. Neither the story nor the writing dims with time, though as the years progress I become slightly more incredulous with each read that when it came time for the boys to head home and arm for the battle they all reappear with air guns and sheath knives. Ah yes, 'twas a different world.

 

 So there you have it, your thoughts on any or all of these most welcome.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Light in the Dark - A Winter Journal ~ Horatio Clare

'Thank goodness for this journal. To have somewhere to put this small story, something to do with it, is a salvation.'

Under a lowering winter sky how much darker and intractable the problems can seem. The fog and mist and cold and and damp ensnaring the worries, refusing to resolve or dissipate the anxieties, and finding himself seriously compromised by winter SADness Horatio Clare decides on light-seeking and journal-writing as a way through the winter of 2017-18...

'I will pay attention. Depression kills your power of vision, turning you fatally towards yourself, but I will practise looking and looking outwards like an exercise, as though I am training for an expedition.'

Now published by Elliot & Thompson as The Light in the Dark - A Winter Journal. Elliot & Thompson that rare but precious breed these days, an independent publisher.

He chose the right winter to put it all to the test; the Beast From the East earlier this year had me rushing for my Vest in the West, but, based in the more northerly Calderdale town of Hebden Bridge, and with the backdrop of the often dark and forbidding Pennines, the challenge for Horatio Clare was bound to be even greater.

The book is searingly honest about the vissicitudes of depression.

'The past is a guilty place, the future a hanging threat, the present a humiliation. Stop it, you want to shout. Just stop it. Let me be.

Depression for Horatio Clare and for many is debilitating and de-skilling and the impact on work, family and friends is apparent along with acute crises of confidence and self-esteem...

'Last night was deep winter, freezing starlight over the valley and Rebecca warming the whole house as she banked up the fire. I looked at her and loved her and felt I had let her down so utterly, not saving enough, not planning enough, not loving and cherishing enough, worrying too much, changing too little, being away too much...'

But, and here's where the book triumphs, there is balance. 'I will embrace this winter like a summer' moments of despair are leavened with moments of insight, hope and grace, a sense that 'things will and do get better', and with ways of facilitating that...

Walking...

'This! This! I thought. How did I let myself fall so far from this? All I had to do was hold it in my heart, take it as love. It is not so hard.'

Paying close attention to nature..

'Beware that glaze which creeps over the inner eye, blinding you to the vision of moss in the rain...'

Paying close attention to and spending time with his son, and let it be known that the account of Aubrey's birth some five years previously one of the most moving I have read...

'To hold him, so new, so small, made me feel like a tentative giant. The tiny mole-like utterness of him, and the feeling of a compliment greater than any you have imagined when he sleeps in your arms, and the sheer impossible vastness of everything ahead of him mantles your shoulders over him.'

I sensed the Book of Common Prayer often returned unbidden to Horatio Clare, exposure to it as a child often ensuring that it rests somewhere deep within ready to surface. The Evening Collect flits into my head regularly on a cold winter's evening..

Lighten our darkness we beseech thee O Lord and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night...

The Nunc Dimittus never far behind in my mind...

LORD, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace :
according to thy word.

For mine eyes have seen :
thy salvation;

Which thou hast prepared :
before the face of all people;

To be a light to lighten the Gentiles :
and to be the glory of thy people Israel.

But the moments of grace shine through for Horatio Clare and for the reader too because he has a lucid and lyrical turn of phrase, and having read this book through to get a feel for it I will now read it slowly, by dated entry.

February 19th, and the first sighting of the snowdrops is 'hope incarnate' and suddenly so much more becomes apparent, there to be noticed, the first bee flying into the attic, the thrush calling at twilight, ducks flying up the valley. 

It is that day in February that Kathleen Jamie writes about in Sightlines when the light shifts noticeably...

'Every year, in the third week of February, there is a day, or more usually, a run of days, when one can say for sure that the light is back. Some juncture has been reached and the light spills into the world from a sun suddenly higher in the sky.

I've written on the page in my copy, '2013 - Feb 14th'. Maybe we get it a little earlier further south and west.

And for Horatio Clare with that light comes real illuminating vision, describing the paralysis and inability to see with honesty, seeing the cloud lift, the promise of hope and the decision to seek help. So much to commend The Light in the Dark. It's a book I'm very pleased to have invested in (I bought it at the North Cornwall Book Festival). Incidentally, knowing how carefully some of us choose bookmarks, this postcard was mine...

Last winter was a shock to the system here in the south west, even the stalwarts rated it as the worst they had known since '63. Maybe it’s because we're getting older we wondered, even though we are fit and well (deo volente) but still enough to make you a little nervous about this one. Yet, like Horatio Clare 'winter suits this house' too...

'...with the fire going, the clothes hanging on the drying rack, the door curtain pulled across and the key turned in the lock, a fractional attempt to stem the freezing draught from the keyhole...'

Yes, yes, yes and yes except this year, suddenly realising that we never open the north-east-facing French windows in the Book Room from the outside, I have taped the keyhole over outside and hung a new, thicker and much-improved layer of insulation on the rail inside.

On a sunny winter's morning it's like having our very own quilted wall of stained glass. 

In fact I may actually have over-compensated this year...we have draught-proofed every last breezy inch around the windows, the fleece linings have gone up on the curtains, the logs are stacked high, I've stocked up on Vitamin D and fleece-lined leggings, the electric lap blanket is at the ready, but above all I am very pleased to have The Light in the Dark in the toolbox too.

Hat tip to Dan Mogford for the beautiful cover artwork. I always check out who has designed the cover of a book and this one speaks to the contents beautifully. Checking out Dan's website I see I unwittingly have quite a few 'Mogfords' on my shelves...

Meanwhile I wonder if you have any suggestions for more books that will cheer through the winter...

And of course all tips for staving off the cold gratefully received...

And as always with apologies to all Southern Hemisphere readers basking in the sunshine.

 

 

Peaceful Reading :: A Month in the Country ~ J.L.Carr

Another peaceful read...

I've recently helped establish a new book group that has started to meet in the church that we can see from our home. This village has no meeting place and so our new churchwarden is injecting a new lease of life into the building with an art group (Bookhound has joined) and various other groups and events.

I love to open the bedroom curtains to this view in the winter...

and this view in summer...

Not our parish, but as we are right on the boundary this our nearest church. I walk across there a lot and it is a church I have written about often here and which I love.

Small in size thanks to a rebuild after a disastrous lightning strike and fire in 1956 which decimated all but the fifteenth century tower...

St Mary's a church that always reminds me of the one in George Eliot's Adam Bede.

We are running the book group on a monthly theme rather than a set book, and for 'The Village' I decided to read (for the umpteenth time) A Month in the Country by J.L.Carr.

As soon as I open the book my spirits soar because I know I am in for something special, Oxgodby in 1920, and each time I read that 'something special' will be something different.

I first wrote this about the book here in 2006 ...

'War veteran Tom Birkin reflects, almost 60 years later, on the summer of 1920 he spent uncovering a medieval wall painting on the wall of a village church.He sleeps just below the belfry and spends his days high up on the scaffolding inside the church. Meanwhile outside another war veteran, Moon, is digging in the church grounds for some archaeological remains.

There were real and very obvious analogies for me of Tom reaching to the heavens for the healing he was searching for after the grimness of the war, and Moon conversely digging in the opposite direction and so much more.It is a reflection on times and loves lost.

"We can ask and ask but we can't have again what once seemed ours for ever....they've gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass" says Carr's narrator towards the end of his account.

Was there ever a more realistic description of grief in so few words?

In her introduction Penelope Fitzgerald adds her own thoughts...

"The death of the spirit is to lose confidence in one's own independence and to do only what we are expected to do. At the same time, it is a mistake to expect anything specific from life, life will not conform"

She was the wisest of women and J.L.Carr most certainly a writer with the "magic touch to re-enter the imagined past".

This time around my mind was focused on that summer we have just had and so like the one that J.L. Carr describes...

'The summer day of summer days - a cloudless sky, ditches and roadside deep in grass, poppies, cuckoo pint, trees heavy with leaf, orchards bulging over hedge briars...'

and this...

'Deep red hollyhocks pressed against the limestone wall and velvet butterflies flopped lazily from flower to flower. It was Tennyson weather, drowsy, warm, unnaturally still...'

The contrast between the bucolic idyll that village life seemed to be (though of course in reality far from) comes in stark comparison to the horrors of war. This is the country that Birkin and Moon fought for and the village knows it. The debt to these survivors of the trenches is in part repaid with acceptance and kindness, with shelter and work, hospitality and inclusion. It was all the more poignant to sit and talk about the book (by chance chosen by two of us) in a church that must resemble the one that features in the book, and in the run up to the forthcoming Armistice commemoration. 

On the evening of November 11th, Peter, one of our number, will (or maybe because the weather forecast is terrible) be playing Last Post from the top of the church tower before nipping down to the belfry to join the ringers. Throughout the day  bells with ring out across the country to mark the 100th anniversary of the cessation of hostilities, and St Mary's, with its tower of five bells, will be joining in the great peal. In Tavistock there will be a half muffled peal followed by a full peal of over 5000 changes...for the campanologists out there this will be of the method known as Grandsire Caters, apparently one of the oldest of all ringing methods, which will last for three hours from 2.30pm.

Meanwhile I would rate A Month in the Country as one of my top ten essential reads. Now I've said that I'm wondering what the other nine might be... any suggestions...

And is this one of your most treasured books too...

The River in the Sky ~ Clive James

'....................................Books are the anchors
Left by the ships that rot away. The mud
The anchors lie in is one's recollection
Of what life was, and never, late or soon,
Will be again.'

I'm not sure whether The River in the Sky emboldened me to try reading Robin Robertson's The Long Take, or whether it was the other way around. Suffice to say, I started Clive James epic poem, a grand tour of 'the fragile treasures of his life,' and took about a month to read it...

'At the opening of The River in the Sky, a book-length poem, we find James in ill health but high spirits. Although his body traps him in his Cambridge house, his mind is free to roam.

... Animated by powerful recollections, James presents a flowing stream of vivid images. He moves from emotionally resonant personal moments, such as listening to jazz records with his future wife, to unforgettable encounters with all kinds of culture: Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony sits alongside ‘YouTube’s vast cosmopolis’.

In some ways I was reminded of Tony Judt's remarkable end-of life book The Memory Chalet for its collection of memories and revelations, alongside wisdom and insight, in that way I'm guessing the approaching end concentrates the attention like no other. The difference is that The River in the Sky takes the form of an epic poetic elegy, and in the case of Clive James the end has been a long time in the offing.

Diagnosed with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukaemia in 2010, and with little hope of a remission or a cure, Clive James had already accepted that the disease had beaten him and the end was nigh. Now, in 2018, expressing some embarrassment that he is still alive and thanks it would seem to an experimental drug treatment...

I had thought this ship was sailing
Across the river in the sky towards
Andromeda, but in the night, it stopped
Quite close to home, and on the quay
Boxes were swung ashore that indicated
Another destination altogether.'

For a man to live under the shadow of imminent death for so long, and for me as a reader to see that the time hasn't been wasted is the most encouraging and uplifting thing, though possibly for very personal reasons.

I have mentioned it many times before so it is well-known here I think, that my brother died of acute myeloblastic leukaemia when he was twenty-four and I was twenty-one. Treatments in the early 1970s were mostly experimental, harrowing and painful, but after his death Malcolm's consultant at the Royal Marsden (Dr Ray Powles) wrote my family a very moving letter which included these words...

'At present it is impossible for you to think of anything but sadness, but I must say to you that we learned a great deal about the management and ultimate control of this very distressing disease from Malcolm's case, and I hope that his loss will not be wasted, and he may ultimately have contributed to the cure of leukaemia....'

Dr Powles won't know how many times I've read that letter over the years and wondered, even hoped that this was true, and so when I hear of any progress, or of successful leukaemia treatment trials, as in Clive James's case, that are extending life, I feel a real sense of gratitude for the short life that we knew, but also for the contribution that might have been made and for the hope and better prognosis that now exists.

So, you see, I bring a lot of baggage to a book like The River in the Sky which may all have added considerably to its impact, I loved the way that threads of a whole life were picked up, woven in and dropped again, only to be re-threaded some time later. Subjects and themes to which I can barely be privy, can only watch as an outsider, but which offered windows into a life well-lived.

One minute dancing the tango in Buenos Aires the next listening to Thelonius Monk playing After Midnight...

Watching The West Wing with his daughter or remembering his childhood and the loss of his father, who having survived the Japanese prisoner-of-war camp would die when the plane returning him to Australia crashed.

There is indeed sorrow, sadness and regret but Clive James is not a wallower; there is a vast amount of uplifting joy here and with so much gratitude to so many people, often perhaps addressed for the first time...

.....A terrific teacher,
So why, till now, have I always left him out,
Except for the occasional fleeting name-check?
The answer is too easy and still too daunting.
The ideal father figure, he raised the question,
Simply be being there, of what life would have been
Like if my father had come home.'

Mr Leonard, who had navigated Lancasters over Germany and had returned.

The River in the Sky an accumulation of deft flights of wonderful memories, whose paths cross like contrails across a summer sky, and once I got into the flow of the writing at each sitting I was transfixed.

Clive James did a radio interview recently. By his own admission failing physically, but his voice, though frail, still had those dry laconic antipodean tones with which I associate him, and with it a mental acuity that allows the memories to flood in and be translated onto the page. He seems deeply philosophical and accepting of his condition and determined to keep the flame burning to the very end making this a moving and in many ways energising read. It has all propelled me into another of his poetry collections, Injury Time. There’s even talk, with my Reading Friend, of a shared plunge into Clive James’s translation of The Divine Comedy.

Maybe though, the abiding message to me from The River in the Sky was something about not wasting a minute...

And perhaps about writing it down when the time feels right..

'In this most fruitful chapter of my life
I swear that I can hear the light...'

 

Dogger ~ Shirley Hughes

It all started yesterday with a picture from Shirley Hughes over on Twitter... the feed run by someone on her behalf...

'One lady had a Toy Stall, full of knitted ducks and cars and baby dolls in bonnets. And there, at the very back of the stall, behind a lot of other toys, was - DOGGER!'

I scrolled back and there were more illustrations from the book with quotes from the story. I'd been reading backwards but no worries, I know this one off by heart. This is Dogger by Shirley Hughes. First published in 1977 and a staple of our bedtime reading shelf along with the Ahlbergs and Topsy and Tim (what was it about Topsy and Tim?)

Meeting his sister Bella from school with mum and baby brother Joe, Dave, distracted by the sight of an ice cream van, leaves his beloved toy Dogger behind. There is misery and mayhem at bedtime and in the days that follow.

...and there I am, things to do (Dyson-ing, washing, writing) places to go, people to see, but instead I granted myself a moment of reminiscing. Not only about how much we all adored Dogger and the fact that I could lay my hands on our bedraggled copy in seconds, but remembering all those moments of the Lost Item.

I say 'item' because whilst two of our three were firmly attached to their teddy bears one was firmly attached to a variety of things, any one of which could be lost. Will I ever forget us having to ring up the local supermarket to ask if they'd found a Thomas the Tank Engine pyjama top anywhere in the store. Bless the manager who, clearly sensing our plight, sent out search parties who eventually located the said item in the frozen peas cabinet. I don't know who was the most overjoyed about the reunion...us, the child or the store manager.

Or the night time search for the furry hedgehog 'somewhere' in the garden, but could be anywhere.

And then let's not forget the Sweep glove puppet left behind in Departures as we boarded a plane. 

'Anyone lost Sweep?' announced the flight attendant as he paraded him down the aisle of the plane. Imagine ten days in Switzerland without it. Bookhound and I blanched at the mere thought.

I suspect many of you will have similar tales of your own...please do share in comments if you want to.

Dave's pain is self-evident through Shirley Hughes's beautiful illustrations, and his misery at the school summer fair is there for all to witness in his face and his general demeanour. And bless sister Bella for doing all she could to assuage the loss...lending one of her own teddies, and then coming to the rescue in the final denouement, which I couldn't possibly spoil in case you haven't read Dogger.

It's a book about attachment, loss, family, kindness, security, and so much more and that evening, as Bella and Dave settle down to sleep and all is well with the world, I remembered how this was the sort of book to reaffirm that, even after some of those nightmare days we had as parents. Some of you might know the ones too ...the days when you felt you'd got it all wrong and thank goodness tomorrow will be another day when you can all wake up and start over.

Incidentally Shirley Hughes could have been standing in the bedroom in our house when she painted this...

The more I think about it the more I realise Dogger is a brilliant book for grown ups too. It's magic still works. I often think of those who don't have children and who, for whatever reason, may feel excluded from books like this. All I will say is we've all been children and it may resonate. 

I drifted out of my state of reverie and reminiscence and found our copy of Dogger...

 

...but going to the shelf unleashed a whole lot of other well-thumbed memory-jerkers too.

The Baby's Catalogue in particular would doubtless be sent to the incinerator of it was a library book. Heaven knows what infectious diseases it harbours. And that reminded me of the joy of the mail order catalogue to us children of the 1950s. Traffords and my brother and I would competitively 'bagsy' something with the turn of each page...I knew exactly where the Etch-a-Sketch was and won it every time.

I was quite pleased to read this in the back of one those books I found. Strictly speaking writing in books wasn't really allowed but I'm now relieved we didn't police that one too hard, and clearly we did get some things right..

Reassured no end, I transmitted beams of love out to our scattered offspring, now all thirty-somethings, before heading for the washing line, except I sat down here to write this first.

 

 

Petal Power : Floral Fashion and Women Designers at The Silver Studio 1910-1940

One of my favourite stopping-to-stare places when I am wandering around the Penlee House Museum and Gallery in Penzance is the display of Cryséde fabrics...

Designed in St Ives in the 1920s and 30s the fabrics seem suddenly timeless, and perhaps the inspiration for much of what I covet in clothing from Seasalt,  the Cornish-based company who are very much in the ascendant right now. I'm not sure I could face a winter without my Plant Hunter coat, whilst I have lived in my stripeys and skirts or my Coach House linen day dress this summer, and my Challah pinafore is already doing good service now the cooler weather is here. One piece per season is my treat and I take my time choosing it.

So with my interest in textiles and design always simmering I ordered a copy of this little book published by MODA (Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture), Petal Power : Floral Fashion and Women Designers at The Silver Studio 1910-1940, as the result of an Instagram post from Florence Knapp (aka flossieteacakes). Never let it be said social media doesn't have a place in book sales because, having spent some time on the trail of designers like Enid Marx this year, I would never have heard about this one otherwise. I am intrigued about the lives of other lesser known women using their artistic skills in the first half of the twentieth century.

Established in 1880 in Hammersmith, West London by Arthur Silver and taken over in 1901 by his son Rex, the Silver Studio employed many women as textile and wallpaper designers for clients who included Liberty & Co and Selfridges. The designers worked anonymously receiving no credit for their work and for very low wages, working for a stickler of a boss who certainly didn't mince his words when it came to demands, criticism or rejection of submitted designs.

It was fascinating to read that, at a time of limited career options for women, here was another route into work for those of artistic ability left unmarried or unsupported after the First World War. Whilst the male designers worked in the studio, the women had to work from home and were often sent a complex design brief but with no assurance of wages. Nor did the copyright belong to the artist or even the studio but to the buyer, who could then decide whether to put the design into production or not.

As Keren Protheroe elaborates, the work was very labour-intensive but not beyond the skills of the women, many of whom had received art school training and with it a sound foundation in drawing. With skills that were readily transferable to other mediums such as advertising and ceramics as well as calligraphy the women's versatility ensured ongoing work.

I was intrigued by the process of working in miniature before scaling up to a full-sized design all of which had to take into account colouring, re-colouring and pattern repeats, and the fact that scaling up could lose some of the 'prettiness' that Rex Silver was looking for. 

The book is just forty pages long but nicely illustrated with designs that evoke the era perfectly, and I saw plenty of iconic designs that I recognised. Women designers were assumed to be more in touch with the fabrics most likely to attract the female consumer and, as buyers for the large stores, were considered to have a commercial advantage over men in this respect.

Books about shops and shopping came to mind, Ladies Paradise by Emile Zola and High Wages by Dorothy Whipple,

' Shopping in department stores was central to the experience of fashionable modernity, whether it involved window shopping or actually purchasing. Swathes of fabric draped colourful shop-floor displays, and floral fabric could be bought by the yard for making up at home...Ready-to-wear clothing was readily available by the 1920s but wealthier women continued to employ designers and dressmakers.'

Mention of the department store and I wonder if you agree that you and I may be living through the era of its slow and tortuous demise. Long may John Lewis thrive, but both Plymouth and Exeter are to lose their House of Fraser stores (always known as Dingles) and Debenhams would seem to be on the ropes too. The hours my mum and I would spend in Grants and Allders in Croydon choosing fabric.

Does anyone remember Rose & Hubble in the early 1970s. I made plenty of these dresses and blouses with their floral designs...

Meanwhile Persephone Books have single-handedly increased our awareness of so many textile designs with their end papers, I even recognised this one in a tiny museum in Geraldine in New Zealand for goodness' sake...

So when I turned the page in Petal Power and saw this it immediately sent me to my shelves...

I'm not going to say which book features this design for a dress silk by Mrs McPherson, someone will know, but it was created in 1928 in the spirit of the French couturier and artistic-decorator Paul Poiret's Atelier Martine.and I recognised it as a Persephone end paper fabric instantly. And as Keren Protheroe says of these women...

'They represent the first generation of female designers to work directly with industry for large-scale textile production. Their careers helped pave the way for greater female influence in fabric design. Artistic sensibility, skilled draughtsmanship, and eye for the popular market allowed women to forge careers in the modern commercial world and become textile designers in their own right.'

And given that until now I had never heard of the Silver Studio, there was a timely coincidence as I sat down to write this...

The latest Biannually arrived from Persephone Books with news of their latest books and included the free bookmark. Mine was of the end paper for National Provincial by Lettice Cooper, of an early 1930's design for a woven cloth by John Churton for the Silver Studio.

 

 

Peaceful reading :: A Time to Keep Silence ~ Patrick Leigh Fermor

We are now in recovery from the excitement of a couple of Ikea runs, choosing the sofa, having it delivered in sixteen boxes two days later when we thought it would take weeks, spending an entire Sunday building it, having three washers left over and not getting divorced, and now sitting (or rather reclining) on it. We bought a 'Gronlid' combination in the end with the chaise option at one end, say no more, I adore it, bring on winter, I'll cope.

And I have a little pile of peaceful, mindful reading on the chaise in progress at the moment which I thought I would share with you over the next few weeks; books to calm the nerves and realign spirits that may be feeling a little more depleted after each news bulletin.

 The first is A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor in which Patrick recounts his retreats in two monasteries capturing both the atmosphere and all its transforming qualities. 

'No automatic drains such as conversation, small talk, catching trains or the hundred anxious trivialities that poison every day life.'

That was 1957, imagine it now.

The assimilation of a strange new world creeps in gradually and not without some sense of inner panic verging on depression  at the solitude.

'The period during which normal standards recede and the strange new world becomes reality is slow, and, at first, acutely painful.'

That power to calm is quietly but powerfully wrought as Patrick Leigh Fermor feels his own life calming and slowing down in the midst of the monks and their daily round of prayer and contemplation....

'As the monks dispersed after Vespers and a few hours later after Compline, I had a sensation of the temperature of life falling to zero, the blood running thinner and slower as if the heart might in the end imperceptibly stop beating.'

Back in the middle of that hot summer we have just had I went along to an evening concert during the Exon Singers Festival, which comes to Tavistock for a week at the end of July each year. It was an evening of anthems amongst other things, Parry's I Was Glad, Handel's Halellujah Chorus, Zadok the Priest, sending shivers down my spine and lifting the roof off our ancient Parish Church. As part of the week-long church-based festival Compline is held every evening at the end of each concert. The candles are lit, the clergy and choir sing the antiphons and responses and time slips away, it could all be hundreds of years ago. As the last notes dissolve back into the ancient stonework I walked out of the church in silence into a summer's evening of complete peace. Our town's abbey, like so many, was a victim of Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, I passed the abbey ruins on the church green and it all made me wonder...had that not happened what might its fate have been.

I had been sitting in the North Aisle with a long view of the St Mary Magdalene Chapel with its William Morris window and the Fitz monument. Sir John in his armour (which he probably never wore in anger as he was a lawyer) who died in 1589 and his wife Mary.

On the wall by my pew the board with names of all the Abbots...

990 Aelfmaer
1009 - 27 Lyfing
1027 - 43 Ealdred
1043 - 82 Sihtric
1082 - 88 Geoffrey
1091 - 1102 Wymund

And so it went on, through Osbert, Robert, Walter, Godfrey, Baldwin, Herbert et al until the final name on the board 1523 - 1539 Peryn

'And on the morning of 3 March 1539 the twenty Tavistock monks gathered under their abbot in their beautiful octagonal chapter house, just as their predecessors had done for five and a half centuries. They were faced with an ultimatum to surrender to the Crown the abbey and its lands. The monks duly signed the deeds of surrender and went their ways...the finest of the abbey's ornaments and fixings were dispatched to London....'

Other sundry items were bought by the churchwardens with 'two-pennyworth of drink for anyone who volunteered to help carry the items on their short journey to the parish church' where I had just been sitting.

'The physical loss that followed the dissolution was the destruction or decay of beautiful buildings....at a level more immediate and more profound the loss was of an institution that was both civilising and supportive of the local community. Tavistock in 1539 must have been a town in which shock and disbelief gave way to alarm and foreboding.'

With their tendency to be domineering and pocket taxes there may have been some relief at the loss of the abbey, but there was much 'worried pessimism' too. The monks ran the school, healed the sick, supported the poor, conducting a whole range of social services...'the economic prospects looked equally hazardous'. The abbey employed large numbers of people...centuries of economic management were now under threat...tourism was surely destined to dive. The keynote was uncertainty, all the familiar props had been removed.

This is 1539 by the way not 2018, in case you were sensing similarities to our current predicament here in the UK, and my thanks to the late Gerry Woodcock's wonderful book Homage to St Eustachius's A History of Tavistock Parish Church for this enlightening background and the sense that plus ca change when it comes to turmoil.

Patrick Leigh Fermor considers the fate of the monasteries too, exploring their place 'as the only guardians of literature, the classics, scholarship and the humanities' for many centuries. France ultimately fared no better than Britain, the French Revolution saw to that apparently. Monks scattered, libraries split up, buildings sold or demolished, but the faith lived on as did the order, indestructible in the face of persecution and ready for reinstatement when the time was right. Patrick offers a deep and insightful reasoning for the existence of these orders in the modern world needed then and well.... many would argue still very much needed now...

'They are the anonymous well-wishers who reduce the moral overdraft of mankind.'

You have to wonder where it all leaves us in the twenty-first century and the digital age, because times have certainly a-changed since Patrick Leigh Fermor escaped from the daily round to write a book or two.

If you haven't come across digitalnun maybe check her out. Dame Catherine Wybourne is bringing the Benedictine Order right up to speed with her internet presence, forging an innovative online version of Benedictine welcome and hospitality. You can find her as a daily prayerful presence on both Twitter  (where she has twenty thousand followers) and also on Facebook.

A Time to Keep Silence is a very special little book, less than a hundred pages of intense and precious reflection which I have read often. It's a book for the spirit; to calm, to uplift and to encourage, especially when the world order at large seems slightly chaotic, and either out of anyone's control or in dubious hands.

If you don't know it I can highly recommend, and if you do I would love to know your thoughts.

 

 

 

 

Ngaio Marsh - Her Life in Crime ~ Joanne Drayton

I mentioned I'd had a birthday recently. It was one of 'those' birthdays, the one that is halfway between two big ones. I had a lovely day, spoke to all my chicks and had lovely gifts from them...birdfeeders and enough fat balls to feed the village from the Gamekeeper, a bright yellow notebook (for winter cheer) and pen holder from the Kayaker, and a parcel from Offspringette in New Zealand that included Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime by Joanne Drayton. I don't know about you but if someone gives me the gift of a book, whoever it may be, it becomes a special read. It has been chosen for me, just me and I was quickly into this one...

'While Ngaio Marsh had a flamboyant public persona, she was fiercely protective of her private life. And no one knows better how to cover tracks with red herrings and remove incriminating evidence than a crime fiction writer…Marsh one of the four Queens of Golden Age detective fiction, alongside Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and Margery Allingham.'

My Women's Lives shelves are bursting with biographies about women writers (mostly), and I had recently thought I should try and read of one life each month or so and then read something they had written. As she had just arrived, and as I was pining a little because I was in New Zealand this time last year, I made a start with Ngaio and emerged a few days later really impressed with her and what a good egg she was.

Born in Christchurch on South Island in 1895, the only child of good and doting parents, Ngaio grew up in the city, her family making their home out on the Port Hills. The Port Hills one of the first places I go to when I arrive for a visitation for the fabulous perspective on the city, the view across Lyttleton to Diamond Harbour and the sheer vastness of the land where I will spend the next three weeks. 

Despite regular trips abroad it was to the family home, Marton Cottage in Cashmere, that Ngaio would always return for her entire life, never marrying but making countless cherished friends who shared her life. Ngaio's Christmas Tree party the stuff of legends apparently.

I was intrigued to read of a devastating incident in her father's life. A bank worker of the most diligent variety, imagine Henry Marsh's dismay on discovering at the end of a working day that his till, for which he was personally responsible, was £500 short. With a fair idea of who was responsible for the theft, but with no way of proving it, Henry had to pay back the money, a vast sum, from an inheritance, leaving the family short of money but, it would seem never short of love. 

Educated in Christchurch before enrolling in the city's art school I was interested to read of Ngaio's close association with many of the artists I had come to know and love during my last visit. I spent a lot of time wandering around the art gallery and then borrowing books from the library (on Offspringette's ticket) which is how I came to read biographies of both Rita Angus and Olivia Spencer Bower while I was there. Both, I now discover, friends and peers of Ngaio...

I fell madly in love with Rita Angus's painting Cass Station, going back to see it at least three times, and then going back one last time to say goodbye to it.

but also stopping at the real Cass Station just so we could say I had been there...

In fact, as Joanne Drayton points out, Ngaio and her friends were the cream of the art school..

'Collectively they represented a phenomenal blossoming of post-war female talent. Not only did they share the ambition to become professional painters, but they knew it was an unconventional role.'

Ngaio would share a studio with Viola Macmillan Brown whose painting Across the Plains I was also standing in front of this time last year. It is the view from Cashmere and might it be a fair assumption that this was painted near to Ngaio's home.... I'd like to think so, and then like to take the liberty of imagining the two of them painting plein-air together

Ngaio was indeed an expert at covering her personal tracks and traces making a biography a difficult task, but she was also a generous and sociable woman. Not only a writer and artist but also a theatre director of note, and with many excellent productions to her name, all of which has left a trail out there which Joanne Drayton has followed assiduously, making this a hugely enjoyable read. Not the least of these trails is the critical reception received by her crime fiction..

'Commentators were now consistently identifying the qualities that set Ngaio apart from the plethora of other detective writers: her characterisation, her narrative ability, her ingenuity, and especially her humour, which performs the important function of making them more palatable.'

Hugely popular in the UK and a regular visitor here, eventually being made a Dame, it was interesting  to learn that the war was no deterrent to the ascendency of the crime novel. As Joanne Drayton elaborates...

People continued to read crime fiction while bombs rained down and vast casualty lists were posted. Special pocket-sized editions of detective novels were produced for easy reading in bomb shelters and lending libraries posted crime sections close to bunker entrances. The demand for intriguing puzzle plots would soar.'

My one Ngaio Marsh book to date is an audio version of Surfeit of Lampreys which I enjoyed immensely and I have especially enjoyed discovering the background to the book and of Ngaio's friendship with the Rhodes family. Childless herself, Ngaio paid special and caring attention to the children of friends, often making financial provision for their education.

I have a very modest shelf of Ngaio Marsh's crime novels and will be interested to see if they stand the test of time given that I find Agatha Christie nigh on impossible to read. Had I read her as a teenager I think the die of a lifelong attraction would have been cast, but I didn't and I just can't make the Christie books work now. I have greater hopes for Ngaio Marsh now that I know so much more about her. A jolly good egg indeed, good to be reminded that here was a woman of many talents and an excellent book, highly recommended.

Meanwhile, I'm sure there must be plenty of Ngaio Marsh fans out there, do you have an recommendations..

And while we are on the subject of crime, any more good crime reads lately..

In fact, let's extend that to thrillers as well...

 

 

 

Year of Wonder - Classical Music for Every Day ~ Clemency Burton-Hill

’So, know this: what lies ahead is not some white girl with a posh name telling you that you ‘should’ listen to classical music every day in order to somehow become a better, smarter or more classy person. I have no interest in making you feel ashamed because you have never heard of some of these composers or their music...’

This is a promising start from musician and Radio Three presenter Clemency Burton-Hill in the introduction to her book Year of Wonder, recommended by one of you in comments recently and for which I am so grateful. I knew in an instant that this was the right book for me, and very quickly treated myself to a copy on the basis that at about 0.05479452p per day this represented exceptionally good value for a year of listening to a piece of classical music chosen for me each day. The book is sensibly square-bound so no crushing or spine-cracking required; it's a detail that matters to book-lovers like thee and me.

This in Clemency Burton-Hill’s introduction appealed to me as well...

‘What I am determined to do, though, is to extend a hand to those who feel that the world of classical music is a party to which they haven’t been invited...’

That felt just a little like me.

Despite the fact that my dad was a Royal Marine's Boy Bugler, drummer and flautist, I don’t come from a musical family or have a classical music background. If I play any instruments it’s because I have taught myself (guitar and flute, the latter poorly). We were a post-war Light Service radio family with the addition of the The New Seekers and Perry Como’s greatest hits when we finally acquired a radiogram. We were certainly exposed to classical music at Primary School, but really only Kathleen Ferrier because the headmistress worshipped her, and Peter and the Wolf because every 1950's schoolchild listened to that on the weekly school's radio programme. I didn’t really discover classical music until I left home, bought a little stereo unit for my student nurse’s room and quietly started to explore for myself with LPs for 99p. I probably began with Rodrigo’s Concerto de Aranjuez and it grew from there. Interestingly my mum and dad likewise started to extend their listening repertoire at the same time... my mum adored ballet music and my dad accumulated anything and everything he fancied. It’s as if they were making up for what their working class wartime childhoods had never provided and which there was never the money or the confidence to provide for me. 

Slowly but surely, I’ve worked my way through a great deal, whilst singing in church choirs for many years has also helped, yet I still really don’t know my Bach from my Beethoven if pressed and feel hopelessly inadequate in conversations about opera (which I loath) and the Proms (which I love). If you had any sort of education in classical music, or learned an instrument as a child how fortunate you were coming to it all at a young age. But better late than never etc. I have slowly built up my classical music repertoire over the years, and yet I still feel there is so much I must have missed, and Year of Wonder is most certainly filling in the gaps.

I was reassured that I could jump in and start listening no matter the date so I backdated a few days to September 26th, my birthday and a lovely Schubert song, and have slotted in a daily listen ever since. New composers, new pieces of music, some familiar  some completely unknown and alongside a brief written explanation from Clemency Burton-Hill. I even forgave the inclusion of Philip Glass once I read her reasons for choosing it. It is a well-recognised moment each day in our house when Radio 3 ‘goes all Cage or Glass on me’ and I creep back to Classic FM. 

I downloaded Spotify, figured out what to do next without having to ask a child, and now have the Year of Wonder playlist at the ready each day and look forward to the moment when I sit down for my listen. I warn Bookhound that I am in the world of the noise-cancelling headphones so won’t hear a thing happening in the world, and to come and get me if there’s a fire, and then I’m away.

So thank you again to the recommender, this would be an excellent one for the C*******s list, or to give as a gift.

Meanwhile I wonder if any of you recognise my experience of classical music..

Or were you raised with it all resonating around the house...

Piano lessons from an early age...

Or self-taught...

I’d love to know.

 

The Long Take ~ Robin Robertson

 

I have been a bit slothful about reading the Man Booker prize lists for the last few years but it's the announcement tonight so I'd better make an effort.

Gone are the years of the Bookerthon when I would read them all and make predictions, but nevertheless I waded into the long list with some gusto, reading Warlight by Michael Ondaatje and Sabrina by Nick Drnaso and lauding both of them for different reasons. Then The Leg happened and August was swallowed up with caring, and before I knew it the short list was out, minus Michael Ondaatje, and I'll confess to a bit of a sulk at Warlight's  omission.

However one book had caught my eye, and this in the wake of my June-long read of a book a day of The Odyssey in Emily Wilson's new translation. That experience left me in step with both the epic and the Homeric and I sensed both in  The Long Take by Robin Robertson and published by Picador..

'A noir narrative written with the intensity and power of poetry, The Long Take is one of the most remarkable – and unclassifiable – books of recent years...'

I detected many Odyssean similarities as I read of Walker, a survivor of the D Day landings, an army veteran from Nova Scotia who, after the war, pitches up in New York in 1946. The city is too much for him...

'If he stayed here
he'd end up in the East River, or Hart Island
with the stillborn, the nameless, the indigent dead.
He could feel the coal seam crackling underground.
He'd leave now. Tomorrow.
He'd try to get out.'

Walker travels west across America to Los Angeles in an attempt to shake off the traumas of the past and start a new life. Unlike Odysseus there has been no wife and family waiting patiently for him at home after the war, in fact there has been nothing to return home for, and so Walker must effectively start over but with what becomes clear is the intolerable burden of his wartime experiences. Los Angeles might be the most distant geographical shore from the beaches of France but there will be no escape from the traumas.

'As he lay in bed, he saw that
trying to forget was the same as trying to remember.
A lifetime's work and damn near impossible.'

Seemingly innocent triggers in the present ignite and inflame memories from the past, as Walker attempts to hold down a job as newspaper reporter against a backdrop of the homeless, the destitute, and the incongruous presence in its midst of Hollywood film-making. The irony of the film-makers, busy on the streets of Los Angeles creating an alternative reality for the masses, is powerful and threads through the book. The reality for many returning servicemen is unemployment, debts, gambling, addiction, loneliness, vagrancy and despair as American society also seems to fall apart around them....demolitions and earthquakes serve to emphasise this broken post-war world in desperate need of repair.

'You know something...
The war made sense at the time :
all in black and white, good and evil they said.
We came back to somewhere different
-those who came back at all -
every place full of people chasing something,
but no jobs for us, the guys who fought, 'y'know,
fought for freedom.'

The Bunker Hill slum clearances, where Walker had made his home, are referenced as is much else by Robin Robertson, so if you know Los Angeles the book will have real echoes for you.

Please don't be put off by notions of poetry combined with history, as a bit 'off the wall' and 'not my sort of thing' in latter-day fiction, as I almost was. This isn't the gimmicky Booker listing to fill the Oddball Slot, this is storytelling at its finest, taking it back to its origins and in fact might be the most profoundly genuine book on the shortlist (I haven't read the others I couldn't possibly comment). It reads as a novel minus all the extraneous wordage, distilling the experience and the meaning to its essence.

And whilst Post Traumatic Stress Disorder might not be high up the list of concerns for the collective social conscience of 2018, up against slavery or ecological disaster, this book feels just as profoundly important. Especially so given that Walker's experience was unrecognisable and largely dismissed in the 1940s and 50s and remains an invisible blight in the lives of servicemen today. This despite the lessons we should have learned from the shell shock traumas of the Great War.

'If only he could drain his eyes of all they'd seen,' thinks Walker towards the end of the book, as the memories of the traumas mount, the guilt surfaces and he makes an excruciatingly painful confession (thinking of those themes in Melmoth, these books, read in tandem spoke to each other in my mind). The final revelations are both stark, brutal and harrowing, but Robin Robertson is a safe pair of hands and has prepared his reader carefully. I had arrived at this point gradually in the previous 200 pages, I was alongside Walker and needed to know, for his sake. I won't reveal what happens next or how I felt, for fear of spoiling, but it was utterly convincing.

As I stiffen the sinews and brace myself to read The Iliad sometime this winter I realised that this book is a Homeric Iliad and and Odyssey of our time. It is an achievement of epic proportions and I would love to see a Man Booker jury brave enough to choose it as a winner, because The Long Take surely deserves a place in the pantheon of Books to Be Recognised and Remembered.

Meanwhile does anyone have any more Man Booker reading to report..

And at the risk of causing unrest (please don’t take this personally America) has interest in the literary bunfight diminished since the submission criteria was extended to include the USA....

 

 

 

 

A Trip West for the North Cornwall Book Festival

Well not that far west actually, just  across to Cornwall for a book festival held there last week.

To be honest I'm ready for winter hibernation after September and Budleigh LitFest. It marks the end of my literary forays within distance of home until the next year, having soaked up enough inspiration and new books to read to last me through the winter. I was persuaded out of the cave by author Patrick Gale, Artistic Director of the North Cornwall Book Festival, now in its sixth year, who suggested on Twitter how awful it would be for me to wake up in February and to have run out of books. 

This is true.

I booked tickets for Bookhound (plus his sketchbook) and I to hear Horatio Clare and Natalie Haynes on what turned out to be a glorious October Sunday. Passports and visas at the ready we crossed the Tamar and made our way thirty miles to the north Cornish coast and St Endellion. It's actually on the road to Port Quin which was one of my dad's favourite little haunts. There's a story (maybe myth, maybe truth) that all the men from Port Quin set off to fish and were lost at sea in a terrible storm, leaving grieving widows and children behind whose cries you can still hear on the wind. The little cove was deserted back in the 1960s (now National Trust holiday cottages) and my dad would ham it up on the beach there as he told this little tale, and we'd all try to feel the sorrow whilst struggling to keep a straight face.

I actually thought Horatio Clare was talking abut his latest book, published by Little Toller, about his walk to Lubeck in the footsteps of Bach but I'd got that wrong, we were on a Finnish icebreaker and travelling to the Arctic. Never mind. Horatio Clare (you might recall how much I enjoyed his childhood memoir Running for the Hills here) is a brilliant raconteur and his tales of the journey and the revelations and the people had everyone transfixed. Put him in a choir and I suspect he'd be the life and soul of the bass section, he has a very resonant and easy-to-listen to voice.

Bookhound sketched while Horatio talked...

 

I nipped off to the bookshop afterwards and bought The Light in the Dark - A Winter Journal and have ordered a copy of Something of His Art which is published later this month.

Just enough time for a hot drink and to look askance at the Cornish JAM FIRST ON THE SCONES when everyone knows how wrong that is, before going back to the marquee to hear Classicist and stand-up comedian Natalie Haynes.

Demystifier of the Classics, Natalie had us rolling politely in the aisles (this is Cornwall after all) whilst marvelling at her memory for all this, as she gave us the classical take on money, philosophy, town and country (the mice, rusticusmus and urbanusmus) and so much more. Leading figures were helpfully given their screen equivalents ( Jacobi, Biggins, Blessed et al) so we could all nod intelligently as if we knew exactly who they all were. With a hawk-eye on her audience (Patrick Gale may wish he hadn't been talking at the back) you really daren't move a muscle for fear of being drawn into the narrative. It was dazzling and hugely entertaining and certainly left us breathless and awestruck. Natalie Haynes must have needed a good lie down, surely at least 2000 calories used up.

And so I must now add this little book festival to my annual itinerary. I say 'little' because it is, small and intimate, with a very rural and unpretentious atmosphere (dogs were welcome and seemed to be enjoying the events) whilst punching well above its weight given we are in tent in a field in north Cornwall...

The guest speakers this year included Fiona Mozley, Wyl Menmuir, poets Andrew Macmillan and Kate Clanchy, writers Philip Hoare, Joanna Trollope, Neil Ansell, Nina Stibbe, Jill Murphy and Anne Enright travelling from her home in Dublin. The festival reaches out to local schools with workshops and events for the children, and various exhibitions and musical concerts alongside. All part of a Endelienta, a wider local arts initiative that organises a summer music festival as well as regular events throughout the year.

I'm guessing this is how other literary festivals began; small and compact with affordable tickets (£6) and then before you know it, sprawling over ten days, several acres, tickets are £15 and 'celebrities' are being flown in by helicopter. Really there's no need the B3314 is perfectly adequate. So I'm hoping that one of the key aims for this festival in the future is to thrive and remain economically viable whilst bringing literature to an out-of-the-way place away from the main centres, and to retain the intimate, uncrowded, relaxed and cosy atmosphere that we both enjoyed so much.

I'm sure I've asked you before but please do add more suggestions about these smaller festivals in comments if you know of them...we'll keep it just between ourselves and hope they don't lose that sense of small is good.

 

NB Correction made...Anne Enright was actually there, not on a video-link from Dublin... I have no idea why I thought that. 

Melmoth ~ Sarah Perry

Right...you might need a pot of tea for this one because I'm not interested in reading Melmoth at all am I.

Not one bit.

The social media hype for the book has been relentless for six months, we've definitely all known 'Melmoth is coming'. In fact I wonder about the impact of that on an author these days, I would be worrying myself sick about the burden of expectation unless I was Dame Hilary. As a reader I have to confess to some weariness in the waiting.

Can hype cancel itself out I wonder....

Gothic horror? No, not my bag, not really...

Some lacklustre reviews just cemented this pre-conditioned avoidance in my head and now I wonder about that too...

Do those sort of reviews deter or encourage a reader?  

 However I was weakening and then I read Sarah Perry's piece in the Guardian Review...

'Melmoth is not an opium novel but it is certainly on opioid one, and a gabapentin one, and a diazepam one. After writing it I have come to understand literary drug culture as being more properly a culture of pain...'

Sarah Perry goes on to describe her own experiences of pain and torment, the result of a ruptured spinal disc eventually alleviated by surgery and through it all the envisioning and writing of Melmoth. It all necessitated a shift in the author's long-held opinions about 'the cult of the drug-addled artist', previously held in contempt...

'I was in some respects a prig, I suppose, and prided myself on my priggishness, and the pride preceded a fall; for what I have on my hands now is a novel that was written while high.'

Well I felt a very slight affinity because the scribbles here were born as a result of a period of acute and excruciating pain almost thirteen years ago now. The community nurse's perk, some sort of mysterious stray virus that had lodged as a neuritis in my brachial plexus, and you might as well have been drilling through my upper arms with a Black and Decker, which would have been infinitely preferable. I was off work for months, reading like a demon in my drug-fuelled state (War & Peace through sleepless nights, the endless Battle of Borodino a welcome and happy release) and began writing here for something to keep my mind occupied, just for a few weeks you understand. It was the gabapentin that caught my attention because I was away with the fairies on it too and had to stop taking it.

And so, I was dithering about Melmoth until I woke up on publication day, Tuesday October 2nd, ordered a copy online to collect from Waterstones in Plymouth, announced to dear long-suffering Bookhound that I really needed this book today, and off we went on the forty-two mile round trip.

I started reading it in the shop.

Helen Franklin is a translator living in Prague. She is quiet, self-contained, reclusive, anti-social and not averse to some self-denial in her pursuit of an ordinary uneventful life. It is clear that Helen is atoning for something, the question is what. 

'What might commend so drab a creature to your sight, when overhead the low clouds split and the upturned bowl of a silver moon pours milk onto the river...'

Prague, at times, becomes something of a hinterland and with as powerful a sense of place as I have ever read. I've never visited but now feel as if I have.

'Look! It is winter in Prague: night is rising in the mother of cities and over her thousand spires. Look down at the darkness around your feet, in all the lanes and alleys as if it were a soft black dust swept there by a broom; look at the stone apostles on the old Charles Bridge, and at all the blue-eyed jackdaws on the shoulders of St John of Nepomuk.'

People various, both past and present, walk onto the Melmoth stage with stories to be told, fates to be revealed...

Thea and Karel Prazan, the academic couple who befriend Helen...

Josef Hoffman, the enigmatic old man in the university library...

His wartime childhood neighbours, Franz and Freddie Bayer...

Sir David Ellerby and his testament of 1637 about Alice Benet...

Albina Horakova. The landlady, malicious, unkind and malevolent, the complete obverse of her name, a sort of living jackdaw in her black dresses, the visible tangible presence of the macabre that builds as do the mysterious birds..

And, through the stories within stories, both victims and perpetrators of past evil and horrors are accompanied by the spectre of Melmoth: the woman who, having denied any sighting of the risen Christ after the resurrection is consigned to a life of barefoot wandering and eternal witness to the evils and pain of the world.

'So she was cursed not with death, but with deathlessness: to wander the earth until Christ returns - one hoped for her sake, in a forgiving frame of mind - condemned always to appear where all's most cheerless, dark and deadly.'

Sarah Perry chooses her pivotal moments of evil in world history with care, introducing Melmoth as a sort of peripatetic conscience, to bear witness and haunt those who find their sins have caught up with them. Melmoth perches on the shoulders of the guilty begging them to walk with her, jackdaws are ever-present, and therein doth madness lie. Helen Franklin will be no exception, yet when her past is revealed...well the reader must make up their own mind, but may also ask themselves 'what might I have done?'

Incidentally my search for the Perfect Bookmark led me straight to Janis Goodman's etching (please don't tell me they are actually crows) and worryingly I have now been noticing jackdaws everywhere since I turned the final page.

Melmoth had me pinned to my chair for two days, with the final chapters gripping to the very last page and the final twists cunningly concealed that had me turning back to the first page to start the book again with this newly-granted vision. It all reminded me of the total-immersion reading experience that was Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell years ago (don't be put off if that book wasn't to your liking, it's the similarity of experience I am trying to describe not a comparison of the titles) and it worked on many levels. On the surface post-modern gothic horror of The-Woman-in-Black genre, with imagination running riot and fear rippling through the pages (hairs - nape of neck etc.) though I have to admit to not feeling overly spooked or scared because, drilling beneath all that, Melmoth became a book about so much more. And I think this 'so much more' might be different for each reader.

For me this was about evil, about being punished, about shrugging it off, about acting on and living with it, about mercy and redemption but above all, for me, this was a book about guilt.

Sarah Perry says this in her article...

'The problem with describing pain, of course, is that you can no more know what I mean by torment than I can know what you mean by love...'

And it could be argued likewise about guilt and perhaps shame, both of which are writ large here. Melmoth made me think about so much more than was on the page and to ask questions of myself and try, sometimes in vain, to answer them, and in a world that can seem increasingly unconscionable and cruel. It extended to thoughts about the lesser part played in the greater evil, the complicity of silence, of guilt by association, of turning a blind eye. It seemed, at times, as if this is exactly what a reader was meant to do...to be allowed to get to know the characters on the page only so much before turning the spotlight on themselves. 

It is no good telling a guilt-ridden person that they have nothing to feel guilty about. Guilt is as relevant and personal as pain and love, and living with the consequences can be equally hard. My starting point for thinking about guilt (and as a health visitor you can have no idea how much of my day was spent counselling young mothers who felt guilty about everything)  has long been the premise that everyone did the best they could with the knowledge, information and skills at their disposal at the time. As Paul Gilbert elaborates in his book The Compassionate Mind...

'The American psychologist Martin Hoffman sees guilt as related to sympathy and empathy. Adult guilt, therefore is linked to compassion and a desire to care for others. If we don't care about others, why would we be bothered with guilt?'

We live in a world where every heartbeat seems to pump guilt our way if we are susceptible to it; it could and does bring vulnerable souls down given a foot in the door, and to watch Helen Franklin's self-imposed imprisonment is testament to this. 

Melmoth is arguably a book that will mean different things to different readers, surely the sign of a great book. Much might depend on a reader's life view and experiences, the place where they are now. Some may find it chilling and disturbing, others may find it revealing of greater depths, but one thing is for sure, you will be thinking about it long after you have finished it because it is a book that continues to unwrap its layers.

Oh and maybe something else for sure...you will see jackdaws everywhere when you might not have noticed them before, but small price to pay for reading what I thought might be a 'fail' for me, but which has been transformed into another of my best reads of 2018.

And yes, before you ask, I will now give The Essex Serpent another chance (wrong moment, wrong reader, maybe right book) as well as seeking out her first novel After Me Comes the Flood because, as Susan Hill suggests, 'Sarah Perry is the real deal.' 

If you have read any or all by Sarah Perry I would love to know your thoughts...

And does hype weary you to the point of deterrent...

And likewise, what about lacklustre book reviews... do they put you off or make you want to read a book to find out for yourself...

For anyone near Cambridge for the forthcoming Literary Festival, Sarah Perry and Sarah Moss will be in conversation with Alex Clark on November 25th at 4pm. I can't think of a more dazzling, fascinating pairing or a better chair, so if anyone is going please do report back for us.

 

 

 

 

 

The Long View ~ Elizabeth Jane Howard

Mention of The Long View by Elizabeth Jane Howard reminded me that I had read and written about the book here a couple of years ago, so I have been down to the basement to dust off that post and also to revisit my EJH shelf for some more reading...

If there is one sure-fire way to pique my curiosity in any book it is to include an introduction by Hilary Mantel. 

And so The Long View by Elizabeth Jane Howard arrived suitably adorned with the sacred words...

And I only had to read Hilary's opening gambit, quoted above, to know that here was a book I would stay with, because if there was one thing I loved about Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies it was that sense of sitting in the room as an interested observer.

I would like to say I met Elizabeth Jane Howard at an event I spoke at some years ago in celebration of the writer Elizabeth Taylor. Truth is we were in the same room and I don't think she noticed me, but I most certainly noticed her. In a wheelchair, clearly impaired with her breathing, motoring in late having got lost so Philip Hensher had been cleverly 'filling in' but he deftly stepped to one side when Jane (as she was known, thank you Hilary) arrived with a flourish. Every last ounce of her beauty and personality still very much in evidence as she spoke eloquently about her friendship with Elizabeth Taylor.

Of Jane, having outlined the stellar success of the 'Cazalet Chronicles', Hilary says this...

'It would be rewarding if the thousands of readers who enjoyed the series were drawn to the author's earlier work. There was a time when her talent was so unstoppable, that there was no predicting where it might take her. From the beginning she attracted superlatives...from the first she was a craftswoman...'

I was intrigued to discover more for myself and quickly realised that, with its attention to nuances of atmosphere, here was an object lesson in detailing the visual for the reader's imagination, as well as plenty of acerbic observation on the human condition. Every page, and I mean every page, is freighted with tangible atmosphere as the sense of place and the life and loves and foibles of the family are laid bare.

I really can't describe the power of Elizabeth Jane Howard's writing any better than Hilary..

'She feels the chilly breeze in the street and the chilly draught of misgiving in the heart. In the moment feelings are experienced, they are described: they are pinned to the page.'

The Long View is a journey back in time, starting in 1950 as the family gather to celebrate son Julian's engagement to June, each book, whilst subtracting the years, adds reasons and explanations. as it moves back through 1942, 1937 , 1927 and finally to 1926. The Antonia and Conrad Fleming and their three children first met become more knowable people...the philandering, controlling Conrad...

'He simply added, as it were, another storey to the structure of his personality, and invited the lady in question to pout herself temporarily in possession...'

The seemingly subservient Antonia...

'She had been loved and touched and fashioned; dominated, protected and ignored...'

And whilst the reader may pass judgement on Conrad's behaviour, and Antonia's acquiesence, somehow Elizabeth Jane Howard maintains an even hand (it can't have been easy) revealing remarkable insights into both the male and the female psyche. There is a breathtaking moment as Conrad reflects on his own life and the complex dilemmas of reconciling wife and mistress, the jealousy, the infatuation, the obsession, when Hilary Mantel's words in the introduction rang true and clear..

'Conrad Fleming...is a man of unblemished conceit, immaculate selfishness. Young women readers today may view him with incredulity. They should not. He is faithfully recorded. He is the voice of the day before yesterday, and also the voice of ages past...'

Here is the book that keeps on giving because the immediate impulse on reading the final chapter is to read the first one again.

I feel sure many of you will have read The Long View and doubtless the other early works of Elizabeth Jane Howard, and know of what I write. It is me who is very late to this party and now with some wonderful catching up to do. Hilary Mantel goes on to debate exactly why these books may have slipped below the radar and are so seriously underestimated, and her conclusions are riveting...

Books categorized as 'by women, for women,'

Enjoyed but disparaged...

Perfection inviting contempt...

Judgements about Elizabeth Jane Howard's personal life contaminating judgements on her work...

I can't recommend a read of this introduction highly enough, offering as it does confirmation of attitudes and assumptions that still need some shifting.

This edition of The Long View (with Hilary Mantel's twelve page introduction) is published by Picador as part of its Classics series, highlighting some of those great voices and and bringing neglected classics back into print. It is a classic in every sense, a keeper on my shelves, and how delighted I am to have discovered it eventually.

Handywoman ~ Kate Davies

Firstly thank you to those of you out there who suggested that I must read Handywoman by Kate Davies. I have been following Kate Davies for several years, saw all the pre-publication publicity but had wondered whether I really wanted to read it. Well of course I did, I have and am filled to the brim with admiration and much-to-think-about since I turned the final page.

Now the non-knitters amongst you, and even the knitters amongst you who don’t move in online knitting circles like Ravelry might be wondering who Kate Davies is. 

In fact some of you might now be wondering what on earth Ravelry is...

To explain. Ravelry is a splendid online knitting community inhabited by many of us as a source of patterns and advice on all things woolly, and by gazillions more for camaraderie and a shared love of knitting. If you haven’t discovered it you might want to check it out; thousands of free or paid for patterns to download. You'll find me on there as Tamarsocks.

Kate Davies is an academic with a PhD in 18th century history which adds depth and insight to all of her writing. The knitting pattern books she has published come with thoughtful essays on things like lighthouses, and landscape, and the history of a garment and I always find them fascinating and informative. It was whilst walking to catch a train in Edinburgh seven years ago, that Kate felt the gun go off in her head before collapsing and finding her left side paralysed. After a traumatic misdiagnosis of stress-induced paralysis, Kate was eventually found to have suffered a stroke and spent the next six months in hospital re-learning much that she had previously taken for granted. There will be loss and grief, humility and elation, despair and exhaustion, revelation and determination, perception and discovery as Kate battles and confronts the demons of her post-stroke life, but she writes about it all with a narrative that both engaged and challenged me. 

Not least as a retired (thankfully) health professional and how disturbed I was to read of the differing attitudes of the staff and others involved when it was finally discovered that Kate's paralysis was not 'psychological' in origin, but a manifestation of an acute and life-threatening cerebral bleed caused by an un-diagnosed hole in her heart through which rogue clots had passed en route to her brain. Brusqueness and off hand irritation became attentive sympathetic caring. 

'Yesterday...I had been an over-achieving, attention-seeking hysteric. But today I was a tragic 36-year-old stroke victim... the right kind of patient.'

I can think back to situations I have been in as a nurse when those challenges have arisen. Working with mothers with post-natal depression was a big part of my working day and how well I remember one farming family who paid for a private brain scan for their daughter-in-law in the hope of finding that she had a brain tumour rather than a mental illness. Attitudes remain seriously entrenched and judgemental and Kate dissects and analyses her own experience with candour.

We say 'suffered a stroke', the words acknowledging the degree of seriousness, but I wonder how carefully anyone thinks about this sort of thing unless they, or someone they know has experienced it. It's a bit like us (but ultimately nothing like) and the recent Broken Leg experience. It took all our combined ingenuity and support to sort out the day-to-day needs of the Gamekeeper and his immobility. Kate and those around her had to figure out how best to support her in her recovery, and shining like a beacon throughout the book is her husband Tom. Patient, loving and supportive, and let's not forget Bruce the labrador...those of you who have followed Kate's blog will feel as if you already know them.

In the aftermath of this experience and the salvation and recovery that knitting facilitated, Kate has established a hugely successful knitting design business, published a selection of highly sought-after books and patterns and is now venturing into supplying wool and knitted garments. She has forged strong links within the knitting community who she praises to the hilt for their support and encouragement in recent years. 

Handywoman is a multi-faceted book with a useful guide at the beginning directing readers to chapters that they may find of most relevance depending on their interests and reasons for reading. Me, I've just read it cover to cover and been both humbled and amazed, neither of which, I suspect Kate will be impressed by given her claim that she has no wish to be 'an inspiration to others'. It is inevitable, like any book published and sent on its way into the world, that reader reactions are safely out of her hands, and we can all be inspired as much as we like, and I was.

Inspired to make the most of what I have been given...

Inspired to understand and work with limitations rather than fight them...

Inspired to be sheer bloody-minded should the need arise...

Inspired to reign in fear when it feels overwhelming...

Oh and so much more...

But above all inspired to get that flippin' Rams and Yowes blanket out of mothballs, overcome the Terror of the Steek and finish it. It's five years since I cast on the flock, it's almost at the halfway point, this whole unfinished thing is a disgrace and I must sort it...

 

I feel I have barely touched the sides of Handywoman (the book has a dedicated website here) and the depths it fathoms in this blog post, but I can commend it to the house unreservedly. There is wisdom, learning and encouragement herein and I for one will be dipping back into it on a regular basis.

Meanwhile...do you think it would an unforgivable sin of commission if I were to turn the Rams & Yowes into a really lovely cushion...

I mean just look, it's about the right size isn't it...

Wouldn't it look lovely...

Somehow I think I know what you're all going to say.

 

 

 

Can we help Andrea in Canada?

I often receive emails like this and my first thought is 'Ask the blog'...

'Greetings from Winnipeg in central Canada,

I live in the middle of the bald and frosty prairie where we have, '9 months of winter and 3 months of poor sledding' ... honestly September isn't even gone and there's been snow already.

For survival I do many of the things YOU do ... needlepoint, knit socks and READ A LOT.  My local bookclub is calling for members to suggest titles ... we're a mixed lot in terms of age and occupation but you seem like an optimist and I was wondering if you could suggest a book that would leave one FEELING GOOD afterwards?  Gloomy reading and gloomy weather are NOT a good combination ... so the ideal book would be rich, well written but still (on the whole) positive.'

I said to Andrea I know just the people to ask, and I think we could all probably do with a list like this for the months ahead. I read somewhere we are forecast 4 MONTHS OF ICE AND SNOW here in the U.K. I’m just hoping it was the usual alarmist autumn talk, but past experience suggests when we’ve had one extreme winter we often have another one in quick succession before the return to damp and muggy. And the omens aren’t good because we’ve had our first frost here in the South West, in September which is unheard of, and there was me planning to enjoy the dahlias into November.

Meanwhile Magnus is rehearsing for the trials ahead too...laps, desks, sleep etc.

But back to Andrea and her book group in Winnipeg ...'rich', 'well-written', 'not gloomy', and 'leaves you feeling good'... any reading suggestions?

The Odyssey ~ Homer (translated by Emily Wilson)

It is a while since I went on this journey, and in the meantime summer has happened, but I can't let the voyage end without mentioning those wonderful twenty-four days through June when I read a book of The Odyssey, in Emily Wilson's translation, each day.

You might ask what is so different about this first translation of Homer by a woman, and to be honest I can't tell you because I have never read Homer properly and seriously before, in any translation. I do know, however that I fell into step with the rhythm of the iambic pentameter with ease, and that this version had me gripped and really looking forward to the daily adventure as I sailed alongside Odysseus on his journey home to Ithaca.

As 'early-born rosy fingered Dawn appeared' each day here in the Tamar Valley, there I was reading of all those places I knew of from a lifetime of hearing about them.

Hades...

Scylla and Charybdis...

The Island of the Cyclops..

and the characters...

Penelope weaving and unravelling until her husband's return...

Telemachus questing after his long-lost father...

Helen whose abduction started the bother in the first place...

Paris who stole her...

and then the Gods and Goddesses...

Zeus...

Athena...

Calypso...

Poseidon...

Homer's repetition stitching together a quilt of poetic narrative out of already existing cloth.

There were moments of revelation and recognition too..

The Sirens...

The Games at Phaecia, with sprinting, wrestling, jumping, discus-throwing and boxing...

The story within a story as Demodocus tells of the Wooden Horse.

The Lotus Eaters and the escape from the Cyclops strapped to the bellies of sheep...

The welcome Odysseus received in strange lands, people espousing sentiments that should still hold true today

'Any man of sense will treat a guest in need like his own brother.' says Alcinous to Odysseus.

The libations for the dead which I happened to reach on June 17th, Father's Day

Meanwhile, I was reading of other journeys alongside..

A Single Swallow by Horatio Clare following the birds as they flew from South Africa via Namibia and Zambia and across Africa to arrive in the Tamar Valley.

Jonathan Raban's voyage around Britain in Coasting, as good a-sailing book as I have ever read and at times hopelessly and haplessly funny. A writer who drew me into his world, welcomed me and put me at my ease with the willing admissions of his own foibles and failures, timeless and in many ways so reassuring. We think of our own era as the messiest and the most chaotic, or the most violent, whilst forgetting that which has gone before was equally so.

And zipping through the waves in the background was Odysseus.

It would be a dangerous journey and Odysseus would need much help to find his way home but by the time he arrived I was surprisingly on the edge of my seat with the suspense of the Big Reveal. What is that makes the return in disguise so compelling; the garnering of truth from the unsuspecting...

'But I grieve less for my own family
than for Odysseus,I miss him so,
I hesitate to call him by his name,
stranger: I would prefer to call him 'brother'.
even when he is far away, because
he loved and cared for me with so much kindness.'

At this point, as Odysseus, heavily disguised, talks to Eumaeus the loyal slave, I had to stop myself from breaking the Book a Day rule, but with it all came this sense of light shining on darkness. It sounds a bit over-dramatic I know, but it was as if all my reading to date had been in the shadow of this book I had never read, but which is both overtly and covertly referenced by so many others. I even read Ulysses by James Joyce without knowing any of this for goodness' sake.

And learning more about Odysseus the man. Complicated, stubborn, shrewd, a strategist, sly and crafty, ruthless and often friendless (mostly I thought because he's killed them all) devious and cunning, lying artful and scheming, battle-scarred and care-worn; traits that have undoubtedly kept him alive until he finally arrives home

I kept notes each day in my reading journal, and just revisiting them to write this has rekindled the excitement of the read, as well as reminding me of everything else bookish that was happening along the way. By June 29th I was on the pen-ultimate book and we were in peek heatwave and a succession of mesmerising sunsets after long hot days...

The Olive Tree Bed, Book Twenty-Three might have been the best book yet, as Penelope tests Odysseus with facts that only he will be able to answer correctly before Athena 'pours attractiveness from head to toe' transforming Odysseus into the man recognisable to all, including his hair 'curly as a hyacinth.' And there we all were at the end of the journey. 

So, what a memorable reading experience The Odyssey has been, through twenty-four days of flaming June. I can't recommend the voyage highly enough. Do embark if, like me, you have never done it before, I don't think you will be disappointed.

And if you know the journey well please do add your thoughts too...

I have The Iliad ready, in the Robert Fagles translation (recommended by some of you I think) and will choose a winter month for that, all advice and suggestions about how best to gird the reading loins for the conflagration, and any associated reading most gratefully received.

I have the new novel by Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls, ready and waiting, and also Circe by Madeline Miller which I know some of you have loved...

Any others...

 

 

 

 

 

The Letters of Sylvia Plath - Volume II : 1956-1963

I’m not ashamed to admit that, having met and been beguiled by the poetry of both Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath whilst studying for that English Literature degree, I joined the ranks of the Lady Lazarus ‘peanut crunching crowd’ who read all there was to read, by and about each of them and both of them. In fact I have so many books I am a 'peanut crunching crowd' of one, the Ted & Sylvia shelves bulging with the evidence; every biography, every expose of yet another aspect of their private lives made public, every new book, until suddenly I felt sated, over-fed and slightly guilty, maybe even a little obsessed.

Dragged Bookhound along on the pilgrimage to the grave in Heptonstall (2004)...

Collected the borage seeds which have since colonised in our garden...

But I finally closed the glass doors on the cabinet and haven’t looked at the books for several years, and I doubt I will ever read those books again. Every so often I think I'll ring The Poetry Bookshop in Hay and ask if they want to buy the lot, or stack them up on eBay to go to someone else embarking on the pathway, because I doubt the public interest will ever die, but mine, in all the commentaries by others, has certainly been laid to rest. I will keep everything I have written by them, the rest can go.

So when I heard about the publication of a new volume of Sylvia Plath’s letters I wasn’t sure how enamoured I might be.  Did I really want to revive the interest because I certainly didn't want to revive the obsession. Nevertheless I asked Faber very nicely if they would send a copy which they did.

In excess of 1000 pages (Sylvia was a prolific letter-writer) this is a weighty tome, and after a busy week it was Sunday morning before I had a chance to open the book.

I hadn’t really been following the news about the discovery of Sylvia Plath’s final letters to her psychologist in the months before her suicide, or the fact that documents which should have remained bound by patient confidentiality had suddenly come onto the open auction market and caused quite a furore, because the one person who deserved to read them, Sylvia and Ted’s daughter Frieda Hughes, was, for a long time, denied access to them. 

It is Frieda’s courageous and very moving foreword to this volume that has somehow finally set all those years of obsessive reading and wondering into what feels like the right and best context in my mind. I have always been of the opinion (usually against the tide of public opinion) that this was a six-of-one-half-a-dozen-of the-other situations, both parties having their flaws but doing they best they could at any given time given what they had to deal with, and Frieda Hughes shares her own feelings on this...

'Whilst my father does not come out of these letters as a saint, neither does my mother; in my view, they are both flawed, impassioned human beings and I love them more for this. They both suffered, they both made mistakes, they were going through the hell that literally thousands of other couples go through every day...'

The book is huge and I will be many many months dipping in and out of these letters. I am only a few pages in and there is joy and excitement about the forthcoming wedding and setting up home. Sylvia fancies 'pale blue-gray walls and bright red & white accents in curtains, pillows, etc' to match the faded old couch they have just bought. 

Browsing ahead I can see that the letters do, as Frieda elaborates, share much of the...

'goodness and generosity, and the kind of love that some of us never find in our lifetimes... There was nothing they would not do for one another; they existed to be together, and their mutual work ethic bound them even more tightly.'

I would certainly be interested to know your thoughts too, and did anyone else see the recent TV documentary, Life Inside the Bell Jar, it was on back in August

Sylvia Plath’s iconic novel The Bell Jar exploded the myth that women were content and life was sweet. It shone a light on 1950s gender politics, sexual identity and mental health at a time when women struggled to find a voice.

Life Inside The Bell Jar is the first documentary about Plath’s classic semi-autobiographical novel. In it Frieda Hughes talks about her mother in depth for the first time on camera, and has unprecedented access to people who knew Sylvia Plath, many of whom are talking publicly for the first time.

Blending beautifully shot interviews, impressionistic reconstruction, unpublished letters and photographs and a wealth of period archive that takes us back to the summer of 1953. This film is the story of an age, a person and a novel like no other.

 

I have decided that the Rest of the World can carry on picking over the traces but to my mind I am very happy to let Frieda Hughes have the definitive final say, the last word on all this, and I am so pleased (and grateful from my own point of view) that she has finally had the opportunity to do so. These letters made it into this volume at the very last minute and, from what I can gather, it was Frieda's decision to allow this in order to let people make up their own minds...

'...and hopefully find the kind of understanding that my mother was working towards near the end, despite the return of the 'madness' that took her away.'

 

 

 

 

 

Your summer reads...

Thank you for all the inspiring reading choices you have suggested today...what a great summer of reading we have all had. I've compiled a list of your suggestions so far just in case anyone is at a loss for what to read next and needs some ideas, or to add to your list of books to look out for. Please do keep adding summer reads in comments and I will add them here dreckly.

Quite a few books on the list I have read, or listened to, and really enjoyed ( My Antonia, The Trick to Time,The Pigeon Tunnel, Some Luck, Balzac and the Little Seamstress, Loitering With Intent, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine) 

Several that I have struggled to get into and you encourage me to try again ( A Man Called Ove, and dare I say Circe) 

A few that I have been meaning to read ( After the Party, Our Place, A Perfect Spy, The Runaways)

Some really unusual ones that I haven't heard of and now want to read ( Who is Martha, Gone; A Girl, A Violin, A Life Unstrung)

One in particular that I am really looking forward to ( The River in the Sky)

And a book that I haven't read but heard the author speak and I think I might agree with you Lesley ( The Life of Stuff)

 

 

Earth and Heaven ~ Sue Gee

The Runaways ~ Tim Pears

A Man Called Ove ~ Fredrick Backman

Magpie Murders ~ Anthony Horowitz

A Perfect Spy ~ John le Carre

The Pigeon Tunnel ~ John le Carre

Some Luck ~ Jane Smiley

My Antonia ~ Willa Cather

The Trick to Time ~ Kit de Waal

Eye Can Write ~ Jonathan Bryan

It's the Hate U Give ~ Angie Thomas

Balzac and the Little Seamstress ~  Dai Sijie

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine ~ Gail Honeyman

The River in the Sky ~ Clive James

Fools and Mortals ~ Bernard Cornwell

Married Love & Other Stories ~ Tessa Hadley

Who is Martha ~ Marjana Gaponenko

The Siege ~ Ismail Kadare

The Siege of Krishnapur ~ J.G. Farrell

Tin Man ~ Sarah Winman

History of Wolves ~ Emily Fridlund

Circe ~ Madeline Miller

The Music Shop ~ Rachel Joyce

Gone; A Girl, A Violin, A Life Unstrung ~ Min Kym

Our Place ~ Mark Cocker

Orchid Summer ~ Jon Dunn

Dinner With Persephone ~ Patricia Storace

The Making of the British Landscape ~ Nicholas Crane

After the Party ~ Cressida Connelly

Loitering With Intent ~ Muriel Spark

The Cost of Living ~ Rachel Ward

Force of Nature ~ Jane Harper

Jackson Lamb series (1-5) ~ Mick Herron

The Life of Stuff ~ Susannah Walker

All That Remains ~ Sue Black

The Hidden Landscape ~ Richard Fortey

 

 

 

Reading gallimaufry...

A gallimaufry (still my most favourite word next to 'haberdashery') of recent reads, short posts about good books various...

In a Land of Plenty ~ Tim Pears

'In a small town in the middle of England, the aftermath of the Second World War brings change. For ambitious industrialist Charles Freeman, it offers new opportunities and marriage to Mary. He buys the big house on the hill and nails his aspirations to the future.

In quick succession, three sons and a daughter bring life to the big house and, with it, the seeds of family joy and tragedy. As the children grow and struggle with the hazards of adulthood, Charles' business expands in direct proportion to his girth and becomes a symbol of the town's fortunes as Britain claws its way back from the grey austerity of wartime Britain. 

As times change, so do the family's fortunes. Their stories create a generous epic, an extraordinarily rich and plangent hymn to the transformation of middle England over the past fifty years. At its heart is a diverse and persuasive cast of loveable and odious characters attempting to contend with the restrictions of their generation. This 'is the story of our lives.'

A long read at 670 pages that saw me through quite a few of those hot days lounging behind the summer house, and a very enjoyable one too. The book had several interruptions and there is too much detail to elaborate, but each time I came back to it with no problem...a bit like meeting up with friends again after a long gap, you don't forget them or what has happened to them. I knew the characters well and slotted back into their lives with ease. This was the England I grew up in, post-war, with all its seeming simplicity by today's standards, yet as complex as ever for those living through it. A really excellent summer-long read and I have more by Tim Pears lined up.

Travelling in the Dark ~ Emma Timpany

The first of two novellas sent to me by Fairlight Press. New Zealand so I was bound to enjoy this one, and I did with the past oozing into the present as Sarah returns to New Zealand with her eight-year-old son after a devastating earthquake and the break-up of her marriage. A slow unfolding of secrets, the crumpled dirty washng of her life, stuffed in the suitcase, the lid sat on for years, is slowly bursting open. A deep sense of needing to know propelled me through this one along with its sense of place. It was as good as going on a visit to South Island which I was preparing to do this time last year.

 

Inside the Bone Box ~ Anthony Ferner  

The second of the novellas from Fairlight and the story of Nicholas Anderton, a morbidly obese neurosurgeon who is starting to lose his touch and his confidence in the operating theatre. The previously cavalier maverick is suffering and everyone, including his rivals sense it. As Nick starts to consider gastric band surgery to halt the potential disintegration of both his professional and personal life, events of the past slowly emerge. Nick's disastrous failure and is impact on his life is insidious. I was particularly interested in the ideas about false belief...errors that drive a person along the wrong path even when they know they are wrong; utterly fatal for a neurosurgeon and not much better for the patient either. This is a little book that packs a huge punch and left me with much to think about afterwards and I learned a new word too...

'aequanimitas' that quality of serenity amid the storm, of imperturbability, the touchstone of the neurosurgeon...

The Rings of Saturn ~ W.G.Sebald

I joined in Robert Macfarlane's shared read of The Rings of Saturn over on Twitter through July and enjoyed it hugely. I have read the book at least twice  before but this was like discovering the book anew; both stimulating and engaging to read all the comments that would follow Robert's question or observation each day. From first impressions, ways of seeing, landscapes, echoes and shadows to the prose style, guilt, walking, silk, sound and music,  the topics ranged far and wide.Then to have access to the thinking of the hive mind and be part of some fascinating discussions was all a bit like attending a very enjoyable little summer school from my armchair. My reading journal is chock full of scribbles which, reading back again to write this, remind me that I have a vade mecum the next time I read the book, which I surely will.

 And now over to you...you must all have read some good books this summer too...

The Alarming Palsy of James Orr ~ Tom Lee

Granta have come to my rescue with a couple of short novels recently that have been both engrossing and readable in a long afternoon, or two sittings, and one of them, The Alarming Palsy of James Orr by Tom Lee had me invested in the outcome from the first page and it slots into the medical reading category too.

'When James Orr woke up, a little later than usual, he had the sense that there was something not quite right, some indefinable shift in the normal order of things, but it was not until he bumped into his wife on the landing - James had been sleeping in the spare room for several weeks - that he had a clue as to what it might be.

    'Oh,' said Sarah Orr, and put her hand to her mouth in genuine alarm.

    James continued to the bathroom and there, in the mirror, he saw the cause of her dismay - and such dismay did not seem unreasonable...'

James has woken up with a severe case of Bell's Palsy. One side of his face seems to have slipped away from the other and with it will come a complete slipping away of the comfortable ordered life that James has known. I was reminded of tectonic plates in an earthquake for some reason, and it will be no less of an earthquake that shakes James's life out of its settled ways

The couple live on a private housing estate built in the 1960s and New Glades allows for a very controlled and ordered way of life surrounded as it is by woodland and well-managed green space for the children to play. There is a sense of veiled snobbery and controlled freedom with everyone conforming to the norms whilst attempting to distance themselves from any hint of elitism; the management committee devising ways to repel all non-resident invaders and constantly debating the installation of CCTV cameras to catch the interlopers who leave rubbish (and worse) in their wake. Fortress New Glades.

With an obvious facial deformity, difficulty speaking and an eye that won't blink, James is beset by difficulties he could never have imagined, and Tom Lee perfectly illustrates the sapping away of confidence and the loss of self-esteem that can manifest itself through illness and disability. When the affliction is facial and highly visible the effects are even more acute, and the powerlessness that pervades James's previously ordered and successful life is both profound and debilitating. His family life, his work life, his circadian rhythms, his moods, his status and his authority all insidiously eroded as the control decreases by the day.

It really is a case of reading on, not only because the book is so well-written, but because something is bound to happen, the question is what...

Of course now I can't say another word, but if you are in need of something a bit different and a book that will stay with you and give you much to think about after the final page, then I can highly recommend The Alarming Palsy of James Orr.

And it has really made me think about the impact of illness and disability in all its forms...

How readily it can strip away who a person is in the eyes of others, and how they view themselves...

And there must be plenty more fiction suggestions that demonstrate this too...

 

 

 

 

Marvellous medicine....

Unsurprisingly I still have a leaning towards the occasional ‘medical’ read, even though it is a time of my life that feels increasingly past and distant, and a world I was quite pleased to let go when the right time came. My shelves are heaving with books on the subject, the Plague & Pestilence shelf is particularly over-burdened and the Nursing shelf too, but I am always happy to hear of any more, so please do add your 'medical' reading suggestions in comments...

Thank you to whoever sent me the email urging me to read All That Remains - A Life in Death by Sue Black. I ordered it immediately on the strength of your enthusiasm and, though reading progress has been slow recently, I am enjoying it immensely. And yes, that seems strange given the subject matter...

'Sue Black confronts death every day. As Professor of Anatomy and Forensic Anthropology, she focuses on mortal remains in her lab, at burial sites, at scenes of violence, murder and criminal dismemberment, and when investigating mass fatalities due to war, accident or natural disaster. In All That Remains she reveals the many faces of death she has come to know, using key cases to explore how forensic science has developed, and what her work has taught her.

Do we expect a book about death to be sad? Macabre? Sue’s book is neither. There is tragedy, but there is also humour in stories as gripping as the best crime novel. Our own death will remain a great unknown. But as an expert witness from the final frontier, Sue Black is the wisest, most reassuring, most compelling of guides.'

I heard Professor Dame Sue Black on Desert Island Discs a while ago and it is one of the episodes that has stuck in my mind. Down to earth, unassuming and pragmatic and well...normal, and All That Remains is likewise, accessible and revealing.

'As we near our allotted three score years and ten, life seems to speed up and we begin to become aware of how much we still have left to achieve...'

This is a re-framing of death from feared demon to something else...the beginning of a new existence perhaps. It involves a suspension of preconceptions as well as the accompanying possibilities of fear, distrust and loathing. Thus far I have learned that anatomy and cadaver dissection teach far more than where everything is...humanity and altruism, respect and dignity, teamwork, attention to detail, patience, calmness and manual dexterity to name but a few. Oh yes, and every single minute 300 million of our cells will die, thankfully many are simply replaced.

 

The Language of Kindness - A Nurse’s Story by Christie Watson is another book that has been calling me, also for obvious reasons. I’m guessing Christie Watson and I  share that RSCN (Registered Sick Children’s Nurse) qualification because we also share the training alma mater that is Great Ormond Street, though I left the year that Christie was born, which is a bit of a sobering thought...

'Christie Watson was a nurse for twenty years. Taking us from birth to death and from A&E to the mortuary, The Language of Kindness is an astounding account of a profession defined by acts of care, compassion and kindness.

We watch Christie as she nurses a premature baby who has miraculously made it through the night, we stand by her side during her patient’s agonising heart-lung transplant, and we hold our breath as she washes the hair of a child fatally injured in a fire, attempting to remove the toxic smell of smoke before the grieving family arrive.

In our most extreme moments, when life is lived most intensely, Christie is with us. She is a guide, mentor and friend. And in these dark days of division and isolationism, she encourages us all to stretch out a hand.'

Care, compassion and kindness were the fundamental nursing attributes instilled in us at Great Ormond Street, and once learned they are never un-learned (if that makes sense). Christie will be doing an event at the Budleigh Literary Festival this year and I will be there too, so I am hoping our paths will cross.

 

This is Going to Hurt by Adam Kay. I have definitely missed the party on this one, top of the best sellers for months but I have to confess that I put it down after a few chapters, in the wrong mood for the relentless wry humour. One of those right-book-wrong-reader moments, but I will come back to it...

'Welcome to the life of a junior doctor: 97-hour weeks, life and death decisions, a constant tsunami of bodily fluids, and the hospital parking meter earns more than you.

Scribbled in secret after endless days, sleepless nights and missed weekends, Adam Kay's This is Going to Hurt provides a no-holds-barred account of his time on the NHS front line. Hilarious, horrifying and heartbreaking, this diary is everything you wanted to know – and more than a few things you didn't – about life on and off the hospital ward.'

 

And I might as well add in a book that has only just arrived (thank you Granta) and will be published in October, but it looks like a must read so maybe get your library on the case if it is of interest...

Nine Pints - A Journey Through the Mysterious Miraculous World of Blood by Rose George

'Most humans contain between nine and twelve pints of blood. Here Rose George, who probably contains nine pints, tells nine different stories about the liquid that sustains us, discovering what it reveals about who we are. In Nepal, she meets girls challenging the taboos surrounding menstruation; in the Canadian prairies, she visits a controversial plasma clinic; in Wales she gets a tour of the UK's only leech farm to learn about the vital role the creatures still play in modern surgery; and in a London hospital she accompanies a medical team revolutionising the way we treat trauma. Nine Pints reveals the richness and wonder of the potent red fluid that courses around our bodies, unseen but miraculous.'

I have a bit of a duck-and-avoid relationship with all things haematological after losing my only brother to leukaemia during my student nurse years. Until his diagnosis it had  been one of my most interesting and enjoyable ward placements at Great Ormond Street, (3AB and Sister Beech...it's all recounted here and particularly here) but then, when it happened, I knew far too much about leukaemia and what the likely outcome would be, and my enthusiasm dissipated. But I still have a fascination for it all too, so we shall see.

And on the subject of medical reads, has anyone read Henry Marsh... I started Do No Harm just before my dad became ill and haven’t been able to pick it up since...maybe I could go back to it now.

 

English Paper Piecing ~ Florence Knapp

It is a long time since I fell in love with English paper piecing, indeed for a long time I thought it was the only form of patchwork in existence. Hand stitch the fabrics over papers, stitch the papers together, five years later a cot quilt still isn't ready for the baby who is now about to start school and dare I say, this one still isn't finished for the baby who is now thirty-five....

But I have at least finished this tiny postcard-sized piece (each hexagon not much bigger than a 5p piece) which has gone to a lovely friend for her birthday today.

It is rare that I write about a patchwork book here. I have hundreds of them, accumulated over years of stitching and the years of running a quilt shop, when Bookhound suggested I keep one copy of every book we stocked. Surprisingly (for me) I couldn’t see the point at the time, but I did keep them and how grateful I am for the idea, because I now have a wonderful archive of patterns and inspiration from the 1980s when patchwork and quilting was finding its place in people’s hearts again after an extended sojourn out on the margins.

I buy very few patchwork books now (apart from those by Di Ford, Yoko Saito ) so it was a lovely surprise when an advanced copy of English Paper Piecing by Florence Knapp (who blogs as Flossie Teacakes) arrived. It had actually been sent to the Kayaker because he had given permission for one of his images to be used; this one of Tracy Chevalier during our conversation at Port Eliot Festival a few years ago.

Needless to say the book rapidly found its way into the right hands...mine.

To my knowledge, books on English paper piecing have been in the minority, though a few have surfaced in recent years thanks to a resurgence in what many have always considered a bit of a time-consuming route to a quilt when you can knock one up on a sewing machine in a day. But Florence Knapp’s book is in the minority in other ways too. English Paper Piecing is not just a ‘How-to’ book, it is something far better than that, it is an intelligent, fully referenced, evidence-based examination of the benefits of mindful sewing. It is a ‘Why-to’ book too and one I have read and re-read, cover-to-cover, several times already.

Now, those of us that do it are fully aware of the benefits. We’ve known it since the day we started sewing. That it is calming and soothing, that we can disappear into a project for hours, forget the world and emerge blinking into the daylight, hours later, barely remembering what day it is, but it it is still fascinating to discover that research now backs up those experiences.

Florence Knapp, in a series of essays, presents and examines the evidence cogently and convincingly.  I was fascinated by the research on Flow. This is the total involvement in a project that leaves few if any of the brain’s resources free to worry about other things,  Evidence shows that hand sewing, of all the crafts, reduces blood pressure and heart rate and increases serotonin levels the most. Flow can be the key to human happiness, creating order in chaos and providing comfort at difficult times. And an interesting quote from psychologist Loretta Breuning resonated...

’We are hard-wired to care about the legacy we leave and that doing so increases our happiness.’

I have summarised briefly, but Florence offers deeper insights in her series of essays, as well as addressing, in some detail, the struggles, the self-criticism, finding motivation and embracing imperfections that many of us may have faced up to in our stitching lives. There are essays on Fine Cell Work, Tracy Chevalier, Lucy Boston (remembering my trip to meet Diana Boston at Hemingford Grey) along with interviews with a series of quilters, before the ‘How to’ section of the book which I walked into feeling calm and ready to learn. The fact that I have been English paper piecing all my sewing life made no difference, there are always new things to discover and I had immediately ordered the recommended Clover Dome Needle Case, which you load with ten needles, ready-threaded for stitching on the move (don't ask me how it works but it does) and which seems like a genius invention to me. 

Safe storage of needles, making what Florence calls the 'inherent portability' of English paper piecing a much easier prospect. I can't be the only one who has tried to thread a needle in a moving car/train and given up.

I have also been delighted with the Straw (Milliner's) needles recommended for EPP, and then there’s the polyester thread...

POLYESTER THREAD!! ME??

How can this be...

Where did my aversion for it come from?

Was cotton an entrenched state of mind, something about being an old-fashioned purist...

Weren’t dire warnings issued about polyester thread making mincemeat of the fabric over the course of time...

About never using it in your sewing machine because the machine would die a slow, tortuous and painful death and be irretrievably damaged...

Didn’t it used to dissolve at the mere sight of a hot iron for pressing...

Truthfully, polyester thread was the spawn of the devil, but times and attitudes, and the thread itself, have changed. I can still hardly believe that I have crossed to the dark side and bought a reel of grey Superior Threads ‘Bottom Line’ for hand-Piecing because Florence said to.

I’ve had my moments with it I can tell you. I’ve had to adjust the way I hold thread in tension because it cuts into my little finger, and I was grateful for Florence’s nifty idea about knotting it at the eye of the needle to stop it slipping and un-threading. But I have to confess that it sews like a dream...small stitches that sink invisibly into the seam and it never ever knots, and these John James straw (milliners) needles, just slightly longer than the average are a revelation.

Is anyone else still doing English paper piecing...

Does the theory of Flow resonate with you...

Has anyone else still not finished something thirty-five years later...

 

 

Michael & Max... Ondaatje & Sebald

Our heatwave continues. I know for plenty of you it must be really uncomfortable but ne'er a moan will pass my lips after all that winter misery. I'm busy stocking up on Vitamin D and we are mostly living outside...

I hope you are all able to enjoy it in a way that suits you too.

Meanwhile two writers have had my full attention this last few weeks.

Firstly Michael Ondaatje, to whom congratulations for winning the Golden Man Booker 50th for The English Patient, and whose latest novel Warlight proved to be such a wonder that my Reading Friend and I both agree it should be on the Booker longlist, or we'll go without toasted teacakes at our next meeting.

This is a young man's attempt to shed light on the turmoil of war and its impact on his life, and that of his sister, both suddenly and inexplicably separated from their parents, to be left in London in the care of semi-strangers. As Nathaniel looks back on those years from the vantage point of his twenty-eight-year old self the themes of memory, its reliability (or lack of) and loss, permeate what for me was a spell-binder of a novel.

'You return to that earlier time armed with the present and no matter how dark that world was, you do not leave it unlit. You take your adult self with you. It is not to be a reliving, but a rewitnessing.'

Explanations emerge along with Michael Ondaatje's astute and perceptive, and I felt honest (there is no deceit of the reader here) examination of memory. The camouflage and deception rests with the plot and the characters; theirs is the evasion of truth and reality, the distortion of identity...

'We order our lives with barely held stories - as if we have been lost in a confusing landscape, gathering what was visible and unspoken, sewing it all together in order to survive.'

The book is shot through with a form of grief and melancholy, and with it finding a moment to let go.

But I also realised two things...

Firstly that I am an unwitting Michael Ondaatje completist.

I have read and loved each of his books over several decades now. There aren't many authors that can lay claim to that on my shelves, and over the years I have shared thoughts on several of them here. (Anil's Ghost In the Skin of a Lion The Cat's Table Divisadero). 

Secondly, how Warlight is arcing across to the shared read of The Rings of Saturn by W.G.Sebald, facilitated by Robert Macfarlane on Twitter through July. There are similar themes among many to consider, especially surrounding war, memory and fallibility, along with the shared landscape of Suffolk (in the second part of Warlight) all adding up to a memorable reading experience. 

My notebook is my best friend and filling up with ideas and 'moments' ...

Which reminds me we are long overdue a stationery conversation because I have found the Notebook of My Dreams (more soon) so I'm in reading clover right now.

If you are joining in on Twitter with the Sebald read I would love to know your thoughts...

And how about completist reading, are there any authors that fit that bill for you...

I can certainly add Hilary Mantel and Margaret Atwood to my list.

 

 

 

 

The Gallows Pole ~ Benjamin Myers

Honestly, I've had a right old tussle with The Gallows Pole by Benjamin Myers (published by Blue Moose Books) before it finally won the day and kept me pinned to my gravity recliner for an entire weekend. 

Saw the social media buzz about it last year...

Interested given that I admire the writing of those creating the buzz but still avoided...

Picked it up in Waterstones... spotted a cover-likeness to the old Penguin Crime novels, put it down again.

More buzz getting louder...

Ordered it on my Kindle.

Started, stopped, started, not my sort of thing, got a refund.

The Gallows Pole wins the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

Buzz now incessant, even from Royal Mail who frank umpteen tens of thousands of envelopes with news of the award. I now want a franked envelope to arrive in the post  thinking I'd take it as a sign. I have to settle for Dog Awareness Week 2018.

Happened to be in the library  a few days later and there was a brand new copy of The Gallows Pole on the shelf.

Now I don't know about you but I do love a brand new library book. No dead-fly-or-worse surprises when I turn the page, so I decided to try again.

Drove home, sat in gravity recliner, opened book, barely moved for an hour except to order my own copy (as an actual book rather than a virtual one) as it was clear this was a book that I would need for my Best Books Shelf.

And that chums is the story of how I was finally sort of hoisted by the petard of my own reluctance, and The Gallows Pole has become the book which I am now flaunting to all and sundry as one of my Books of the Year a year after everyone else.

Set in and around the Yorkshire town of Hebden Bridge in the 1760s, and based on a series of  true events, The Gallows Pole tells the story of The Cragg Vale Coiners, a band of weavers and land-workers who make counterfeit money by clipping gold off existing coins and smelting it into forged currency.

The book gets off to a fairly visceral start and it may have been this, coupled with the semi-literate prison cell narrative of the gang leader David Hartley, that I initially found off-putting. Silly me because of course it is Hartley's narrative, alongside the telling of the main story, that brings this book, the time and the place to life. 

There is so much to pay attention to and Benjamin Myers achieves this with seemingly effortless ease, which must surely belie what was involved in writing the book. This is a pivotal moment in British history; cloth is still woven in homes but it won't be long before the arrival of Hargreaves's Spinning Jenny (thank you Miss Spencer, history teacher) the mechanisation of weaving, and the establishment of the industrial mills. Life will be changing and fast, and there is threat, treachery and treason around every corner.

The class differences and inequalities of the time are self-evident...

' They have five fires blazing, while we burn green wood...'

 Benjamin Myers asks in these pages, what is that motivates a man?

Greed, violence, power, class, superiority, lust, wealth, a sense of injustice, and the book certainly made me feel the burning injustices, the distortions of power and the quest for control as those wealth and riches are so cleverly juxtaposed with the poverty. It is the rivers and the landscape that Benjamin Myers litters with the riches of the poor, but poetry in rivers bejewelled with diamonds and frost like sequins are no sop to the ever-present cosh of starvation. That beauty is regularly and perfectly contrasted with the hardships of the landscape.

There is a form of poetry in the names too. An episode when the Coiners walk from far and wide to hear of their leader's plan ...

Isaac Dewhurst, John Wilcox, Absalom Butts, Abraham Lumb, James Crabtree, Nathan Horsfall. Matthew Hepworth, Jonas Tilotson. Eli Hoyle, Crispin Crowther...

The rhythm of the footfall as the men gather 

'From across the moors; from all horizons.
They walked through bogs dried and cracked; they came through whin and gorse and lakes of wild sedge hung heavy with gobs of cuckoo-spittle....'

'Poor men, proud men. Desperate souls of the valley'

'Men of stone and soil.'

The Coiners, led by the iron-fist rule of charismatic David Hartley, set up an operation that provides what the poor of the valley need, money; but this is a peasant life from which ultimately there can be no respite, and only false promises of reprieve. When the Powers That Be and the excise men assert their authority it will be by any means and with no mercy. That said, with stench, rot and decay prevalent in their lives the working community punishes its own in fairly unthinkable ways too. 

The Gallows Pole is a book that had me taking sides, swapping sides, feeling unexpected sympathies and feeling no sympathy, and despite some fairly gory moments it never felt gratuitous. This is the 1760s after all. Surprisingly I didn't recoil in horror and nor did I have nightmares about ...well I won't spoil it for you.

Very occasionally a book makes me set it aside thirty pages or so from the end. Not only because I don't want it to end, or to face up to how I think it must be going to end, but also so that I can savour those final pages properly. I usually make an announcement and disappear off and that's what I did.

I really, really don't want to spoil it for anyone who decides to read it but there is a pleasing redemption at the end for the women, or one of them. As was common in 1760's life, the women are marginalised and possessed, mistreated and misused, and generally the heir-bearing and food-supplying support act to the requirements of the men, but there is a single small moment in the book that I doubt you will miss either. An action that lodges in the reader memory and you just wonder...

Being a map person, and with the area so beautifully described by Benjamin Myers, I quickly ordered a copy of a map, The Cragg Vale Coiners' Walk illustrated by Christopher Goddard and with quotes from the book that had me walking the paths from my recliner.

I'll walk it for real one day. It's been a while. It would seem a lot of the Coiners buried their booty and I'm assuming the metal detectorists have already been out in force, but you can still visit the grave of David Hartley in the churchyard at Heptonstall.

Here I am visiting that 'other' grave in Heptonstall churchyard many years ago now..

So there you have it. All in all The Gallows Pole has been a right jolly good read, and I have more books by Benjamin Myers lined up. Under the Rock The Poetry of a Place seems a natural progression.

If you have read The Gallows Pole or think you might, please do share your thoughts...

You have to admire the tenacity of a book to win my reading day in this way and I'm wondering if there are other books you can think of that eventually made it through your defences and came out as winners...

And is there anyone out there around Mytholmroyd and Hebden Bridge who might be walking it...

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Rings of Saturn ....

For anyone who may have missed this and is interested, Robert Macfarlane is starting a shared read of The Rings of Saturn by W.G.Sebald  on Twitter this week.  

I have cut and pasted some of Robert's twitter thread here for your information...

'On Monday 9 July at 9am, a global Twitter reading group of WG Sebald's great & haunting book, The Rings of Saturn, begins - running until 2 August. Join us!'

Each day or two at 9am, I'll post questions or reflections about the book; its style, landscapes, strange form, found photographs, histories, ethics; about its many influences & legacies; about pilgrimage, atrocity, analogy, nature, moths, stars, exile & memory's patterns...

People can join these conversations, and/or begin their own, and/or join other conversations, using the hashtags. In this way a loose constellation of discussions should find its own shifting form over the course of the weeks of the group.

.there is, needless to say, no obligation to 'like' the book. It confronts & challenges readers with its indirections & obliquities, its greyscale, the darkness of the history encountered during this 'Englische Wallfahrt" (English Pilgrimage; the book's German subtitle)...

.I will be reading (& quoting from) the book in English, in Michael Hulse's translation from the original German, with which Sebald (1944-2001) was much involved. Others in the group will be reading in other languages. Translation is inevitably one of our subjects...

There is no obligation to have read the book in advance, or to 'keep up' with the group. It is a digressive, recursive work, and responses to it will often be of that nature also. My own questions will wander vaguely through the book's course over the weeks' course

 

I should probably make plain now that I am running this group because I find The Rings of Saturn deeply, unsettlingly powerful, and wish to examine that power as part of a community of readers. There is zero pecuniary gain for me, nor any hidden motive...

 

just a pleasure taken in thinking with and learning from others, and bringing new readers to a book that has been part of my life as a writer, teacher & walker for nearly twenty years. In 2006 I followed on foot the book's route, from Somerleyton Hall to Orford Ness...

 

.So - do join. There is no qualification or enrolment necessary. It will be a pleasure to walk these pages & places with you. “Perhaps there is something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer." 

 

I will definitely be joining this because, having read The Rings of Saturn several times, I feel sure I have a great deal more to discover about the book, and this feels like a wonderful and generous opportunity to learn more.

 

My copy is off the shelf and ready.

 

 

The Trick to Time ~ Kit de Waal

*SPOILER ALERT*

In order to say what I want to say about The Trick to Time by Kit de Waal I have had to reveal the 'tragedy' mentioned in the book's cover details. 

 

In my last job before finally hanging up my RGN RSCN RHV qualifications and my registration to practice I worked for four years, from home, as a Health Visitor Parent Supporter for an online parenting website. I had special responsibility for three of their forum boards, Loss and Bereavement, Cancer and Serious Illness and Miscarriage and Stillbirth as well as doing the occasional shift in the online drop-in clinic and the Post-Natal Depression forum. I don't mind telling you it was one of the hardest jobs I have ever done. I only had words to work with, working from home alone, no face to face contact, no off-loading over cake and tea with the team, no body language to read, and bucket-loads of grief and sorrow from around the country to read through and reply to every day. The busiest board by far was Miscarriage and Stillbirth and I shared the work with a wonderful midwife, and thank goodness I did because the mutual support we offered each other was essential and invaluable. 

In the olden days we wouldn't really know we were pregnant for weeks; nowadays people seem to know after about six hours, and have bonded with their baby within seven hours, making early miscarriages equally as harrowing for them as at any other time. We paid attention to each and every person who posted, gave them space to grieve and a place to come and write it all out and know someone was listening, because that early loss is a grief little understood.

Alongside were the parents who had suffered a stillbirth and goodness me, all you really wanted to do was jump out of the screen and give them a hug. Care has improved enormously in recent years but there is still much work to be done to change public perceptions. 'You can always have another one' is not what is required, permission to grieve is what is, and I would now add a recommendation to eventually read The Trick to Time as well.

Stillbirth and its lifelong impact is such a rare subject for fiction, let alone a book that could make recommended reading for anyone who suffered the tragedy of the loss of a baby. The impact on a young Irish married couple, recently moved to Birmingham, Mona and William, is clear to see and exquisitely and sensitively handled by Kit de Waal.

The narrative weaves back and forth in time, filling in the past alongside the present in a very satisfying story-telling way. Mona eventually makes a life for herself using the services of a local carpenter to make wooden dolls, 'babies' of the exact birth weight (because for many women in the past birth weight was the only tangible memory that they had) which she than dresses. Her sessions with those who have lost a baby, where she imagines a future life for the children, are moving beyond words. She gives a voice to dashed hopes and dreams allowing them to flourish in the imaginations of the mothers, and in a way that they had never dared or been allowed to contemplate before. It's that moment when you hold your baby and wonder what it holds for them...and where does all that go when confronted with a stillbirth.

This was a deeply moving read with a twist that I didn't see coming. A quiet, gentle, astute and life-affirming book that deserved its place on the Women's Prize long list, and how I would have loved to have seen it make the short list and win the prize too. I'm guessing the judges saw more pressing 'issues' among their choices but  hopefully word of mouth and a lot of love will get this book into the right hands at the right time.

 

The Last Hours of Father Nicholas Gibbes , English tutor to the Romanov Children ~ Helen Rappaport

A longer blog post today which I hope you will enjoy reading, so maybe get the kettle on (or pour a long cold drink), and with thanks to Helen Rappaport for this. Helen's latest book (and she tells me her final one on the Romanovs) fits in the final pieces of the jigsaw on the fate of the Tsar and his family. The Race to Save the Romanovs: The Truth behind the Secret Plans to Rescue the Russian Imperial Family, is published by Hutchinson in the UK 28 June and St Martin’s Press in the USA 26 June.

If you would like to leave a comment or a question for Helen she will, as always, happily reply.

 

 

 

 

The winter of 1962/3 was one of the coldest ever experienced in Britain. Bitter freezing conditions and a bone chilling easterly wind had brought heavy snow over Christmas, that had been accompanied by terrible, dense fog that had persisted well into the New Year. The now historic fog of 1963 took a terrible toll on the old, the frail and the vulnerable. At St Pancras Hospital in London (then part of University College Hospital) the nurses were overwhelmed with sick patients that dreadful winter. One such nurse who spent three months on the geriatric ward caring for the many elderly who had succumbed to the fog and the cold was Anne Scupholme. The death rate was very high: Anne, who, then aged 22, was the senior night nurse on her ward, recalled there was at least one death every night and on one occasion, three in a single night.  

St Pancras Hospital, London

Fifty-five years later there is one death that still sticks in her mind.  His name was Charles Sydney Gibbes, but since 1934, when he had taken his vows as a Russian Orthodox priest, he had been known as Father Nicholas. Under his real name he had been English tutor to the five children of Russia’s last Tsar and Tsaritsa – Nicholas and Alexandra – and during that time had developed a very close relationship with the young tsarevich, Alexey.

Sydney Gibbes second right, with Alexey at Army HQ in 1916. French tutor Pierre Gilliard is on the left

From 1908 until the revolution of 1917 brought the Russian throne crashing down, Gibbes had lived with the Imperial Family at their palace at Tsarskoe Selo, 15 miles south of St Petersburg. He had shared holidays with the family in Crimea and on board the Imperial yacht, sailing round the Finnish skerries. During World War I he had accompanied the young tsarevich to Army HQ when he joined his father there in 1916, in order to ensure he did not miss out on his studies. Left behind in St Petersburg when the Romanov family was taken to Tobolsk in Siberia in August 1917, Gibbes managed to join them there later, and followed them to their final place of arrest – in Ekaterinburg, Western Siberia – in May 1918.

But this time the Bolsheviks would not let Gibbes enter the house where the Romanovs were held captive. After the family were murdered there on 17 July 1918, he managed to retrieve a few precious mementos from the Ipatiev House. Then, like many others who had been closely connected to the Imperial Family, he fled the Bolsheviks on the Trans- Siberian Railway to China.

After living and working in Beijing as a secretary at the British Embassy, Gibbes eventually settled in Harbin, where he lived for the next 20 years working as a customs official. In 1934 he converted to Russian Orthodoxy and became a priest. During his time in China, Gibbes had visited England on occasion but did not return permanently until 1937. Now known as Archimandrite Nicholas, with snow-white hair and a long and venerable white beard, he was attached to the Russian Orthodox Church of St Philip on Buckingham Palace Road, but moved out of London during the Blitz and settled in Oxford. In 1949, he sunk most of his savings into buying a house in Marston Street where he created a chapel cum shrine to the Romanov family on the ground floor. Here he displayed the Romanov mementos he had managed to preserve and bring home from China in a collection of trunks and boxes, many of them personal gifts from the family. The chapel became a base for Gibbes’s own Russian Orthodox community of St Nicholas the Wonderworker. 

Gibbes’s chapel in Oxford with the Murano glass chandelier from the Ipatiev House and other Romanov memorabilia

In 1959 and now in rapidly failing health, Gibbes had finally retired from the priesthood to live in a house he owned at 17 Robert Street in London, making only occasional visits back to Oxford.  The house was one of a row of seedy and dilapidated Regency houses off Camden Road (now demolished) that had seen better days. Here Gibbes occupied a tiny bed sitting room, sharing the rest of the house with a succession of students, most of them studying at the nearby Slade School of Art or University College London. Gibbes’s own room was extremely Spartan: divided into two by some hardboard nailed to battens, an opening from the outer section which measured a tiny 8’ x 4’, revealed an even smaller space containing his bed of hard planks, covered by coarse blankets. The outer space was dominated by a large stove, on which – as one of the student tenants, Jeremy Hornsby, recalled – a huge saucepan of cabbage soup was forever on the boil. In memory of his many years in Russia, Gibbes had also improvised a sauna for himself in a tiny cubicle with an electric heater perilously poised above him.

Archimandrite Gibbes

The students were often late with their rent, but Gibbes could happily be mollified by a couple of hours of chat, recalled Hornsby. He vividly remembers the thin, hunched old man in his flowing beard and his soiled black robes, who often sat happily typing away – probably at memoirs of his time with the Romanov family. On the wall behind him hung six magnificent icons. Gibbes told him that they were ‘the last presents that the Russian Royal Family gave him’ before they left for Ekaterinburg.  Hornsby noticed that on each of the icons, ‘long slivers of black oil had run down to deface the remarkable artistry’. No doubt this was from years of having small oil icon-lamps burning in front of them. But to Gibbes they were a powerful spiritual reminder of his time in Russia: they were ‘the spirits of the Tsar and his family making their presence known through the icons’.

It was here in this small and rather squalid refuge that Gibbes was found in March 1963, alone and having suffered a stroke that was soon followed by pneumonia. The walls of his self-created monk’s cell were covered with old blankets and furs against the cold, but that had not prevented him from succumbing to the terrible winter conditions. He was brought to St Pancras Hospital not far away and placed under the care of nurse Anne Scupholme. From the first she noticed how very eccentric he was. Strangely – having been highly reluctant for most of his life to talk about his time with the Romanovs – as he lay there sick and suffering Gibbes finally opened up about this life in Russia in some detail. Perhaps in her presence and that of the young students at Robert Street he had finally felt a need to let go of things long suppressed.  As Anne Scupholme recalls – ‘he was confused but shared many tales from the Russian Court with me, although I had difficulty believing them at the time.’  It was only after he died on Anne’s shift, that she discovered, from an obituary in The Times the next day for ‘Archimandrite Gibbes, Tutor to the Russian Royal Children’, that the stories were true.

More than half a century later, Anne vividly recalls that Gibbes’s first and foremost dislike was of Rasputin, whom he ‘blamed for Alexandra’s ill health and therefore that of Alexey’. He had ‘rather liked living at the Russian court and had seemed oblivious to the unrest outside.’ His bitterness toward the Russian peasant was intense: he thought all peasants were ‘uneducated, ungrateful and should have remained subservient in gratitude.’ These, according to Anne, were ‘clear and consistent themes in his night-time ramblings’. But what she was not so clear about was ‘why he would suddenly turn on me in a rampage about how it was me, and my kind, who had killed the tsar and Alexey’. Gibbes repeatedly, and bitterly, blamed the British royals for not rescuing the Romanovs. Anne adds that he never talked about women except the tsaritsa, and only in terms of her relationship with Rasputin. She sensed that he had little interest in the women in his story - ‘but whether this was a product of his upbringing or a general dislike of women’, she did not know; passing suggestions about Gibbes’s private sexual preferences have never been substantiated. What sticks in her mind is that although Gibbes could be difficult and at times became exasperated with her and all the other nurses, he was clearly suffering the mental confusion of a dying man. There were times when he reached out to her: 'he was always very reluctant to let go of my hand’, she remembers, and it was a hand with a remarkably strong grip for someone so sick.

Sidney Gibbes in the schoolroom at the Alexander Palace with Anastasia, whom he found a difficult and disruptive pupil

At some point shortly before Gibbes died, a Russian Orthodox priest came to give him the last rites. He also insisted that the nurses should do nothing to his body when the moment came. ‘This all happened a long time ago but I can still see the bed and its position in the ward very clearly,’ recalls Anne. ‘The detailed instructions for laying out his body after death had clued me in to the fact that he belonged to someone, somewhere and that some of his conversation was based on fact.’ But she herself never saw any visitors; ‘he seemed to be alone, with no family’. (He did in fact have an adopted son living in Oxford).

Charles Sydney Gibbes died at the age of 87 at around 5.30 am on 24 March 1963, Anne Scupholme’s shift had ended at 8, so she was not there when  his body was laid out according to Russian Orthodox practice. Gibbes’s funeral was held on 28 March at the Russian Orthodox Church at Ennismore Gardens in Knightsbridge; his coffin was then taken back to Oxford where he was buried in Headington Cemetery, the simple gravestone marked by a traditional Russian Orthodox cross.

Sydney Gibbes’s grave in Headington, Oxford

In 2010, Gibbes’s community of St Nicholas the Wonderworker, which for years had been meeting in a church hall, finally acquired its own premises – in a disused Anglican church in Headington Oxford. This is located not far from Gibbes’s original chapel, and now has a thriving community of worshippers. The collection of precious Romanov artifacts that Gibbes brought back with him from Russia – including an icon from the Tsaritsa, a pair of Nicholas II’s felt boots, the Tsarevich’s pencil case and exercise books belonging to his sisters Maria and Anastasia, and the beautiful Italian Murano glass chandelier of red and white lilies that he retrieved from the Grand Duchesses’ room of the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg were once on display at his chapel in Oxford. They have since disappeared into storage and their whereabouts are uncertain. In 1986, Gibbes’s adopted son George Paveliev Gibbes, sold off two of the most important Romanov pieces in his father’s collection made by Fabergé: a pair of monogrammed cufflinks given to Gibbes by the tsar’s eldest daughter, Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna, and a miniature gold Easter egg pendant with a diamond in the A note, that belonged to Anastasia.  The latter was bought by film maker Steven Spielberg as a gift for his then wife, Amy Irving, when she finished filming at TV mini series starring as Anastasia.

The two Romanov Fabergé pieces owned by Gibbes

The rest of the Sydney Gibbes collection was, for a while, part of the Wernher Collection at Luton Hoo. But when the house was sold for redevelopment as a country spa hotel, the Gibbes artifacts were moved to storage at Ranger’s House Greenwich. They have sadly so far not resurfaced; nor have they been placed on display anywhere. Indeed, their precise whereabouts is uncertain.

In the most poignant of codas to this story, nurse Anne Scupholme is now herself a priest – an Episcopalian minister in rural Virginia USA. This change of vocation came after having worked for many years as a nurse-midwife in an innercity community in Miami dedicated to helping the underprivileged. Today, 55 years since witnessing that lonely deathbed in St Pancras hospital on 24 March 1963, Anne says that the last hours of Father Nicholas, devoted tutor to the Romanov children, continue to have a lasting impression on her.

The Russian Orthodox church of St Nicholas the Wonderworker Oxford 

© Helen Rappaport

June 2018

 

Prize Draw copies of The Race to Save the Romanovs ~ Helen Rappaport

Helen Rappaport's fourteenth book is published today, her third on the Romanov family ( follow the links for my thoughts on Ekaterinburg and Four Sisters) and to celebrate the day there are three prize draw copies (UK postal addresses only)  of The Race to Save the Romanovs - The Truth Behind the Secret Plans to Rescue Russia's Imperial Family...

'On 17 July 1918, the whole of the Russian Imperial Family was murdered. There were no miraculous escapes. The former Tsar Nicholas, his wife Alexandra, and their children – Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and Alexey – were all tragically gunned down in a blaze of bullets. 

On the 100-year-anniversary of these brutal murders, historian Helen Rappaport set out to uncover why the Romanovs’ European royal relatives and the Allied governments failed to save them. It was not, ever, a simple case of one British King’s loss of nerve. In this race against time, many other nations and individuals were facing political and personal challenges of the highest order.

In this incredible detective story, Rappaport draws on an unprecedented range of unseen sources, tracking down missing documents, destroyed papers and covert plots to liberate the family by land, sea and even sky. Through countless twists and turns, this revelatory work unpicks many false claims and conspiracies, revealing the fiercest loyalty, bitter rivalries and devastating betrayals as the Romanovs, imprisoned, awaited their fate.'

It is the centenary year of the death of the Romanov family so the book is perfectly timed. I know how hard Helen works on all her books, and how thorough and diligent her research is in order to create a scholarly yet very readable account of her subject, so I am looking forward to reading this one.

Just to repeat, these copies are available to UK postal addresses only, but please don't worry Rest of the World because coming up on here tomorrow an exclusive piece by Helen Rappaport, a fascinating story, about a connection to the Romanov family, that hasn't yet been told.

Meanwhile please do leave a comment here if you would like to be included in the prize draw and we will do the usuals dreckly.

 

Pendings...

Every book I pick up at the moment, in the light of my Odyssey reading, seems to be about a journey of one sort or another and I have been happily trundling along with two very different books, Swimming With Seals by Victoria Whitworth and In a Land of Plenty by Tim Pears.

Swimming With Seals because a few friends seem to be heading to Orkney. It has been a joy to share their journeys on Facebook, beautiful pictures of so many places I love.

Thank you to the friend who headed to Waulkmill Bay and sent me pictures of the place where we scattered some of the Tinker’s ashes...

and to another who lit a candle for him in St Magnus Cathedral... emotional moments both as I sat here in Devon I can tell you. As for Victoria Whitworth's book...

"This is a memoir of intense physical and personal experience, exploring how swimming with seals, gulls and orcas in the cold waters off Orkney provided Victoria Whitworth with an escape from a series of life crises and helped her to deal with intolerable loss.

It is also a treasure chest of history and myth, local folklore and archaeological clues, giving us tantalising glimpses of Pictish and Viking men and women, those people lost to history, whose long-hidden secrets are sometimes yielded up by the land and sea."

The book has proved to be every bit an intensely personal read, based as some of it as around Evie Sands looking towards the deserted island of Eynhallow. The Tinker and I would sit there and wax lyrical about the monks on the island back in the day, as well as wondering how on earth they got there given that the tidal race, where North Sea bumps into the Atlantic Ocean, is so treacherous. That cover too has worked its magic, reminding me of Leila Thomson's wonderful tapestries at the Hoxa Gallery on Orkney...

I am smitten all over again and could fly on the paraffin budgie (as the Tinker called it) from Edinburgh to Kirkwall right this minute. Failing that drive to Thurso and hop on the Hamnavoe into Stromness.

Tim Pears is a new discovery for me, where on earth have I been to miss him, because having finished The Horseman, the first in his West Country trilogy (more soon),  I went a-hunting through the back list only to find myself in a land of plenty. Literally in fact with  In a Land of Plenty , 700 pages of sprawlingly wonderful Middle-England; one of those family sagas that has the power to engross and let the world fall away. Set in the aftermath of the Second World War, and billed as ‘the story of our lives’, it is all resonating with me having grown up through the same era. 

This author quote from the British Council website says much and thus far the books have delivered..

"Our lives may be judged by how much, or how little, cruelty we inflict on others. If a reader comes to empathise with characters in my books, and then extends that understanding to real human beings, then that reader and I have achieved together more than either of us had a right to hope for. Also, putting together sentences, pen and paper my chisel and plane, is an endlessly hard and pleasing venture."

And just to note, I ordered my copy of In a Land of Plenty, and a couple more by Tim Pears, via Hive directly from his website. The books were post free, cheaper than You Know Where and a percentage is given to an independent book shop of my choice...to the lovely David and Anne at Bookends of Fowey, you are most welcome.

All thoughts on Swimming With Seals, in fact swimming with anything most welcome.

Are there any wild swimmers out there...I haven't quite managed it yet but who knows sumer is icumen in etc. and Victoria Whitworth does make it sound so exhilarating. There's a lot of SwimLit out there at the moment and its all very persuasive.

And of course your thoughts about Orkney and Tim Pears most welcome too.

 

 

 

 

Ithaka ~ C.P.Cavafy

A great big thank you to the person who mentioned this poem in comments, Ithaka by C.P. Cavafy (1863-1933) It was new to me (and I now realise he also wrote Waiting for the Barbarians) but fits this reading moment perfectly, so I have copied it into my reading journal in the midst of all my Odyssey notes. It seems like a mantra for life too... about the journey being as important as the destination, and that perhaps in yearning too much for something we miss the scenery along the way. I would be interested to know what you think.

I have also become mildly fascinated by the original Greek, those mysterious letters, all little twizzles and curlicues and vaguely familiar, so I have added the version in which the poem was originally written, here too. The classicists among you will romp through it, the rest of us can just admire the alpha to omega mystery of it all.

 

Ithaka

By C.P. Cavafy

As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
 
Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.
 
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
 
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
 
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

 

 

Σα βγεις στον πηγαιμό για την Ιθάκη,
να εύχεσαι νάναι μακρύς ο δρόμος,
γεμάτος περιπέτειες, γεμάτος γνώσεις.
Τους Λαιστρυγόνας και τους Κύκλωπας,
τον θυμωμένο Ποσειδώνα μη φοβάσαι,
τέτοια στον δρόμο σου ποτέ σου δεν θα βρεις,
αν μέν’ η σκέψις σου υψηλή, αν εκλεκτή
συγκίνησις το πνεύμα και το σώμα σου αγγίζει.
Τους Λαιστρυγόνας και τους Κύκλωπας,
τον άγριο Ποσειδώνα δεν θα συναντήσεις,
αν δεν τους κουβανείς μες στην ψυχή σου,
αν η ψυχή σου δεν τους στήνει εμπρός σου.

Να εύχεσαι νάναι μακρύς ο δρόμος.
Πολλά τα καλοκαιρινά πρωιά να είναι
που με τι ευχαρίστησι, με τι χαρά
θα μπαίνεις σε λιμένας πρωτοειδωμένους·
να σταματήσεις σ’ εμπορεία Φοινικικά,
και τες καλές πραγμάτειες ν’ αποκτήσεις,
σεντέφια και κοράλλια, κεχριμπάρια κ’ έβενους,
και ηδονικά μυρωδικά κάθε λογής,
όσο μπορείς πιο άφθονα ηδονικά μυρωδικά·
σε πόλεις Aιγυπτιακές πολλές να πας,
να μάθεις και να μάθεις απ’ τους σπουδασμένους.

Πάντα στον νου σου νάχεις την Ιθάκη.
Το φθάσιμον εκεί είν’ ο προορισμός σου.
Aλλά μη βιάζεις το ταξείδι διόλου.
Καλλίτερα χρόνια πολλά να διαρκέσει·
και γέρος πια ν’ αράξεις στο νησί,
πλούσιος με όσα κέρδισες στον δρόμο,
μη προσδοκώντας πλούτη να σε δώσει η Ιθάκη.

Η Ιθάκη σ’ έδωσε τ’ ωραίο ταξείδι.
Χωρίς αυτήν δεν θάβγαινες στον δρόμο.
Άλλα δεν έχει να σε δώσει πια.

Κι αν πτωχική την βρεις, η Ιθάκη δεν σε γέλασε.
Έτσι σοφός που έγινες, με τόση πείρα,
ήδη θα το κατάλαβες η Ιθάκες τι σημαίνουν.

Jonathan Raban

Books and authors various have sailed in and out of my radar recently, but one especially, Jonathan Raban. 

I’m sure a lot of you will know this feeling. It’s quite odd but I love it when it happens; an author you have vaguely heard of, then a friend mentions that he/she has written the best book she has ever read about whatever (in her case Bad Land) and then you see him/her quoted in an article, maybe another mention on the radio, then the final nail... the publishers put some intriguing pictures of the books on their Instagram feed. I realise I might do this to you all the time, so please be comforted by the fact that others do it to me as well, I’m as un-immunised to temptation as the next person.

I ordered a couple of books in the newest Eland Publishing editions, Coasting and For Love & Money,  and with that sense of excitement for books arriving at the breakfast table in the post, and have to say they are real keepers.

I was fortunate enough to meet John Hatt (who had set up Eland in 1982) at the launch of the books about James Ravilious last year. He had funded the publications sensing that James Ravilious must not be forgotten, and we had a good chat about the book world and all its foibles, and John very kindly authorised the prize draws for the books that we had at the time. Eland has been taken over by Barnaby Rogerson and Rose Baring and in an interesting interview here this quote popped out at me and I have warmed to my purchases even more strongly...

What makes you decide to publish one writer, and not another?

ROSE: Readability, truthfulness, extent to which it conveys the essence of a culture.

BARNABY: We look for books that have been written with inner conviction and truth about the world.  We want them to observant of others, capable of summing up a spirit of place and catching the moment on the wings – aside from such everyday literate skills as being funny, wry, intelligent, human, universal, self-deprecating and idiosyncratic – plus the whole book has to be held together by a page-turning gift for storytelling.

It's a fine ethos coupled with the fact that the books are of that variety that I would never part with. Distinctive but subtle livery and good quality paper, like Little Toller, books to collect and enjoy. I have started with Coasting and am an immediate convert to the writing of Jonathan Raban. He somehow balances the serious with the self-effacing, intellect with observation, wry with humorous and gets it right. He definitely doesn't take himself too seriously either.

It is 1982, and having coasted through his life to date and been a general disappointment to his father, an Anglican vicar, our man decides to take to the seas and sail around the coast of Britain. This with minimal sailing experience, and with no thought to leaving anything behind or being in any way inconvenienced, he refurbishes and furnishes the Gosfield Maid with an extensive library, oil paintings, a sheepskin rug and as much comfort as he can muster...

'It looked less like the launching of a boat than the eccentric submersion of a thatched Tudor cottage.'

Having spent two weeks at sea with a  retired naval commander and taught himself navigation out of books, Jonathan Raban then sets sail from Fowey in Cornwall  and heads out into the English Channel, the waters frequently slightly more treacherous than he had realised. But this is 1982 and he is moored in Plymouth when he discovers that the Falklands War has been declared, and as the Task Force sails past headed for the Southern Ocean he casts his wry eye on the proceedings...

'Her Majesty's Navy was a seaborne industrial estate of displaced tenements and factories: it looked as if Slough, Milton Keynes and Newark NJ, had taken to the water for the day.'

I have strange recollections of the Falklands War. I was twenty-eight, Offspringette had been born the year before, I had given up work and put my HV career on hold, as many of us did then, and I well remember that feeling of vulnerability and a sense that the end of the world as we knew it was nigh. We would watch the news bulletins and listen to the M.O.D updates with a sort of unwanted addiction and utter horror; never in our lifetime had we expected to witness this, and of course so many of the Naval and Royal Marines servicemen were based locally, people we knew, making the fear even more acute and the tragedies very personal.

Jonathan Raban skewers the warlike intent and the hysteria in some of the national press with a very astute eye. I had forgotten a great deal and it was slightly embarrassing to read of the Argy-bashing and then this...

STICK IT UP YOUR JUNTA

This was the Sun's illuminating ray, cast on the peacemaking efforts of the American Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, who had spent the last week shuttling between London, Washington and Buenos Aires. It was the tabloid newspapers' view that the United States was now behaving like a soppy spoilsport. The editorial writers had a best-selling war on their hands, and they were not going to be cheated out of it by a sleight of yellow-bellied diplomacy.'

I cringed with embarrassment at being reminded, I really did, yet I welcomed the reminder.

Coastings a book that segues perfectly with my June read of  Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey at a book a day too. I am completely besotted with Homer (at last). Coasting a journey of self-discovery, a sea voyage, war, its all there and I am enjoying it immensely. It really does fulfil Eland's  aim to 'catch the moment on the wings' but I really wish I hadn't looked here.

Meanwhile I am sure plenty of you are way ahead of me on this so all thoughts and recommendations about Jonathan Raban most gratefully received.

 

Journeying...

I get lots of mails thanking me for writing here, and inspiring and 'helping' people in ways various (and thank you for them, I try and reply to everyone ), but I have to say that you all inspire me too. Your comments are like gold dust, and this week's thoughts you all so kindly shared on The Mighty Dead - Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicolson have launched me into Homer much sooner than I had planned.

I am still toiling slowly up The Magic Mountain, and I know I haven't written about it yet (sorry) but I will, though I'm going to bivvy and shelve it until the autumn for now, because having read the first book of The Odyssey in Emily Wilson's translation I realised this was the perfect summer excursion.

With that, she tied her sandals on her feet, 

the marvellous golden sandals that she wears 

to travel sea and land, as fast as wind.’

I'm tying on my virtual golden sandals and I'm off; a book a day (fifteen pages approx....maybe I'll manage two), a few pages of the introduction and the end notes alongside each book to see me through to and beyond the Longest Day, and I am ready for the jaunt.

Thank you too for the suggestion of Women's Work - The First 20,000 Years : Women, Cloth and Society in Early Times by Elizabeth Wayland Barber. As a companion read alongside this first translation of The Odyssey by a woman I can see it will be perfect. It's very much a 'me' book along the lines of The Subversive Stitch by Rozita Parker and others which unveil the anonymity of the fabric of women's lives in history.

'New discoveries about the textile arts reveal women's unexpectedly influential role in ancient societies. Twenty thousand years ago, women were making and wearing the first clothing created from spun fibres. In fact, right up to the Industrial Revolution the fibre arts were an enormous economic force, belonging primarily to women. Despite the great toil required in making cloth and clothing, most books on ancient history and economics have no information on them. Much of this gap results from the extreme perishability of what women produced, but it seems clear that until now descriptions of prehistoric and early historic cultures have omitted virtually half the picture. Elizabeth Wayland Barber has drawn from data gathered by the most sophisticated new archaeological methods-methods she herself helped to fashion. In a "brilliantly original book" (Katha Pollitt, Washington Post Book World), she argues that women were a powerful economic force in the ancient world, with their own industry: fabric.'

I've lined up a few more books too...

It's a very long time since I read The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood but I'm looking forward to it again. I remember it as the first in the Canongate Myths Series which would ask contemporary authors to reimagine a myth, and with the entire project set to last years I'm not sure how far it has reached now.

'Penelope. Immortalised in legend and myth as the devoted wife of the glorious Odysseus, silently weaving and unpicking and weaving again as she waits for her husband's return.

Now Penelope wanders the underworld, spinning a different kind of thread: her own side of the story - a tale of lust, greed and murder.'

And I also have Circe by Madeline Miller ready and waiting...

'In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe has neither the look nor the voice of divinity, and is scorned and rejected by her kin. Increasingly isolated, she turns to mortals for companionship, leading her to discover a power forbidden to the gods: witchcraft.

When love drives Circe to cast a dark spell, wrathful Zeus banishes her to the remote island of Aiaia. There she learns to harness her occult craft, drawing strength from nature. But she will not always be alone; many are destined to pass through Circe's place of exile, entwining their fates with hers. The messenger god, Hermes. The craftsman, Daedalus. A ship bearing a golden fleece. And wily Odysseus, on his epic voyage home.

There is danger for a solitary woman in this world, and Circe's independence draws the wrath of men and gods alike. To protect what she holds dear, Circe must decide whether she belongs with the deities she is born from, or the mortals she has come to love.'

And so Homer Summer begins. I am already struggling to set The Odyssey aside at the end of each book but am being disciplined, it's not a book to rush, more one to read aloud.

I've added these books to a 'Journeying' sidebar over here >>>>> along with another suggestion from those comments, An Odyssey - A Father, A Son and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn.  More suggestions very welcome.

 

The Mighty Dead - Why Homer Matters ~ Adam Nicolson

'There are two possibilities for human life. You can either do what your integrity tells you to do, or niftily find your way around the obstacles life throws in your path...'

 

I had included The Mighty Dead - Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicolson  in last Wednesday's gallimaufry of books that don't get a longer blog post, before deciding to migrate it to a post of its own so that the comments (yours, because I'm hoping you will have some) will all be in one place where I can come back to them. The Port Eliot Helpers, now known as the BDW Chapter (Bloody Difficult Women) are convening here this weekend and I'll be gone a few days off on Adventures, so I'm leaving you home alone and hoping to come back to lots of help replies.

I really did mean to write more about The Mighty Dead  backalong but tempus fugit since starting it in January and finishing it in March, besides which there is so much to say about it and, I must confess, some which I didn't really quite grasp. Some of the puffs suggest the book will 'cause you to see Homer afresh'...but what if you haven't really seen Homer in the first place.

I can't really carry on saying 'we never did it at school' even though we didn't. I vaguely remember Virgil's Aeneid but nil on Homer.

This all makes The Mighty Dead a book I will read again and alongside some Homer. There is a gaping hole in my knowledge here, it has always bothered me, and I felt it acutely as I read. I'm sure great nuggets of wisdom were sailing over my head, literally, because it's a book, at points various, that made me wish I sailed a boat, because I think therein lies so much deeper significance and understanding.

Anyway, this was all enough to prompt me to at least order the new translation of The Odyssey by Emily Wilson, the first by a woman, and set it all aside for a Future Project. There were however so many moments of brilliance in Adam Nicolson's book that I now have a very defaced copy.

This for example...

'Human memory lasts only three generations at best, but the poem is more godlike than that. A poem is not an act of memory but of memorialisation, fixing into everlasting song what would otherwise be forgotten.'

I know a lot of you have read and recommended  The Mighty Dead so I'm hoping you will help me out and share your thoughts in comments. 

Meanwhile, is there anyone else out there who has the great big Homer gap too...

And for those who are best friends with Homer, is it really worth the effort (seems like sacrilege to even type that after reading this book).

 

 

 

The Great Unwritten About...

Another gallimaufry round up of books read recently but not written about in longer blog posts...

Mad Blood Stirring by Simon Mayo

I stand guilty as charged for perhaps making unwarranted assumptions about 'celebs' who write fiction and I really should know better. Simon Mayo (who has a radio programme here in the UK and prefers to be called a broadcaster, not a disc jockey) has a degree in history and politics and is thus well-qualified to research and write a book about Dartmoor Prison in 1815. It was obvious I would have to read it.

Based on true events the book creates a fictional account of the influx of American prisoners held in Dartmoor following a bit of a spat between Britain and America in 1812. Conditions are bleak, and deprivation and violence prevail. At the request of the white American prisoners the black Americans were segregated in their own block within the prison under the 'rule' of self-appointed leader King Dick. There will be conflict and there will be drama, a production of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to be precise. I enjoyed the book, it is pacy and unusual, and Simon Mayo weaves unexpected elements of compassion and civility into this brutal environment. 

I actually finished reading it sitting on the quay at Dartmouth whilst waiting for Simon Mayo's speaking event about Mad Blood Stirring to start. He was a lucid and learned speaker, providing plenty of insight into the book, so it would be worth getting to an event if he is nearby. Meanwhile no hiding for me. The BBC filmed the Dartmouth event for our local news and if only I had £1 for every person who has said 'Saw you on the tele...' even the woman in the post office.

Slow Horses by Mick Herron

This is all the fault of Adele Geras who recommended the Mick Herron 'Jackson Lamb' spy series (five books). I made a start with Slow Horses, the first one, on both Kindle and Audible, mixing reading with listening and I loved it. The premise is that Slough House is the backwater for failed MI5 spooks, the ones who have somehow messed up, or whose reputations are tarnished by scandal, and are consigned to the rubbish assignments, literally in this instance...sorting through the bins of a journalist under surveillance. River Cartwright, himself the grandson of an agent, is one of those trying to redeem himself under the auspices of the large, uncouth and scathing eye of Jackson Lamb. This first book sets the scene and establishes the characters beautifully (the computer geek, the alcoholic)  around a terrorist plot to execute a captive in the UK live on social media. I was gripped both reading and listening and have number two Dead Lions lined up ready.

To the Back of Beyond by Peter Stamm

Did anyone else watch the recent TV series Keeping Faith? If you did then when I tell you that the book I unwittingly picked up and started reading that same week was this one...

'After returning from a pleasant holiday with his wife, Astrid, and their two children, Thomas leaves the house. He walks down the street, and he keeps on walking. At first Astrid asks herself where he's gone, and then when he's coming back, and finally whether he is even still alive. '

Well it was all a bit deja vue after eight episodes on the trot of Keeping Faith where almost the same thing happens. There is disbelief, denial and shame on Astrid's part as her life is dissected and picked over in an effort to discover what may have happened, along with an enigmatic ending open to multiple interpretations (or so it seemed to me) This was a great read and one that has me keen to read more by Peter Stamm. 

It's time we had some recommends... have you read any good books lately...

 

At Hawthorn Time ~ Melissa Harrison

At hawthorn-time in Wiltshire travelling

In search of something chance would never bring,

An old man’s face, by life and weather cut

And coloured,—rough, brown, sweet as any nut,—

A land face, sea-blue-eyed,—hung in my mind...

 

Edward Thomas ‘Lob’

 

It was my recent sojourn with all things Edward Thomas that led me to At Hawthorn Time by Melissa Harrison, and I doubt there can be a more perfect book to read in the month of May.

 

After several years of what have seemed like indistinguishable seasons here in the south west...mild winters segueing into spring, mediocre summers drifting into autumn, with the plants hardly knowing where they are, it has all been very different (and dare I say more normal) this year. Everything has had a jolly good freeze and knows exactly where it stands...yes, sadly we have lost the Tinker’s dahlias but other things have really benefited. The month of May has been a proper month of May this year, packaged with that sense of relief and excitement and no small wonder as everything suddenly comes back to life, especially our wisteria which is outsmarting itself...

 

 

And our swallows, a month late arriving but now nesting furiously..

 

 

The narrative arc of At Hawthorn Time is prescribed from the opening pages. There has been a car accident on a main road before the turn off to the village of Lodeshill. The clues are all there, the big Audi, the Simon & Garfunkel CD, the souped-up boy racer car, clues that will resonate and become clearer throughout the book, and hanging over it all the hawthorn hedges, in country lore so often associated with death...never bring May blossom into the house.

 

As I read, even knowing all this, I was still in a state of suspense over exactly how and why and who. There was guesswork going on along with a careful reading for more clues, but this was all as an aside, the warp to Melissa Harrison’s exquisite wefts of nature and rural living that thread through the book. There were moments that pulled me up short. I would read them over and again and think ‘Yes, it is exactly like that, you’ve got that right.’ Details that can’t be invented, can only come from close observation and taking notice.

 

’Spring was at its most fervid and riotous. The grass was lush and high, the cows sleek and giving good milk, and the narrow lanes around Lodeshill were hemmed with goosegrass and umbellifers. They stroked the sides of cars when they pulled over to pass each other, whispering along their hot flanks and striating the dust accumulated from faraway city streets and motorways.’

 

Our lane is barely a car’s width in places and ‘tis folly to have a mind to your paintwork as you drive along it. A layer of dirt offers some protection and thankfully is readily available. You have to be as good at driving backwards as forwards and be prepared to do so, because if you could see the look of terror in the other car. The greenery is starting to ‘stroke’ the side of the car, it does ‘whisper’ along the ‘hot flanks’. I’m noticing it now.

 

 

A small and manageable cast of characters quickly took on a reality as I read...

 

Howard and Kitty the incomers to the village. Howard never quite sure if he will ever belong, but perhaps he just hasn’t tried hard enough. Kitty, the opposite, almost trying too hard to embrace rural life with her paintings of bluebell woods. The couple at odds with each other, the move from the city exposing all the cracks and crevices in their marriage.

 

Jamie’s family the locals. Born and bred in Lodeshill, part of the village furniture. Jamie’s ambitions thwarted by lack of opportunity and limited resources. 

 

And then there’s Jack the itinerant wanderer. Jack, for me, was Everyman, channelling the life and loves of John Clare. The misfit who needs to be free to roam, carrying his notebooks with him, seeing and watching and listening to the natural world around him, at odds with the status quo.

 

We had a Jack (actually called Jack) who lived around us here who had worked and wandered the land all his life. He turned up at our gate one day with a rose cutting that he’d picked from the garden of the derelict mill about a mile along the lane, urging us to plant it. I’m not sure we realised the significance of him or his offering at the time, and nothing came of the cutting either which is one of my big regrets. I walk back down there occasionally and do you think I can find any hint of a rose. Jack knew where to look, I don’t. 

 

As the book moved towards its inevitable conclusion, and it does so very quietly, almost gently and without drama or bells and whistles, I found myself thinking ahead beyond the final page. The lives that would be left to cope afterwards, those lives that may not even be missed and thinking about the mark we all make, what we leave behind. At Hawthorn Time proved to be a remarkable book for me, one that will linger long in the memory and with much anticipation for where Melissa Harrison takes me next with All Among the Barley to be published by Bloomsbury in August.

 

If you have read At Hawthorn Time, I would love to know your thoughts..

 

And I'm trying to think too, of other novelists who entwine nature into their fiction as effectively as Melissa Harrison, and do you think I can bring anyone to mind...

 

 

 

 

 

 

Clay ~ Melissa Harrison

Before I wax lyrical about Melissa Harrison's second novel, At Hawthorn Time, later this week, I thought I would resurrect an extract from a post I wrote on here in 2014 about her debut novel Clay. It has been good to remind myself about the book and my thoughts on it, especially as Melissa's third novel All Among the Barley will be published by Bloomsbury in August.

But first Clay redux...

 

Set on the inner city Plestor Esate, Melissa Harrison fights her way through those 'thick layers of dead language' paying gentle and meticulous attention to nature in Clay as she weaves her story around a small group of residents. Connections with the land and its social history are immediately evident with the chapter headings mirroring the ancient high days, festivals and seasons... St Bartholomew's Day, Michaelmas, Hallantide, Martinmas...and as a way of sensing the passage of time in the book. There is something about linking the lives of Sophia and her daughter Linda, and granddaughter Daisy, to that of immigrant Polish worker Josef and young TC, and his mother Kelly, that made deep-rooted connections with the unchanging traditional round, not only of time and seasons, but perhaps of human behaviour too. 

Seventy-eight and a half-year-old Sophia's council flat looks out out onto the park, it is her 'garden' and her delight, her kitchen windowsill a sort of indoor resting place for all manner of 'untidiness' in the form of pine cones and conkers...

'The other flats in the block... may have descended into relative disorder, but Sophia's remained a haven of tranquillity...'

The little park a mini-arboretum in her eyes, the hornbeams and acacia and oaks alive with squirrels and jays and wood mice. Much that grows within her line of vision Sophia has discreetly sown in there herself, the purple flowered honesty most pleasing to her eyes. There is a wonderful moment when, spotting the council workers, with the aid of a JCB, planting bulbs six inches apart in regimented rows, Sophia sneaks out, illuminated by the moonlight, unearthing the bulbs with her bare hands and throwing them back into the hole randomly.

It is through the medium of the park... and the descriptions of it are vibrant with natural life, that Melissa Harrison connects her characters, allowing them to forge a bond with nature in the absence of more fulfilling relationships. When nine-year old TC, much-neglected and left to his own devices by his mother meets lonely immigrant work Josef, a friendship forms out of their mutual loneliness, and all under the watchful eye of Sophia.

Clay is a book that illustrates and reiterates what a sad and untrusting mess we now find ourselves in on the whole issue of adult-child friendships. 

Who cannot fail to be sickened by the news at the moment (remember this post was written in 2014 but actually plus ça change) Here in the UK a recent child death in Edinburgh; over the last few months a succession of ageing celebs in court for historic sex offences, whilst on the worldwide stage, the exploitation of children in the Philippines for internet gratification. It all reinforces the impossibilities of adult-child friendships, and reading Clay I was horribly aware that my first thought, when TC and Jozef met was of predatory behaviour and grooming,

...or was Melissa Harrison portraying two lonely and vulnerable people, an innocent immigrant who felt betrayed by his homeland, and a young boy who felt equally betrayed by his mother, and who had both found some comfort in each other's company and friendship??

I haven't even mentioned the dog... or Linda and Daisy so there is much more to this novel but of course not another word.

Clay has worked on several levels for me, to trust or not to trust, and all to a backdrop of the changing seasons bound to the unchanging round of human nature, a really good read and one you will want to discuss with others I feel sure, so if anyone has read it I would love to know your thoughts...or did you miss this one too...

An Address in Bloomsbury ~ Alec Forshaw

On that recent trip to London, and wandering through Bloomsbury to lunch and revisit The Lost Words exhibition, I walked along Great Ormond Street with Adele Geras and Helen Rappaport and took them into the children's hospital to see the chapel. 

I'm afraid it's exquisite beauty and peace passed me by as a young student nurse taking children to services on a Sunday afternoon.

 

It seemed over-the-top and garish to me in the 1970s, but I go in every time I am passing now and it never ceases to take my breath away.

And, as you know, I credit that little corner of London with helping to shape my formative years, because whilst that time probably seems a little rose-tinted over forty years on, there are many happy memories in amongst the rest, so when Alec Forshaw's book  An Address in Bloomsbury came to my attention I ordered a copy immediately...

'This is the tale of two houses, which at different times have had the same address of 49 Great Ormond Street. Built at the end of the 17th century on what was then the northern edge of London, this street has a complex history, famous today for its hospitals, but remarkable for much more besides. Superbly illustrated in full colour with photographs, drawings, prints and maps, the book traces the life and times of both No.49s and the people who lived and worked there. It embraces the development of institutions such as the Foundling Hospital, the church of St George-the-Martyr, the Hospital for Sick Children, the Working Men's College and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, together with the involvement of great figures such as Nicholas Barbon, Richard Mead, William Stukeley, Earl Grey, Charles Dickens, Louisa Twining and William Morris. With over 350 years of history packed into 400 pages it is a rich and compelling story.'

Built in 1686 when the street was first laid out isn't this one of the best and most entertaining ways to tell history...take a house and write its story and Alec Forshaw does so in meticulous detail having bought 49 Great Ormond Street at auction in 1993. 

But think on it...1686, barely any time at all since the the monarchy had been restored following Cromwell's rule, a mere twenty years on from the Great Fire of London which destroyed 90% of the inner city buildings, St Paul's Cathedral, eight-seven parish churches, 13,200 houses and then the Great Plague... 100,000 Londoners, about 15% of the population would die. It is only the first page of the book and it has my full attention because the statistics are staggering, even by today' standards, when our perceptions of numbers and population are so much greater.

The book embraces every aspect of history...social, political, architectural, medical, decorative, artistic, transport. map-making and more...

And then there are the details that I had never really given a thought...

'There were no street lights. Individually oil lamps were hung outside houses...people lived by daylight. While the affluent, replete with candlebras and oil lamps might dine fashionably late at 5.00 p.m., the more usual time was 3.00 p.m., while it was still light...'

Another very interesting (to me) fact came to light too...

'The Duke of Bedford flatly refused to allow the railways to encroach on any of his land south of the New Road...'

Not only did the Duke own great swathes of Bloomsbury but he owned great swathes of the Tamar Valley and in particular our parish of Milton Abbot too. Indeed I think it was our end that helped supply the wealth for the other end thanks to the mining boom here in the mid-nineteenth century. Many local names are reflected in the Duke's London estates...Tavistock, Russell and Endsleigh featuring large in both but, as in London, the Duke (the old misery) also objected to the location of the railway through Milton Abbot. There was no argument, he owned most of the village and employed most of the population after all; the line and the station were diverted across to nearby Lydford as the old sign at the end of our lane attests.

The book is lavishly illustrated with maps, paintings, portraits and many fascinating photographs and I relished every turn of the 400 pages. This one has proved to be a really good investment and one that makes me realise how little I really knew and how much more I will have to explore on my next (now very well-informed) visit.

Meanwhile I am sure there are a lot more books out there telling history in this compelling and fascinating way, through the life of a house...

 

 

 

 

The Human Factor ~ Graham Greene

'On May 15 1967 Graham Green wrote to his brother Dr Raymond Green to ask how a character could be killed off without arousing suspicion. 'Could you help with a suggestion?' he wrote. 'I am writing of a man in the Secret Service who is suspected of being a double agent.' The man, Greene went on, 'has to be made to die apparently naturally from some disease or other. The bacteriological War Establishment is at the disposal of the Secret Service. Is there some bug they could use with the help of those experts?'

Extract from Colm Toibin's introduction to The Human Factor by Graham Greene

In the past I had only ever read Graham Green because I'd been made to.

Brighton Rock at school and for some reason my copy was never returned and still sits on my shelf, and England Made Me as a set book for my O.U. degree, so it was a bit of a surprise when chatting to my sister-in-law in our Christmas phone call to hear her recommend The Human Factor.  I didn't even bother to look up what it was about, her recommend was good enough for me  because she's never wrong (indeed she was the one who helped convince me to do that O.U. degree) and I'm happy to say her 100% book recommend reputation remains intact.

And what a week I chose (beginning of March) to start reading The Human Factor  and the Africa Department of MI5, with its agents Maurice Castle and Arthur Davis. The department a bit of a staid backwater of intelligence gathering but no department with the potential for leaks and double agents escapes the attention of the Powers That Be.

When it becomes clear that there are problems the Powers That Be decide they must act...

I mean as if...

' I know that elimination is rather a new thing for us. More in the KGB line or the CIA's...Nothing spectacular. Doctor's certificate. No inquest if it can be avoided. A suicide's only too easy, but then a suicide always means an inquest, and that might lead to a question in the house...'

My flabber was well and truly ghasted as I read on...

'...aflatoxin is the answer to our little problem...kills the liver cells. They only need to be exposed to the stuff for about three hours...a post-mortem shows haemorrhage and necrosis in the liver and engorgement of the kidneys...death usually occurs within a week...'

And there it was all across the newspapers. Graham Greene's book, published in 1978 almost happening for real on the streets of Salisbury forty years later. If we didn't know what Novichok was before we certainly do now.

On the subject of Salisbury, I'm planning a visit. A piece on the news recently showed a growing flock of origami doves in the cathedral and in shops around the town....I feel an affinity. With trade down 40% the nerve agent attack has had serious consequences for one of our most beautiful cities and it desperately needs our support. I can only begin to imagine what Graham Green might have thought about all this.

I don't want to dwell on further plot details for fear of spoiling the book, but it was a gripping and poignant read given real relevance by current events, and I was on the edge of my seat to the very last line. Praying for one outcome whilst knowing it was going to be A.N.Other. Along with my sister-in-law I can now highly recommend The Human Factor too. Nor had I any idea it had been made into a film with Richard Attenborough and John Gielgud...is it worth seeing I wonder.

This has all whet my appetite for more Graham Green. His writing seems to have withstood the test of time, and that isn't always the case for his contemporaries. Of course wanting the books is always the cue for every charity shop, previously harbouring gazillions of copies of Graham Greenes, to have virtually none, but I am slowly building up a collection, the question is which would you recommend next...

And if you have read The Human Factor or seen the film please do leave a comment, I'd love to know your thoughts...

 

 

 

Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves. [...]
The world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

From "Wild Geese";
Dream Work (1986)

Perhaps Mary Oliver's most well-known poem and the one that I read somewhere a few years ago and so it all began.

I bought New and Selected Poems Vol 1 in ...and Volume Two last year

But the more I read by Mary Oliver the more I have to have everything else she has written. And I need it yesterday. All I can think of is what is out there as yet unread by me, so when I came across a couple of more recent collections which didn't seem to feature in the two editions I already have I had ordered in a nano-second.

A Thousand Mornings and Blue Horses recently published for the first time in the UK (how has it taken so long) along with Upstream, a collection of essays.

An intensely private person who prefers to allow her work to speak for itself,  there is not a lot to find out about Mary Oliver beyond the usual details of birth ( 10th September 1935) home ( Provincetown, Mass. and now Florida) love ( a partner of forty years Molly Malone Cook who died in 2005.)

Writing in the New York Times in 2009, Mary Duenwald suggests this...

'To follow in Ms. Oliver’s footsteps is not to power walk, but to stroll and stop often to take in sights and sounds and feelings. As she told an interviewer 15 years ago: “When things are going well, you know, the walk does not get rapid or get anywhere: I finally just stop, and write. That’s a successful walk!”

and somehow it is that intense feeling of 'taking in the sights' that shines through all the way to Devon as I open A Thousand Mornings and read the poem of the title...

I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall—
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.” 

I pick up one or other of the Mary Oliver books each day and always but always she has something to say of relevance and meaning. If poetry's purpose is, amongst other very worthy things, to teach, to console and to warn, then Mary Oliver is winning the game in the consolation category. But she is not without her critics, indeed some of them may be among you, but for me Mary Oliver and my love for her writing transcends any concerns that others may have about her work. For me she says what I wish I could say but so often can't or for some reason don't.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

From "The summer day";
New and Selected Poems 1992

 

The Friendly Ones ~ Philip Hensher

Many years ago now Philip Hensher described me as a 'disinterested reviewer' and I think he meant it in the nicest possible way. I had no favours to repay, no axes to grind, no knives to plunge in as revenge via the medium of a scathing review and in fact I still don't call myself a 'book reviewer'. It's all far too emotional and subjective here, book as experience, book as evocation of memories, book as accompaniment to life etc. If you are looking for straightforward objective opinion sadly you have come to the wrong place.

But dovegreyreader scribbles was still quite new and finding its feet in 2008 when I had eulogised about The Northern Clemency  ad nauseum, the year it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Book blogs were still a bit of a new invention, the world of literary criticism was in a bit of a panic, as if the ivory towers had been stormed by the rabble, and in defending their territory they were pouring all sorts of boiling oil down on us from the ramparts.

So it was quite refreshing to receive a sort-of compliment in the midst of the brickbats and criticism. In the end I was no help whatsoever, The Northern Clemency lost out to The White Tiger  by Aravind Adiga on Booker night, but look, book blogs have proliferated and now coexist happily alongside the review pages, and I would like to think that the quiet but determined defence mounted by a core group of us back in the early days (on radio, lit-fest panels etc) and with a determination to strive to offer good and interesting content, allowed the medium of a public voice to thrive and grow. 

Anyway in my usual enthusiastic 'pooterish' way, having already said this about The Northern Clemency (which incidentally still keeps its place on my shelf of Best Reads)...

'It offers the most dazzling insight into social behaviour I've read in a long time, a sweeping yet microscopic glimpse of life behind the front doors of British suburbia....'

I was really on a tiggerish roll and went on to say this...

'More assets, the characterisation, the subtle but believable ageing of characters, not an easy one to pull off with that essential requirement to maintain personality traits established in childhood whilst allowing them to mature into adulthood, or from adulthood into old age and yet remain familiar. Some intriguing off the beaten track psychological explorations with several characters which I won't spoil but you will definitely spot.
The plot twists and turns but never strays too far from the ordinary as to be risible, and with a perceptive eye for detail that kept me constantly in thrall to Philip Hensher's control of his huge novel. One or two characters puzzlingly made an entrance and then seemed to fade, leaving only a slight trace, but then I realised that is so true to life. Not everyone becomes a best friend about whom you know every detail, great writing restraint there.'

I'm sorely tempted to say the same about the 579 pages or so of The Friendly Ones, and I can't tell you how delighted I am to say that, because I quite thought I would love every book that Philip Hensher wrote after The Northern Clemency, but of course not every book will be the same. In all honesty I'd gone a but lukewarm until my Reading Friend's eyes lit up when I asked her if I should invest time and money in this one. It was a done deal and I am delighted to say I have not been disappointed. Not one iota.

Based first in Sheffield and then in Bangladesh, The Friendly Ones charts the life, loves, conflicts and sorrows of two families, neighbours in suburban Sheffield. Retired GP Hilary Spinster, his wife Celia and their four adult children Leo and living next door University professor Nazia, his wife Sharif  and their children Aisha and twins Omith and Raja.

The book gets off to the most perfect start. The Sharifs are holding a party in their garden and Dr Spinster is looking on from the vantage point of his ladder whilst ostensibly trimming a tree. His services will suddenly be required in the most dramatic of ways and the Sharifs will be in his debt for ever, but the party provides an opportunity for the book to be rapidly and efficiently populated, and yes it was at this point I started my usual genogram which would prove invaluable. Not only is Nazia and Sharif's large family extended across continents but the Spinsters likewise can give them a run for their money especially when Tamara, Thomas, Tresco and Trevor (a girl) appear on the scene. 

And the pleasure continued. I seem to have been reading the book for weeks and travelled so far with it but, like The Northern Clemency, whenever I picked it up I knew exactly where I was. The pace, the warmth, the eccentricities, the truths and the development of the characters ebbed back and forth in time whilst cleverly revealing so much of what stays hidden within a family. And in that Middlemarch-ian way there were surprises; the rush to judgement about a character and their motives and opinions suddenly turned upside-down.There is a telling moment when Hilary and Sharif are discussing the merits and drawbacks of overseas aid, their respective arguments subverting all expectations. I'm ashamed to say I knew little about the birth of Bangladesh as a country either, it just seemed to happen. Well I know a great deal more now. a gaping hole in my knowledge with all its tragedies and terror has been filled.

Plot details forgotten about suddenly surface, just like real life ...

Characters reappear a few years older and wiser (or not) and are instantly recognisable, just like real life...

Oh I could go on and on because to be honest I wallowed and revelled in The Friendly Ones, and its title's multiple connotations (which became clearer as I read) and emerged knowing that this one will go up on the Best Reads shelf alongside The Northern Clemency.

I don't want to jinx things by whispering Booker longlist at least, but too late, I've said it now.

May the Fourth be with you etc today and please, I would love to know your thoughts about this or any other book by Philip Hensher you have read.

 

 

Sense & Sensibility redux

It's a while since I have paid any attention to Jane Austen, until last week that is. It hadn't been widely advertised but Joanna Trollope was giving a free evening lecture at our local Hogwarts, the subject Updating Jane Austen, and so I went along. Joanna Trollope one of those authors whose books saw me through those years of work and growing children. According to my reading journal, A Village Affair in 1990, swiftly followed by The Rector's Wide, A Passionate Affair, The Choir , The Men and the Girls, A Spanish Lover. Looking back I see this was also my Alice Thomas Ellis era along with Mary Wesley,  Anne Tyler, Garrison Keillor, Deborah Moggach, Maeve Binchy and the wonderful Susan Howatch...does anyone still read Susan Howatch. I loved them all back then.

This would also be back in the day when I was a full-time health visitor, and when the master's wives had babies I would trot up to Kelly College (now Mount Kelly) with my baby scales and drift back to the surgery afterwards bathed in a sort of reverie of Goodbye-Mr-Chips-like fantasy. Long corridors with shields and painted alumni boards, echoing halls, stone staircases and a school motto to brace the sinews...Fortiter Occupa Portum - (Defend Your Harbours Bravely). Wasn't that the thwack of willow I could hear out on the cricket pitch, I Vow to Thee My Country surely echoing from the school chapel...it seemed a world far-removed from the hustle and bustle going on beyond and it was always a pleasure to go there.

Now of course I'd have to say it's all Gryffindor and owls delivering letters, and Draco Dormiens Nunquam Titillandus (Never Tickle a Sleeping Dragon) but it was still good to wander along the corridors and imagine what it must be like to be young and in receipt of an education here. The girls glide along in their distinctive uniforms of floor-length kilts (never very practical when walking into town in the pouring rain though) and the boys all in ties and blazers, and I almost wanted to stop them and say think how lucky you are with all the life-opportunities awaiting you, don't waste a minute of this. Interestingly the woman sitting next to me turned and said 'I know you from somewhere,' and, as is most often the case when this happens locally, of course I had been her health visitor for the baby now doing a law degree.

Anyway enough of that. Joanna Trollope was excellent and I now want to read Sense & Sensibility again and read her updated version alongside. 

Joanna Trollope recounted how, having been approached by a publisher to be the first of six authors chosen to update Jane Austen's novels, she could take her pick and chose Sense & Sensibility. With Jane Austen's themes of money, class and romantic love it seems surprising that little has changed, those themes still the bedrock of much fiction. Pondering her approach carefully Joanna explained that she felt Jane would have objected to the sanitisation of the novels, and nor would she have approved of excessive sentimentality. The Georgians were 'robust and very unsqueamish' and my thoughts turned instantly to my recent read of The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock...unsqueamish indeed.

The particular nuances of Jane's characters also needed to be preserved; the idleness of the upper classes, their extravagance largely funded by either the sugar trade or coal mining; the reduced respect for the clergy so apparent in a character like Mr Collins in Pride & Prejudice. And on the subject of money, it being a grim necessity and without which utter destitution beckoned, the threat of rags and the gutter sharpening elbows considerably in the quest, thus making daily life alarmingly harsh, with marriage the only career option for women.

It all set the scene perfectly for Joanna's approach to updating Sense & Sensibility which she decided to follow with a 21st century exactness that proved remarkably entertaining to do, the characters becoming modern versions of their 1811 selves, revealing the same preoccupations that existed then as now. This something that became immediately and very amusingly apparent when Joanna read the same episode from both books. 

In Joanna's words when she came to dissecting the novel (literally, she carved up several copies into small chunks) and rewriting and updating...

'200 years had made not a dent in its brilliance, the sign of a truly great novel'

Apparently and very teasingly, a single Jane Austen sentence has been transposed into the new version and is buried in the book somewhere. No one has found it yet. I did ask how the book had been received by the Janeites and Joanna proceeded to explain that there had been 'a lot of upset. In the end I told people just don't read it.' Her hope was that it might lead a new generation of readers back to the original which can surely only be a good thing and there was much nodding of heads. Given that the Kelly College school motto is fortiter occupa portum - "defend your harbours bravely" I think Joanna was in the right place.

I was really pleased to have made the effort to be at this talk  and of course will now read both versions with added enthusiam. I'm thinking to read an alternating chapter of each might be quite interesting.

Meanwhile I'm braced for it... I'd love to know your thoughts...

Have you read the updated version...

Or would you not deign to have it cross the doorstep...

Should Jane Austen be left where she began, in the nineteenth century..

And now I'm thinking about all the updated Shakespeare plays, and how Shakespeare himself was updating and recycling old stories...

 

 

The Salt Path ~ Raynor Winn

An upcoming theme for our Endsleigh Salon book group is ‘Never Judge a Book By its Cover’. My plan is to re-read a certain book from last year that had a stunning cover but for me didn’t live up to the hype or the expectations (I know it did the opposite for many of you). The book was bought for me as a special gift and it was one I was committed to enjoying on that basis alone...maybe I try even harder when a book is given to me in that way.  To no avail, I just couldn’t make it work past the things that annoyed me intensely but I will try again, different year, different mood etc. 

It was Angela Harding’s distinctive and eye-catching cover that first drew me towards The Salt Path by Raynor Winn, even prompting me to create a homage piece for my Journal Quilts once I had read it, because this is a book that has left a deep and lasting impression.

Devastated by the loss of their savings and their home in a failed business investment with a friend, and with the simultaneous diagnosis of a degenerative neurological condition for Moth, the couple decided to throw any remaining caution to the wind, the South-Westerlies in fact, and walk the South West Coast Path. 

'I was under the stairs when I decided to walk. In that moment, I hadn't carefully considered walking 630 miles with a rucksack on my back, I hadn't thought about how I could afford to do it, or that I'd be wild camping for nearly one hundred nights, or what I'd do afterwards. I hadn't told my partner of thirty-two years that he'd be coming with me.

Only minutes earlier hiding under the stairs had seemed a good option. The men in black began hammering on the door at  9am., but we weren't ready. We weren't ready to let go...the bailiffs moved to the back of the house.'

I’d seen the book cover hither and yon around the Internet and then saw Raynor and her husband Moth interviewed on the local news and before you could blink I had ordered and the book arrived. I started reading it at the breakfast table and didn’t lift my head until supper about two days later. I may have slept in between but it was a fitful sleep as I thought of the Winns camped on cliff tops, nursing the day’s fatigue, shivering in their lightweight sleeping bags from Tesco’s having watched the world around them eating pasties while they made do with noodles.

From its punishing beginnings the walk becomes redemptive and life-enhancing. Untrained and unfit the couple slog up and down the coast path with little clue about the potential difficulties. Maybe sometimes this is the best way to do it and sort it all out as you go along.

Sometimes maybe not... 

 As I read it all came back to me. Entirely different circumstances but also involving a tent and being woefully unprepared, I'm almost ashamed to repeat it...

Bookhound and I had set off to walk the Two Moors Way in August 1979. We were young, fit, keen and naive. It had been a gloriously dry summer, what could be better. We kitted ourselves out with what we thought were the right things plus the dog and off we went. The GP I worked with had warned me that the biggest danger would be adders biting the dog, so much so that he sent me off with Adrenalin and a syringe just in case (not sure what would have happened if we had got bitten). We walked seventeen miles from home onto the moor on that first day ( in new boots and carrying a bungalow each) when it started to rain...a lot...and a lot more. I’m not sure we’d even looked at the weather forecast, or was it still a bit amateurish back then. Anyway it turned into the weekend of the Fastnet disaster, a thunder and lightning storm like no other. Don’t ask me how we managed to pitch the tent ( heavy old things back in the day) or survive the storm through that night, the tent surrounded by huge moorland cattle who clearly would have liked to get in there with us.

All I could think of were the metal tent poles inviting the lightning, and to be honest I think we were lucky to get off the moor in one piece the next day. No mobile phones, the map disintegrated to pulp so we just followed a river. We were drenched with not a single dry piece of anything between us and the dog’s collar went rusty. We retreated back to home on the bus, water running in rivulets down the gangway from us and our rucksacks, licking our wounds, cursing our stupidity and Bookhound immediately joined the Dartmoor Rescue Group. There are no photos because the Instamatic was an early casualty of the rain. But at the time we had options, we could choose to go home. Raynor and Moth had no such option other than to carry in walking. But there was still much I understood about their vulnerability to the elements, the vagaries and uncertainties of where they might sleep or what they might eat.

As well as its focus on loss and the reinvention that a journey makes possible, The Salt Path is an education in what we really need from life, the meaning of home  and especially homelessness and its impact on ‘ordinary’ people who find themselves in this predicament. The prejudice and misplaced judgements waiting out there become a stark reality for the couple, But above all I was impressed with the the book’s lack of bitterness. If a friend had shafted me out of my home, my savings and my livelihood I think I might have spent an inordinate amount of time plotting their demise with recourse to a virtual doll and needles if necessary ...indeed perhaps Raynor and Moth have done so (I’d like to think it wasn’t just me) but to their credit not an ounce of this seeps through into the book. This is a journey into the couple’s future, about acceptance with the chance to shed the past and walk into new beginnings, and if that sounds a bit fanciful I don’t mean it to, but all the ‘de’ words... desolation, despondency, depression, despair, are slowly transformed into all the ‘re’ words...renewal, reaffirmation, redemption. 

Whilst that future may be uncertain the couple head into it with hope and optimism, The Salt Path a testament to their own resilience and a book that will give strength to anyone who feels their life is under the cosh for whatever reason. That aside I’m never taking a bath or shower for granted ever again and, like Raynor, I too find that the minute you nip behind a bush for a comfort break every dog walker in Christendom will appear over the horizon.

Welded to the book from start to finish, I trod every step of the way with Raynor and Moth and wish them much success and happiness for the future... this book has to be a shoo-in for The Wainwright Prize short list for starters, and if you have read or plan to read The Salt Path please do share your thoughts in comments.

 

 

 

Another point of view...Chris Chapman and A Black Fox Running

At my request Bloomsbury very kindly sent proof copies of A Black Fox Running to three people who I thought would enjoy the book. My thanks to Fran and Carol for leaving comments on yesterday's blog post, I've promised them both some Black Fox walking on Dartmoor when they visit soon and herewith a longer piece from third reader, Dartmoor photographer Chris Chapman.

Chris is a true man of the Moor who knows and loves it like no other, so my thanks to him for taking the time to read the book and share his thoughts and memories. Please be aware that the first paragraph does contain some details about the hunt..

When I was an art student I lived in a caravan on a farm in South Wales. One Saturday morning Llewelyn, the farmer’s son, knocked on my door and asked if I fancied going hunting. ‘Bring your camera’. It was an extraordinary day. We watched two foxes give the hunt a good run for its money, one leading them on a merry dance round and round the woods on a knoll near Penhow Castle. Towards the end of the day Llewelyn and I saw this particular fox change course, slip down the hill and cross a lane into the garden of a small cottage. We hollered at the huntsman and pointed excitingly to the spot. He brought the hounds into the garden but they could find no fox and he was just about to call it off when we both spotted a steam of breath coming from a small tree smothered in ivy. We both screamed. As the hounds approached the fox leapt from the tree and made his escape across a field and into a bramble covered ditch. But there was nowhere to hide. As the sun set we walked back to the farm in almost total silence. Later we drank beer and both wished we had kept quiet.

It was only after reading Brian Carter’s book that the above story came flooding back and I now know why. Llewelyn and I had both felt the fox deserved to get away. Carter’s main character, Wulfgar, is clever too, and I found myself for the first time being drawn into the mind-set of the fox.  Carter isn’t sentimental. His language is rich in sound and smell and he carries you over the country as if you were on four paws. Here is Wulfgar confidently giving the hunt a run down the banks of a Dartmoor brook: ‘the thrushes hit the trees like bullets. The noise of the wind and water blended in a dull roar, and to the east and west the clouds fumbled the hilltops. Distances were dark under rain. Wulfgar ghosted through the scrub birch and sedges, and plashed along the Rookery path. The rain hissed through branches that writhe and flailed. He was still running flat out, carrying his fur close to his body, wet and spiky’.

Although he lived on the South Devon coast, Brian Carter was passionate about Dartmoor. The reader soon realises that the 10 year old blonde haired boy, who collects eggs on the high moor and one day spots Wulfgar and his Vixen Teg with her three cubs, is he. Carter imbues every chapter with detail seen through a naturalist’s eye.  Even a country dweller born and bred will learn something new (I had to look up the word ‘Cockchafer’, despite having them crash landing into the bedroom on warm spring nights!).

There is a danger when one weaves a story about animals laden with human traits of becoming mawkish but this book succeeds in that the story is earthy and plausible, especially when we meet the humans. The grubby cider drinking Scoble, mentally maimed forever after his time in the trenches, together with his deranged lurcher Jacko, see ‘Blackie’ as the arch enemy. Both are determined to bring Wulfgar to his end but both are bewildered by the fox’s human like cunning. I have known people like Scoble and he is well portrayed by Carter, as is the author’s detailed understanding of the world of hunting and farming.

A Black Fox Running will delight all lovers of Dartmoor and beyond. Here is nature in the raw, woven into a tale that Carter himself describes as a Saga.  Life and death are met head on, and the book reminded me of what the late Exmoor artist and writer Hope Bourne once said to me when she was telling me why she loved her moors and the hunting:

‘It’s no good being sentimental about nature, because believe you me, nature won’t be sentimental about you………….’

Chris Chapman 2018

Throwleigh, Devon

A Black Fox Running ~ Brian Carter

He appears after dark,
reads the wind with his nose,
mirrors the moon in his eys,
laps the dew, feels the grass sing
in his blood.
Ebb and flow of stars,
waves of trees breaking
on the sky
    -these are the nightworld things.

And I shall go, foxwise,
in the darkness that is scent
and touch and wind and torment.
on those blowy nights
of September, all gales
and roaring moonlight...

Brian Carter (1937-2015)  Extract from 'Foxwise in the Darkness' (Where the Dream Begins 1979)

 

Melissa Harrison, in her foreword to the republished edition of the late Brian Carter's story of Wulfgar, the 'dark-furred fox of Dartmoor and Scoble the trapper', made me realise just how very, very fortunate we are to live here...

Here's Melissa...

'A Black Fox Running is not a children's book, but I first encountered it as a child. I must have been seven or eight when my mother first read it to me, the Devon landscape it so vividly described thrillingly familiar to me as the beloved country of our summer holidays...'

Though I was born in Devon and lived here until I was four, and though every holiday we had was spent either at my grandparents' cottage at Coleford near Crediton, or further down into Cornwall with family friends at Tintagel (long before the world discovered it), it would be twenty years or so before I came back. I brought a husband with me for good measure and of course our children were all born and raised here... and mostly out on Dartmoor. When you have such a wonderful go-to place to run the steam out of little legs and send them to bed exhausted, you don't waste the opportunities, and now, each time our wanderers return, Dartmoor is the place of choice they head to first. I would like to think we have filled their imaginations with wonderful (if frequently cold and wet..nothing ever stopped us) happy memories of Dartmoor too.

Set in the 1940s, A Black Fox Running, in the time-honoured tradition of Tarka the Otter, Watership Down and War Horse gives voice to the animal kingdom, and there might be your first concern, because it was certainly mine. How do you successfully invest such a magnificent creature with human voice and feelings,and also a spiritual life...this the chap Bookhound and I met out at Bel Tor last year..

'On the far side of the brook stood the big dark fox...Wulfgar did not flinch...The fox seemed to grow larger and brighter like the image on a negative...'

Giving a genuine literary voice to animals is a tricky business fraught with danger and great huge sinkholes of disaster if an author doesn't get it quite right, but we are talking about Brian Carter here. He lived and breathed Dartmoor and gave its wild beauty expression in his artistic output, knowing the moor and its wildlife intimately, walking great swathes of it and preferably alone. Brian Carter understood 'wilderness', here writing in another excellent book Dartmoor - The Threatened Wilderness...

' Going alone up the East Dart to Cranmere I am confronted by the familiar invested with a splendour springing directly from the whole wilderness experience....many find bleakness and solitude intolerable; but what can seem a hostile environment to the casual visitor may be an area of immense interest to those who love it for what it is...

Brian argues in favour of solitude, a feeling I understood walking out to the head of the East Dart and Cranmere last year...

'He walked up the East Dart to the great marshes beyond Sandy Hole Pass...by noon he was jumping the black ditches of Cranmere Pool ...' Black Fox Running Country - East Dart Head, Dartmoor (Aug 2017)

'What can we give of ourselves to the place? We cannot increase the beauty of the high moor. Caring deeply for a landscape does not sweeten the larksong or make the grass radiant. But we can tarnish that beauty or destroy it out of stupidity, avarice or carelessness. By remaining faithful to Nature we remain faithful to our better selves...'

The more I read his writing the more I realise that Brian Carter was one of the original footprints for the current resurgence in nature writing, and a heightened awareness of the fragility of it all, that we are benefiting from today.

And it's so clear, from reading A Black Fox Running, that all this feeds into the book. Brian Carter knows every inch of the moor he describes, he feels it as if a fox and he understands it as if he is any one of the animals he brings to life. You sense that he has been watching and taking it all in for the lifetime that he was given. 

'Hay Tor was bursting out of the cloud. Dartmoor was the colour of a hen kestrel....the wind keening through the heather sounded like a stricken shrew...' Black Fox Running country - Smallacombe Rocks & Holwell Tor (Jan 2018)

Bookhound and I first discovered Brian Carter in the 1970s, soon after we had moved to Plymouth and found Dartmoor on our doorstep. His book Where the Dream Begins became a substitute for owning one of his original pictures which were way out of our price league though I think we went back to the exhibition several times. In his foreword to the book, the much
missed Robert Hardy wrote...

'An awareness of what we have been busy destroying for generations, of what we stand in the most imminent danger of losing from the world for ever, and therefore of wilfully and wickedly denying to the generations that come after us, is dawning very slowly on the general consciousness...'

Remember this was 1979...

'Tap anyone's shoulder and ask, and almost all will admit to some sort of regret for a pace, and a space, and a simplicity of life that we have almost civilized out of sight and sound...'

1979... the internet still twenty or so years away...

'...the only hope lies with those who care enough to tell us what we are missing; the best of that hope with artists, writers and poets. Brian Carter is all three...'

And so Brian Carter a trusted pair of hands for the task of bringing Wulfgar, Stargrief, Ashmere, Thorngold, Brackenpad, Briarspur and all the other foxes to life. 

And Stormbully and Fallbright, the buzzards...

And Thorgil the badger, Earthborn the hedgehog, Trollgar the barn owl, the otter Romany, Scrag the heron..

As you can see the names are a work of art in themselves but the prose is exquisite too. A book crammed with Carter's poetic vision of Dartmoor, so many moments that I had to note down...

'When the moon rose the farmland became suddenly radiant. The silence had a silver gleam.
    'No matter what happens the stars won't stop shining,' Stargrief said...'

Pitched against the bitter and vengeful hatred of Scoble the trapper there are going to be some tragic moments to cope with here, and fair warning that there was a particular moment when I could have howled with sadness. But this is nature red in tooth and claw and Brian Carter doesn't shy away from the realities.  Scoble, a veteran of the trenches of the Somme, has his own tragic reasons for a hatred of foxes and is contrasted powerfully with another veteran of a later war who has emerged with a very different perspective, all of which makes for some fascinating contrasts on the impact of war on the individual. The interesting thing as a reader was that I found myself firmly in Team Fox and I won't say another word for fear of spoilers.

Meanwhile my Walking Friend and I have been doing some Black Fox Walking, recently from Jay's Grave out to Hound and Holwell Tors...

'From the highest granite outcrop he looked up at Black Hill...' Black Fox Running country - Black Hill from Hound Tor (Jan 2018 )

 

' Other foxes came to mind as they walked up the slope of dead bracken to Holwell Tor. Light was ebbing from the sky and the wind had dropped to a gentle breeze...' Black Fox Running country - Holwell Tor and Hay Tor (Jan 2018)

I think you can probably tell that A Black Fox Running is a book that I loved and one that has seeped into my consciousness in the best possible way, so I hope, for those who don't know Dartmoor, the pictures have shared some of that visual imagery which made the book so powerful for me.

One of the joys of the book are the wonderful names that Brian Carter gives his animals so, before you scroll down for gifts, I'll leave you with these three, the fox cubs that we watched playing in Mowhay Meadow to the front of our house one bright autumn morning. We think this their last rough and tumble together before the more pressing business of being a grown-up.

Who knows, maybe these are reincarnations of  Teg and Wulfgar's  cubs, Oakwhelp, Nightfrond, Dusksilver or  Brookcelt... 

 

Still in Pursuit of Edward Thomas

My penchant for writing down the names of the inns and pubs of In Pursuit of Spring (more than seventy by the end of the book) is only matched by Edward Thomas's obsession with noting the names and epitaphs in churchyards, and it is something that has really made me pay attention. 

I wandered across to the village church (in Sydenham Damerel, the neighbouring parish to ours but nearer to home) a few days ago with a notebook in hand. We can see the church from here and on a high summer's day it looks quintessentially Devon ...

I'm envious because this parish has an original copy of its tithe map framed and on display in the church and thankfully it can't have been in there when the church suffered the devastating fire in 1957. The tower and the bells survived but only one chancel was rebuilt.

I walk over to St Mary's several times a week, and I frequently amble between the graves, reading the headstones and wondering, but I have never taken notes before. Well, after a very engrossing hour with my notebook I realised that if ever I have a novel in me (very unlikely) there was surely a story to be written here, though it might be a bit miserable..

I could include James and Elizabeth Giddy Jasper whose son Robert died on April 2 1858 aged three months followed by another son Richard aged 2 3/4 in 1859. I usually feel sad when I see these gravestones, but I spent some time imagining their lives before the sadness...much better.

In fact perhaps there was an epidemic of something in 1859 because Richard and Eliza Freeman lost Mary Ann that year too, born in April, died in July. " Cease to grieve for children taken early from a life of pain. Ripest fruit is quickly shaken, Death to them must needs be gain."

And what on earth happened in the Serpell household...

Eliza wife of Samuel died on January 25 1879 aged thirty years along with their son Samuel aged six days

" Not dead but sleepeth."

But maybe there was some happiness in the preceding months, just a bit in the midst of the hardships.

And I'm thinking all these people probably knew each other, were friends and neighbours with the church at its centre, because unlike ours it is a tiny parish, a very knowable community and one that, unlike ours, didn't benefit from the benevolence of the Duke of Bedford. The Duke slowly bought up vast tracts of land in Milton Abbot and provided copious employment; I always envisage the Sydenham Damerel-ites having to fight for their livelihood in comparison. In fact I imagine a bit of rivalry, maybe a touch of envy because if you worked for the Duke you at least had a modicum of security.

I had been dipping into The South Country by Edward Thomas when I came across this...

'The names of the local families - gentle and simple - what histories are in them, in the curt parish registers, in tombstones, in the names of fields and houses and woods.'

And with it comes the encouragement to make notes and explore...

'Better a thousand errors as long as they are human than a thousand truths lying like broken snail-shells round the anvil of a thrush.'

I'm not a historian, I'd be dangerous if I was, so I suspect I'm going the long way around the hedges to discover what I am about the local field names along with the people who lived here in the mid-nineteenth century. Hours spent online in the library where I have free access to Ancestry and cheap printing, so the Textithe project has my full attention now I have a stitching method that feels right.

I've finished the piece about the fields surrounding us here and it is now hanging on the kitchen wall, but one of the things I noticed on the 1842 tithe map were a number of farms around us that have long since vanished, swallowed up by their neighbours, no longer in existence, their names unknown by all but a few in 2018. It seemed a natural progression to quilt some of them back into life so I am currently busy resurrecting Newton Farm on the banks of the Tamar (owned by the Duke of Bedford), with its four long-gone dwellings and home to twenty three people on the 1841 census yet no trace of the farm by 1871.

I've been to visit our neighbours who now farm the land and we spent a fascinating hour poring over old maps and making then-and-now comparisons. They have also very kindly given me permission to hop over the gate and walk the fields whenever I want to. My Tex-tithe version of Newton is now tacked and ready for quilting and I am really looking forward to settling down with it and a good audio book (suggestions welcome).

Which book would I like to quilt into this...

What I'd give to find an old photo album, but who could afford that back in the day, so who can know what happened to farm labourer John Geake, his wife Elizabeth and their children John, Jane and William who lived at Newton in 1841...

Well in fact we do know because by 1851 our house has been built (about two miles across the fields) and they are living here with William and two more children, Alice and Ann. 

Isn't that an amazing thought. 

I hope the children played in the garden, and with thanks to Edward Thomas, still providing the inspiration a hundred years on.

 

 

Pearls Before Poppies - The Story of the Red Cross Pearls ~ Rachel Trethewey

I've had a very big book Pleasing this week, in fact several, so here's one of them and it followed on from an email from author and historian Rachel Trethewey.

Rachel  wrote the definitive book, Mistress of the Arts, about Georgiana Duchess of Bedford and our local environs here around Endsleigh, now a hotel but once the Duke and Duchess's holiday 'cottage', and we were lucky enough to hear Rachel talking about the book at Endsleigh too, here a few extracts from a 2010 blog post...

'...Mistress of the Arts the reason we all know locally that years ago it took someone from the village three days to plump up all the feather mattresses when the Bedfords were planning a local sojourn in their holiday cottage. 
Fascinating then to hear the background to the writing of the book, the countless phone calls around the museums to check the existence of letters from Georgina which unearthed some really unexpected gems, including the love poetry of one ardent admirer of the Duchess (one of many it seems). 
Lord Holland fired with the sort of imagination you'd want an admirer to possess when he manages to capitalise on the shortage of words to rhyme with Duchess, and so settles frequently on 'crutches'.
The research proved an invaluable insight into Regency life with marriage for dynastic reasons, for life and for the heir and the spare, but infidelity rife and accepted practice.

In the end, after fruitless trips to Ireland and the archives of the Abercorn family, into which Georgina's daughter had married, it was the Devon Records Office that produced the research jewels for Rachel Trethewey, an archive of every bill and receipt for monies paid out by the Bedfords in the construction of Endsleigh.

In total £120,000, the equivalent of £4 million today.
Within those records fascinating details...
Georgina joined the Tavistock Subscription Library
Her favourite scent was Esprit de Rose
She regularly bathed in asses milk
But all was not lost on the research trip to Baron's Court in Ireland, the seat of the Abercorn family. Here were revealed the sketches by Edwin Landseer, almost certainly Georgina's lover (yes, another one) and whilst poetry may not have been Edwin's bag, art was and the sketches revealed an intimate, tender and sensuous evocation of their love, much like a photo album. The drawings seemed as fresh as the day they had been drawn and in the words of Rachel Trethewy, the 'distance between the past and the present evaporated'.
Georgina, exiled from Endsleigh by the family after the death of the 6th Duke, died in Nice in 1853, sadly a trip to Nice could not locate her grave.

 

Rachel and I met on several occasions thereafter and had also done an event together at Dartington, with Justin Picardie, on Justine's book Daphne (Daphne du Maurier),so it was good to hear from Rachel last week with news of her latest book and the offer of a copy. As both a historian and a journalist Rachel's research is always diligent and thorough, and will translate into a highly readable account so I was on tenterhooks waiting to see this one.

Pearls Before Poppies - The Story of the Red Cross Pearls, this information from the publisher's website...

In February 1918, when the First World War was still being bitterly fought, prominent society member Lady Northcliffe conceived an idea to help raise funds for the British Red Cross. Using her husband’s newspapers, The Times and the Daily Mail, she ran a campaign to collect enough pearls to create a necklace, intending to raffle the piece to raise money. The campaign captured the public’s imagination. Over the next nine months nearly 4,000 pearls poured in from around the world. Pearls were donated in tribute to lost brothers, husbands and sons, and groups of women came together to contribute one pearl on behalf of their communities. Those donated ranged from priceless heirlooms –one had survived the sinking of the Titanic – to imperfect yet treasured trinkets. Working with Christie’s and the International Fundraising Committee of the British Red Cross, author Rachel Trethewey expertly weaves the touching story of a generation of women who gave what they had to aid the war effort and commemorate their losses.

Those of you who live in the South West may also have seen Rachel talking about the book on BBC Spotlight.

Any book published by The History Press is a pleasure to read and to hold because their production values are high, so I have made a start and am deeply engrossed in something I knew nothing about. Indeed Rachel apparently knew very little either until she saw the World War One commemorative exhibition at Port Eliot in 2014. The exhibition featured information about the pearl, donated by Emily, Countess of St Germans in 1918, which had once belonged to the Empress Josephine. As I read I am finding  so many connections to other names which have cropped up on here down the years too, not least Ettie Desborough and her son Julian Grenfell.

Much more about Pearls Before Poppies to come, but I thought I'd tip you the wink for those who like to get their library reservations in before word travels too far and the list is a mile long.                                             

In Pursuit of Edward Thomas

It is the anniversary of the death of Edward Thomas today so there will be a couple of posts dedicated to him this week.

 

'Winter may rise up through mould alive with violets and primroses and daffodils, but when cowslips and bluebells have grown over his grave he cannot rise again: he is dead and rotten and from his ashes the blossoms are springing....I had found Winter's grave; I had found Spring and I was confident that I could ride home again and find Spring all along the road.'

I'm not sure what Edward Thomas might have made of the month of March 2018. It would all have been a terrible trial on a bicycle that's for sure. Devon has had double the usual rainfall and been the wettest county in the UK, we can vouch for that.

But it rained in March 2013 too, whilst Edward Thomas was on his cycling journey In Pursuit of Spring, so what did he wear...

I have a feeling it was a suit, tie and a mackintosh but he has something to say about the whole waterproofing situation...

'I have also discovered that sellers of waterproofs are among the worst of liars, and that they communicate their vice with their goods. The one certain fact is that nobody makes a garment or suit which will keep a man dry and comfortable if he is walking in heavy and beating rain...'

What would Edward have made of lycra and breathable Gore-tex...

'At first thought it is humiliating to realise we have spent many centuries in this climate and never produced anything to keep us dry and comfortable in rain.'

I seem to remember we were still getting wet in the 1970s, Gore-tex had only just been invented and most of us were still making do with gaberdine and and ridiculously luminous cagoules. Mine was bright yellow, you saw me coming from a long way off. 

'We must solve the question by complaint and experiment or by learning to get wet - an increasingly hard lesson for a generation that multiplies conveniences and inconveniences rather faster than it does an honest love of sun, wind and rain, separately and all together.'

I tell you, Edward rightly has a real bee in his bonnet about all this, and when you think he still had the trenches to come.

In Pursuit of Spring and Edward Thomas and I reached the last stage of our journey on March 31st having set off on March 21st (I got a bit of  a head start on 15th) 

Edward and his bicycle actually arrived in the Quantocks of Somerset on March 28 1913, but I was lagging behind a bit (puffing up those hills behind him). It all seemed like double-quick time to me and made me think what a joy the arrival and ready availability of a bicycle must have been in 1913. Few cars passed us on the road and I suppose the only other means of transport to cover this route would have been by horse or on foot. We did cross a few railway lines but most of the journey has been off the beaten track.

I have found so much to love about this book, especially the descriptions of landscape and place. enough to make me think that plenty of people have surely followed in Edward's cycle trail and repeated this journey (if there isn't a book on it there really should be) though I suspect they might have paid more than four shillings a night for board and lodging.

Take the city of Wells for example. Wells is one of my favourite Cathedral cities and within a day's journey of us here. If we go to Bath we often go via Wells where I have a fondness for pacing out Mary Rand's Tokyo Olympic Gold medal-winning jump inset in brass in the pavement near the Cathedral.

As he approaches Wells, Edward Thomas sets the scene...

'At a turning overshadowed by trees, at Dulcote, a path travels straight through green meadows to Wells, and to the three towers of the Cathedral at the foot of a horizontal terrace-like spur of oak, pine and beech, that juts out from the main line of  Mendip leftwards or southwards.'

I'd like to think those meadows haven't been consumed by a housing estate or a motorway now, but if they have at least there is a record of the way it was. (worse things may have happened, I've just done a search and seen the words 'Dulcote Rubbish Tip')

Moving swiftly on to Wells itself...

'Rooks inhabited the elm tops and swans the water. Rooks are essential to a cathedral anywhere, but Wells is perfected by swans. On the warm palace roof behind the wall - a roof smouldering mellow in the sun - pigeons lay still ecclesiastically...'

And Edward talks about the houses that you see in close proximity to any Cathedral, 'discreet, decent, quiet houses.' I had never thought of that before but Exeter has them too, in Cathedral Close. In fact, doesn't the fictional (but no less real for that) Simon Serraillier live in just such close and peaceful circumstances to the Cathedral in Susan Hill's Lafferton.

More pursuing of Spring to come because this has been exactly the right read at the right time for me this year, lots of inspiration. And meanwhile, in pursuit of more Edward Thomas reading in recent weeks I have found a couple of little gems.

Here is the first...

Edward Thomas A Mirror of England by Eliane Wilson with calligraphy and illustrations by Frederick Marns. Published in 1985, I took a chance on this at 1p plus postage from You Know Where.

A pristine hardback copy appeared from a prolific marketplace seller whose usual assessment of a second-hand book's condition I always find a little optimistic, so this was a Pleasing. The book has an informative introduction that added more to my knowledge rather than repeating the usual biographical information and the selection of poems is beautiful. Somehow made even more so by the exquisite calligraphy.

I'll leave you with this...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Call the Midwife ~ Jennifer Worth

A few weeks ago, at the end of another memorable series of Call the Midwife on BBC 1, I had a bit of a pang. And whilst I dare say plenty of people switch the TV off the minute they hear the theme music followed by the dulcet tones of the Vanessa Redgrave voice-over, Bookhound and I are settling down to watch in that Never Miss An Episode way that we do with a series that we really enjoy. We’ve watched every episode of every series, and all the Christmas specials.

The babies slither out week after week and cords will be cut, there will be traumas in the clinic, Doctor Turner will diagnose something else obscure ( for the era) and I'll try to beat him to it , Sister Monica Joan will wander off on another amusing frolic of her own, Nurse Crane (we adore Phyllis) will be a right softie underneath her no-nonsense exterior.

Meanwhile caretaker and handyman Fred will sort yet another plumbing disaster and we love it all.

I'm always intrigued by the old midwifery ways...remember Chummy delivering the breech baby, letting it dangle by its head for a while, and I'm hard-pushed (sorry) not to think I see real joy on everyone's faces when a baby is born.

There have been weddings and funerals and personal crises galore (come back soon Cynthia) and real life weddings and births; the vicar (Jack Ashton) and Trixie (Helen George) have had a beautiful baby of their own, and somehow I'm in danger of conflating the original book, with the fiction of the series, with the reality of the now.

It is sixteen years since I bought and read Jennifer Worth’s book in its very first edition published by Merton Books.  My copy quickly did the rounds of the health visiting team at the time, because two of my colleagues had worked as midwives with those very same nuns in the East End of London. We had some fascinating diversions at our team meetings for a while as they shared their memories. So it has been a fine refresher to take the book off the shelf and look at it again, not least to be reminded of Jennifer Worth's preface...

'In January 1998 the Midwives Journal published an article by Terri Coates entitled Impressions of the Midwife in Literature. After careful research Terri was forced to the conclusion that midwives are virtually non-existent in literature.

Why, in heaven's name? Why in heaven's name? Fictional doctors strut across the pages of book in droves, scattering pearls of wisdom as they pass. Nurses, good and bad, are by no means absent. But midwives? Whoever heard of a midwife as a literary heroine?

Yet midwifery contains within itself the very stuff of drama and melodrama every child is conceived either in love or lust, is born in pain and suffering followed by joy and elation or tragedy and anguish. A midwife attends every birth; she is in the thick of it, she sees it all. Why, then, does she remain a shadowy figure hiding behind the delivery room door. Terri Coates ended her article with the words : " Maybe there is a midwife somewhere who can do for midwifery watch James Herriot did for veterinary practice."

I read those words and took up the challenge

Jennifer Worth

July 2002 

In the book, all names were changed and The Midwives of St Raymund Nonnatus was also a fictional name. The 'real' Nonnatus House was actually St Frideswide’s Mission House, and the nuns were from the Community of St John the Divine; there is a very revealing and interesting first-hand account  of life working with the nuns here.

But how real it all seems now as I browse the pages and read about  Sister Julienne, (small and plump in the book in contrast to Jenny Agutter's screen portrayal) . And remember awkward but adorable Chummy (Miranda Hart.)

 

Here is Chummy, desperate to be a missionary, being kitted out with a bike...

'Cynthia, Trixie and I went with her to the bicycle shed and selected the largest - a huge old Raleigh of about 1910 vintage, made of solid iron, with a scooped out front and high handlebars. The solid tyres were about three inches thick, and there were no gears. The whole contraption weighed half a ton, and for this reason no-one rode it. Trixie oiled the chain and we were ready for the off.'

Now Chummy must learn to ride it...

'Several times she fell heavily to the ground. She hit her head on the kerb and said " Not to worry - no brains to hurt." She cut her leg, and murmured : " Just a scratch." She fell heavily onto an arm and proclaimed : " I have another..."

 

Nicola Beauman once told me that Persephone Books had turned the book down when offered it for publication. I seem to remember thinking at the time (and maybe even saying) 'If only you'd asked me.' Oh how the long arm of coincidence works in such mysterious ways when I read that Chummy was almost certainly a character based on the real-life midwife Fiona...

I was convinced that Fiona’s legs seemed to go on forever. The bike was called Persephone as it came from the underworld. 

Fiona on Persephone which was the only bike that would fit her long legs.

 

Reading the book again I find that everyone's there, except this time around I know them. Sister Monica Joan, Sister Evangelina, Conchita Warren expecting her twenty-fourth baby and there they are all fixed in my imagination thanks to the TV series. I would rarely go back to re-read a book once the TV has got its hands on it but I think Call The Midwife might be the exception. Jennifer Worth wrote a really excellent starter for ten which has become a hugely popular best-seller.

Now I'm sure plenty of you will either be of the 'Never watch it' category, or the 'Loath it' category, and for reasons various which is fine, it's not for everyone, but if anyone is in the 'Never miss an episode' of Call the Midwife category please do leave a comment... or is it just us.

 

 FOOTNOTE : Please be aware that we have had a jolly good discussion in comments since this post was published and you may find SPOILERS. If you are only just starting to watch the most recent series maybe read on with your eyes closed.

 

Reservoir 13 ~ Jon McGregor

One of my reading resolutions this year has been to try to keep up to speed on the literary 'now', though, given the number of books that are published each month, it's easy to slip way behind. So here I am dashing to catch up with Jon McGregor's Reservoir 13, winner of the Costa Novel Award and also longlisted for The Man Booker Prize 2017, and which came ecstatically recommended by my Reading Friend

My admiration for Jon McGregor's writing is enshrined on here with my thoughts on

So Many Ways to Begin in 2007

Even the Dogs back in 2010,  

This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You in 2013

and Jon even braved the armchair back in the day when I did a series of author interviews asking each the same questions , dovegreyreader asks... Follow the link if you want to know a bit more about A.S.Byatt et al too.

And so to Reservoir 13... oh my word...

Thirteen-year-old Bex / Rebecca / Becky Shaw has gone missing whilst on holiday in the midst of a rural community somewhere in the Midlands of England. In fact there seemed to be enough clues to locate the book in the Peak District of Derbyshire with the proliferation of reservoirs, traditional well-dressing etc. Despite extensive searches no trace of Becky is found at the time, her disappearance remains a mystery, but one that hangs over the community as the complexities and connections play out in the years to come. As the years pass the village becomes infamous for that connection and the people shoulder the burden, many unwittingly, some unwillingly.

Time passes and Jon McGregor slowly populates the community into something knowable. As a reader it's a bit like moving into a village and slowly getting to know who is related to whom, finding out more about them with time and slowly building up a picture. 

But here's the thing. 

Think book as experience and I found myself screaming with anxiety and the expectation of a discovery any minute, because Jon McGregor skilfully sets up tantalising chance after chance, after opportunity after opportunity, for a body to be found. The reservoir levels rise and fall, the wild animals dig and burrow, people walk out with inquisitive dogs and the narrative is peppered with feints and wrong-footing. 

A.n.y.  m.i.n.u.t.e. n.o.w....

I kept thinking, and about that I can say no more because the will it / won't it kept me on the edge of my seat...mostly.

Because suddenly there was a moment in the book when I realised I had been cleverly steered towards not being quite so anxious, not being quite so worried. Time was passing, the community was ageing and changing; decay and diminishing for some, new beginnings and increase for others;  the youngsters were growing up and I was changing too. I found myself settling into the annual familiar round, as if I lived there.  Recurring motifs bred a familiarity, a settling in... nature immutable pays no heed to the preoccupations of the humans, year on year the fox cubs emerged, the heron flew, the bluebells flowered. Meanwhile the humans carried on too, the annual village cricket match was lost or won, the allotments were dug, the pheasants were released, the school boiler broke down again and the caretaker assumed control, the annual well-dressing happened. There was a sameness, fortunes waxed and waned as they do in life; things were left unsaid and now, knowing the community as I did, I could fill in the gaps.

I was reminded of Raymond Williams, the literary and cultural critic, and his work on 'knowable communities' but only vaguely, its all now lost in the mists of the Open University degree. No, I didn't even want to go there, this was pure reading as experience and deep involvement.

And still the opportunities for discovery continue, but for me it slowly became less about the disappearance of Becky Shaw and more about the people left behind, and what lies beneath the cracks. Worryingly, after ten narrative years, I found myself almost feeling at home here.

I'm quite good on names, or I was when I was working with an average caseload of say 300 children under the age of five and their parents, so this will make you laugh, but I realised I'd need to keep track of this Reservoir 13 community somehow. I really enjoyed doing this as I read, creating a genogram of sorts but in the end it was almost as if I was compiling a Christmas card list...

Come December and I'm going to be disappointed not to be sending a card to Irene, or Su and Austin and the twins.

I turned the final page with a welter of mixed emotions whilst thinking ' Crikey, that was a fantastic read,'...you know, that moment when you sort of exhale and blow your cheeks out, and need time to recover.

So for me Reservoir 13 enters the 'Terrific Read' pantheon, rightfully taking its place on the top Best Books shelf with Jon McGregor's other work. And as I go to place it up there I suddenly realise that I may not have read his first novel If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things. How can this be...I can find no record of having read it, no sign of the book. Something is amiss and I must rectify that pronto.

Meanwhile I have since read The Reservoir Tapes, recently published and a sort of add-on-with bells to Reservoir 13 . I'll save that for another day, but 'breathtaking' will do for now.

If you have read Reservoir 13 I would love to know your  thoughts (spoiler-free...you'll know what I mean) in comments.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Midwinter Break ~ Bernard MacLaverty

It was Hilary Mantel who started this...

'Why is Bernard MacLaverty not celebrated as one of the wonders of the world? His new novel Midwinter Break will be my Christmas present to myself....'

It was one of those end of the year reading round-ups offered on the literary pages by the great and good to give the rest of us ideas about what to read, and for many of them, I must confess, I sense a bit of back-scratching going on, my nepotism antennae are on full alert, and strike me down if it had never crossed their minds. But Hilary Mantel is in a different league and if this was good enough for a Christmas present to herself then it was good enough for me.

Retired couple Gerry and Stella, he previously an architect, she a teacher, head off to Amsterdam from their home in Ireland for a short holiday. Married for an eternity it would seem, and settled into that groove of familiarity and understanding that such longevity creates, but Stella has an inner restlessness born of Gerry's issues with alcohol and her own near-death experience when much younger. Stella has a change of direction in mind, a surprising one that she wants to explore in Amsterdam (no not that) whilst Gerry seems happy to carry on as he is. 

I was immersed from the opening lines. Tiny references to things not being quite right  cleverly woven into the narrative by Bernard MacLaverty, whilst Gerry and the drink gains momentum, his furtive attempts to conceal his alcoholism making for superb reading...

'The drink was unfurling him...drink made everything easier - easier to feel, easier to find words. Some people he knew were transformed by it into monsters. They became viscious, spiteful and, worst of all, violent creatures. But not him. With a drink or two in him, he loved people, wanted to hug them, not hit them.'

It's not hard to sense Gerry's panic at the thought of running out of drink. nor to accept the lengths he will go to to find one, all the time assuming that Stella doesn't notice.

Likewise Stella's quest for change and her search for a place of peace...

'An alpha and omega place. Where the mind and the spirit could be freed by being restricted. Exercise for those who wanted to remain within walls. Imprisoned yet protected from the outside world.'

And maybe Stella thinks Gerry doesn't notice, but sometimes he does...

'He just saw her as if from afar. Like someone he didn't fully know.'

Midwinter Break another book that allows for thinking beyond the given.

I wondered about Gerry's alcoholism and how bound up it might be in Stella's near-death experience..

How much Stella's devout faith was wrapped up in the aftermath of that too...

And Gerry's open mockery of Stella's faith...

Bernard MacLaverty leaves these things unsaid, reader work to be done if wanted..

But Bernard who?

Why was he not firmly on my radar, celebrated as a wonder in my reading world, if he was on Hilary's. I needed to know much more about Bernard 'The Mystery' MacLaverty and I warmed to him instantly  reading  this...

'Some years ago in Dublin I bought a finger doll of James Joyce to set on the mantelpiece. I loved the idea of entrepreneurs making money from their most famous writer without having read a word. On later visits I bought Oscar Wilde and Ernest Hemingway, to be companions for Joyce above the fireplace. Much later when my grandson (2½ yrs) came to visit he discovered magnets in their heads. So we have devised a game we call “Throwing Writers at the Radiator”. As they stick we have to shout their names out. You can say what you like but the wee boy will be better educated than many.'

Many years ago Offspringette bought me a set of these and I treasure them. I have James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf and I have to confess that, at times various, similar games have been played. Mostly though I walk around my Book Room looking for hidden but magnetic places on which to hang them by their heads. I love the sudden attraction of magnets where least expected, and who knew they would stick to my computer screen (I know computers and magnets, never a good plan but the unit is safely under the desk).

Don't you just love their facial expressions...

But I digress...

Melancholy, retirement and its challenges, along with the intuitive nature of that state of couple-dom and the exquisite writing have all contributed to make Midwinter Break one of my three best reads of the year so far. A little bit of digging and I discover that it is to be made into a film once the director John Crowley has finished work on The Goldfinch ...where on earth have I been, I didn't know about that either. One of my best reads of 2014,  so double joy ahead.

I'm sure some of you will have read Midwinter Break so please do add thoughts in comments.

And what about other books by Bernard MacLaverty, and while we are about it any more recent Irish-themed fiction that I may have missed, all of which is reminding me that I still haven't written about Inch Levels by Neil Hegarty, and I must.

Oh and the other two Best Reads of the Year so far...this one, and A.N.Other still to be revealed.