dovegreyreader scribbles

Reading Journeys...

A lot of writers were kind enough to take me along with them on their journeys last year...

It is by chance that I seem to have been on a journey each month (more or less) with these twelve amazing books. Links back to original scribbles with just my thoughts on paddling down the Yukon still to come...

The Mighty Dead ~ Adam Nicolson

In Pursuit of Spring ~ Edward Thomas

The Salt Path ~ Raynor Winn

St Kilda - The Silent Islands ~ Alex Boyd

Coasting ~ Jonathan Raban

Swimming With Seals ~ Victoria Whitworth

A Single Swallow ~ Horatio Clare

The Odyssey ~ Homer (trans. Emily Wilson)

The Rings of Saturn ~ W.G. Sebald

At the Loch of the Green Corrie ~ Andrew Greig

Something of His Art ~ Horatio Clare

 

Central to all the journey reading before and since has to have been that June read of The Odyssey. I really wasn't prepared for the impact of this book. The understanding of all that had gone before and all that I have read since. I see it everywhere to say nothing of now being especially appreciative of a 'rosy-fingered dawn' when it happens. I'm hoping to read it again through next June too; it's a book that set the seal on summer.

I've been scouring the shelves for a few more journeys that might take my fancy this year. A sort of counter to all the holiday adverts that proliferate about now and knowing that we have committed ourselves to a project nearer home that will preclude much journeying for a while. It will be spur of the moment if we do.

Meanwhile nothing is certain in the journey reading either. Much depends on mood and whim but these seem like a good starter for some virtual packing and setting off...

Hungary and Transylvania with Patrick Leigh Fermor in Between the Woods and the Water

Stones of Aran - A Pilgrimage with Tim Robinson

Dublin to Tibet on a bicycle with Dervla Murphy in Full Tilt. (I do still have the padded attire from that 100 miles plus in New Zealand, might as well get the wear out them.)

From Wales to New Zealand and the Himalayas with Rebecca Loncraine's post-humous memoir Skybound about learning to fly a glider.

And perhaps a tramp around the Lake District with Samuel Taylor Coleridge in O Joy For Me! an account of the origins of fell-walking in the late eighteenth century by Keir Davidson.

And at the last minute I feel I must add another by Adam Nicolson as it was thanks to his patient, diligent and accessible explanation of Homer that I set off on The Odyssey in the first place, so Sea Room is added to the pile of potentials.

Meanwhile please do share any of your own journey-reading recommendations, because nothing is booked yet, I am armchair-ready for the off ...

 

Something of His Art - Walking to Lubeck with J.S.Bach ~ Horatio Clare

'Perhaps every long distance walk is a pilgrimage, whether the walker is a believer or not. The reconnection with ourselves through immersion in the world is inevitably therapeutic.'

I'm not going to make the overdone wisecrack about buses, you know, waiting for hours and then three come along together, so forget I said that. Just know that having read two books by Horatio Clare in quick succession I'd be quite pleased if a third would hove into view around the bend. 

Firstly The Light in the Dark, the winter journal and an antidote to the challenge of Seasonal Affective Disorder, and now Something of His Art - Walking to Lubeck with J.S.Bach, this latter published in an exquisite edition by Little Toller. I can't deny that the three-way combination of Horatio Clare's writing, the Ed Klutz cover and Little Toller's gold-star production standards had my undivided attention from the off, though I might have known about this sooner had I heard Horatio's Bach Walks radio series last December. As it is I missed that and am now praying it will be repeated because of course, having done the reading journey, now I'm desperate to do the listening one.

In the winter of 1705 Bach sets out to walk from Arnstadt to Lubeck to hear the music of Dieterich Buxtehude (who?) the famous organist at St Mary's church there. Interestingly my new friend Clemency Burton Hill had chosen some music by Buxtehude and mentioned the walk soon after I had started Year of Wonder (September 28th)  so my ignorance was only partial. I had at least heard the name. And three centuries on Horatio Clare, together with a team from Radio 3, sets off to complete the same journey with Bach and his music as his companion. I fell into step and walked alongside because, as Horatio Clare suggests, Bach never travelled quite alone either...

' A composer and performer such as Bach gave breath to the word of God: there was always a higher purpose, alongside, beneath and beyond his worldly concerns. No artist of any worth ever works without one, whether or not he or she is religious.'

Along the way music weaves its way into the narrative and my Bach collection was 'good enough' to contain the cello suites. I have both the Pablo Casals and the Jacqueline du Pre recordings and so could listen in..

'Though they are not explicitly religious pieces, the suites have a power and humility which takes the listener to the same places that the religious describe when they talk of the mysteries of faith, of states of grace and diving comfort...' 

And then this...

'The music seems by turns wise and melancholy, ruefully amused sometimes and philosophical, both accepting and longing...'

Along the way there is much to see, and much to compare with how Bach may have experienced it, so by the time we arrived in Lubeck, which Horatio Clare likens to 'entering a kind of holy city, I was fair desperate to see inside the church and hear the organ playing. I was anticipating the moment for days and can't quite describe how I felt when I discovered that the original building and its contents had been destroyed by allied bombing during the Second World War. I know we suffered losses too, Coventry Cathedral being one, but my sense of  loss was instant and profound, acutely so, even though the church had been completely rebuilt.

Moping around over this, and having missed the Bach Walks radio series, I suddenly realised that my new-found Spotify skills (thank you Clemency Burton-Hill) might come to the rescue. I retraced my steps and made a note of all the music that Horatio Clare had mentioned and listened to along the way, compiling my own 'Something of His Art' playlist. Then, with that playing, I stared at the cover of the book for a while and realised here was another book that I needed to immortalise for my A4 Journal Quilts.

It's a work in progress, my own journey with the book stitched into place. I had the last remnant of that hand-dyed Arashi shibori that was perfect for the sky, and I'm lining up the map for the reverse...

Lots of stitching to be done over the winter months with that playlist in the background. This is book as entire experience.

So there you have it. Another journey and one I might never have 'walked' but for this book. 

If you heard the radio series please do share the joys of it with me...

 

 

 

 

Candlestick Christmas

A little cohort of the dovegrey Candlestick Chapter have kindly emerged from winter hibernation to share their thoughts on the season's offerings from Candlestick Press. Jessica and Fran have penned this post about two of them and the rest of us will chime in via comments, which I hope you will too.

Three beautiful pamphlets to send instead of a card, Christmas Lights Ten Poems for Dark Winter Nights, Ten Poems About Robins, (both of which also include a postcard with another poem alongside the customary bookmark) and a short story The All Night Bookshop by David Belbin.

Firstly Jessica who luxuriates in the consolation and comfort of  The All Night Bookshop by David Belbin...

 

     There is something about this time of year that makes me long for olden days, for candlelight and fir scented Christmas trees glowing inside and lacy curtains of snow falling outside. Being a Jewish girl, born and still living in California, I can’t realistically call this angst nostalgia but that is what it feels like. Tucked inside the overseas packet from Candlestick Press is a story (with two exquisite poems) that perfectly captures my mood. On the cover, painted in muted shades of winter and limned by streetlamps stands a tall building, a relic of days gone by. From the attic story a light glows even at this late hour. And in the alley a black cat stands poised, waiting like me, to slip inside The All Night Bookshop.

     I am guessing that if you clicked your way to this blog you are not just someone who Loves to Read but a card-carrying member of a group that Reads to Live. And I don’t know the actual statistics but would hazard a guess that most people who Read to Live have insomnia. AND if you are an R to L’er with insomnia, you have most certainly suffered at some point from abibliophobia…fear of running out of things to read.

 Oh I know things are different now and those same clicks that brought you here can send a net into the ether and haul in as many books as your credit card can handle, but it is not the same is it? Not the same as slipping in with the cat over the threshold of an All Night Bookshop.

     Once inside, the story lives up to the cover’s promise… books higgledy-piggledy, overstuffed armchairs, odd insomniac customers and odder staff. The black cat, some romance and just the right amount of mystery were the perfect remedy for this particular Read to Live member who suffers chronically from insomnia and at times acutely from abibliophobia.

     Did I mention the exquisite poems? There are two, delightful bookends to the story. Unlike some befores and afters, these poems give context to the booklet and celebrate bookshops and their precious contents. Fetch a mug of cocoa and a fleece, your companion of choice (husband and dog for me) and enjoy.

    

And now Fran extolling the poetic virtues of the nation's favourite little Christmas bird...

Ten Poems about Robins

selected and edited by Hamish Whyte

 

Sociable, perky, Britain's national bird and recognised by most , the robin has been associated with Winter and Christmas for centuries. Stories and myths abound; Stephen Moss writes of many in The Robin: A Biography  [2017]. Their habit of living in close proximity to humans [more common in British robins than those in Europe] means they have been closely observed and researched. David Lack published The Life of the Robin in 1943, a ground breaking book and early classic of nature writing.  His love of this common bird led him to also compile an anthology of prose and poetry which his son Andrew Lack updated and reissued as Redbreast ; The Robin in Life and Literature in [2008]. The book contains excerpts of poetry and prose, along with art from Anglo-Saxon times onwards showing quite how much has been written over the centuries. So it must have been quite a task for Hamish Whyte to narrow down the Candlestick collection of Poems about Robins to just ten.

John Clare was bound to feature;  his "The Red Robin" starts off the collection. Not his only poem about robins; a quick look through my books and I have found four. In this one he writes of the a robin's song, heard throughout the year, and he notes,  changing slightly with the approach of autumn. A bit further on Christina Rossetti also writes of the poignant autumn/winter song  in The Key Note.

The connections with Christmas begin with UA Fanthorpe's "Robin's Round"- " I am the proper/ Bird for this season"…  For me the lines '' I dine in his garden/ My spoon is his spade"  from this poem are the highlight of this collection. Next time I am out digging and suddenly sense a robin's presence close by I know I shall recall this. Still out side in the garden Norman MacCaig compares man and robin in "Real life Christmas Card".

The custom of sending Christmas cards started in 1843. Since then robins have, and still do feature on many. Reading "After Christmas " [ Peter Wilson] I find I am not the only one who gathers together my robin cards as they arrive and group them in one place.  In the natural world of course this would never happen; a collection of robins altogether. Notoriously territorial it has been observed they will fight intruders, sometimes to death should their space be invaded. Peter Walton writes of a winter walk and seeing plenty of robins along the way. He wonder's if there has been " … a mantelpiece migration'.. yet returning home finds all his robin cards still up and occupied.

Watching birds feed outside the windows is one of my simple pleasures of wintertime. So many of us put out seed and fat balls, eagerly eaten by robins and many other garden birds. Both Fleur Adcock and Hamish Whyte write of this in "To the Robins" and "I watch the robin". Hamish notes the fact that robins have adapted their feeding habits now that humans often provide hanging supplies. Traditionally ground feeders they have learnt that good things maybe found from suspended feeders; …" whirring at the half coconut shell….like a humming bird…."

Living as they often do in close proximity to us we are very aware of their characteristics; their bright feathered fronts and beady eyes which often look so knowingly at us. The final two poems in this collection speak of this connection; "Robin Redbreast" by Stanley Kunitz and John Freeman's "Gardener's Friend". This final one with the poet talking to a robin has become another favourite of mine.

Plenty to ponder on here, as well as enjoy. One left unmentioned; "You know Her-by Her Foot" by Emily Dickinson. I confess I have read, and re-read several times and as yet have not really "got" it. Not that it really matters, always good to have a challenge. It crossed my mind she may have been writing about an American Robin, bigger than our European species but, it would seem, a songster too.

That is the great thing about these booklets. Unlike the cluster of robin cards which I will tidy away soon after the festivities have ended I can keep this booklet on my shelf. It will fit well amongst all my "birdy" books and throughout the year revisit those poems which I have so enjoyed. This would make a perfect small gift/Christmas card in one. Just as robins are with us year round so can these poems be. I shall be putting it out amongst the robin cards as part of my decorating, the front cover is illustrated with a very knowing robin perched on some frosty teasels, so festive enough. Then turn to the window and watch "my own" robin as he feeds close by, his beady eye watching me back.

 

My thanks to Jessica and Fran for their thoughtful contributions and please do scroll down for gifts.

 

 

 

 

 

A Pentameter of Poetry...

A small regathering of the Candlestick Chapter has been convened and we have been busy reading the latest pamphlets (Robins, Christmas Lights, and, pre-empting the Chapter verdict but I loved it, an exquisite short story The All Night Bookshop) and will be reporting back on them dreckly. Meanwhile I thought I would parade a pentameter of poetry books that are by my side at the moment, and likely to stay there for a while because it takes me months to read a collection of poetry properly.

Seamus Heaney 100 Poems 

It was apparently always on his list of Things to Do. To compile...

'a personal selection of his poems from across the arc of his writing life, small yet comprehensive enough to serve as an introduction to all-comers'

Sadly times wasn't on Seamus Heaney's side but his family have done his wishes proud with 100 Poems...

'By its very nature, this is a different selection from the one Dad might have made...we have also made some special choices that have special resonances for us individually...each one of us approached the task with a lifetime's memories...'

and thus does the Family Note at the beginning of this collection set the seal on a wondrous and intimate selection of Seamus Heaney's poems. I did 'cherish' and I was 'surprised' , as the family hopes each reader will be, by the selection of poems and yes, I do (because I am still reading them) bring my own memories of first reading some of these choices too. The Rain Stick, we have one here somewhere...

Upend the rain stick and what happens next
Is a music that you never would have known
To listen for. In a cactus stalk

Downpour, sluice-rush, spillage and backwash
Come flowing through. You stand there like a pipe
Being played by water, you shake it again lightly

And a diminuendo runs through all its scales
Like a gutter stopping trickling. And now here comes
A sprinkle of drops out of the freshened leaves,

The subtle little wets off grass and daisies;
Then glitter-drizzle, almost-breaths of air.
Upend the stick again. What happens next

Is undiminished for having happened once,
Twice, ten, a thousand times before.
Who cares if all the music that transpires

Is the fall of grit or dry seeds through a cactus?
You are like a rich man entering heaven
Through the ear of a raindrop. Listen now again.

 

 

Treelines - A Collection of Poems

We've had Shorelines and Washinglines and now we have Treelines, another themed collection from Lautus Press, selected by Janie Hextall and Barbara McNaught. When I opened the book at random and settled on a poem by Alice Oswald I knew I was going to love this one. Poems by Wendell Berry, Helen Dunmore, John Clare, Gillian Clarke, Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gerard Manley Hopkins and so many more, and all beautifully interspersed with etchings and wood engravings (twenty-five exquisite illustrations) make this little tome incredibly good value and one that will keep me going for months.

 

Green Noise ~ Jean Sprackland

I've barely been able to let go of Green Noise since I found a copy of Jean Sprackland's latest collection tucked away on the shelves in Waterstones whilst browsing recently. To think I might have missed it when I loved her last collection Sleeping Keys so much, and before that Tilt and Hard Water.

I read Jean Sprackland very methodically, a poem a day, in order and I keep notes. Each day I revisit previous poems as well as reading the new one, because re-reads reveal hidden layers. Poetry is the gift that keeps on giving, and these poems especially, for their observations of ordinary life that becomes far from ordinary when seen through Jean Sprackland's lens. The value of the notes became apparent when I looked back over my Sleeping Keys experience in 2013...

Sincerity ~ Carol Ann Duffy

This Carol Ann Duffy's final offering as Poet Laureate and so the quest begins for her replacement, though I don't really want to think about that because, like many, I have so enjoyed her years as the incumbent. This collection a distillation and a reveal about much that has mattered to her in that time...

'Time and its passage are at the heart of this reflective work, which gazes out from the autumn of life. There are moving elegies here for what has departed; whether that be children who have flown the nest, a way of life, literary luminaries, past loves, lost parents or our own youth. As Duffy dramatizes scenes from childhood, adolescence and adulthood, she finds moments of grace or consolation in memory, love and language amid the complexities of life.

This collection finds a poet at the height of her powers using her full poetic range, casting her eye both inwards, in poems of a deeply personal nature, and yet also outwards, taking stock of a world in turmoil. In some of her most radical work yet, we see Duffy satirise and unpick the deception and dishonesty at the heart of our current political situation. A rallying cry builds steadily through the book culminating in a moving closing ode to the virtue of sincerity.'

 

Injury Time ~ Clive James

Since reading The River in the Sky, my love and respect for Clive James now knows no bounds and this collection makes it sparkle even more. What a bright and honest light he shines on these his most treasured of days...

'Injury Time finds James with more time on the clock than he had anticipated, and all the more determined to use it wisely – to capture the treasurable moment, and think about how best to live his remaining days while the sense of his own impending absence grows all the more powerfully acute. In a series of intimate poems – from childhood memories of his mother, to a vision of his granddaughter in graceful acrobatic flight – James declares ‘family’ to be our greatest blessing. He also writes beautifully of the Australia where he began his life, and where he hopes to 'reach the end'. Throughout Injury Time, James weaves poems which reflect on the consolation and wisdom to be found in the art, music and books which have become ever more precious to him in his last years.

The poems in this moving, inspirational and unsentimental book are as accomplished as any he has ever written; indeed the unexpected gift of James's Injury Time shows him to be in the form of his life.'

 Well, there's my pentameter of poetry for you, meanwhile if you have more collections to recommend, or are familiar (or not) with any of these, please do leave a comment.

The older I get the more I can't manage without poetry. Fiction. Non fiction, new, old, classics, contemporary novels all very lovely but if push came to shove I'd want poetry on that desert island.

How about you...any collections you couldn't manage without...

Which poets would you want by your side...

 

 

 

Shall we read ...

The bells of waiting Advent ring,
The Tortoise stove is lit again
And lamp-oil light across the night
Has caught the streaks of winter rain
In many a stained-glass window sheen
From Crimson Lake to Hookers Green.

The holly in the windy hedge
And round the Manor House the yew
Will soon be stripped to deck the ledge,
The altar, font and arch and pew,
So that the villagers can say
'The church looks nice' on Christmas Day.

Why stray from annual tradition and the words of John Betjeman. I couldn't think of a good reason not to fire up the tortoise stove again. So here we are then, 'tis Advent, we can all make a start on the calendars and say the word 'Christmas'...

It's a few years since I have bought an Advent calendar, but this year we have something special to countdown because Offspringette will be flying in from New Zealand to spend three weeks with us over Christmas and New Year, and I'm thinking opening the doors on this lovely Angela Harding creation will be a fine way to wish Landing Day that bit closer. 

Meanwhile I am very grateful to Fran H-B who reminded me about this when we met up recently...that last year I had suggested we might read A Box of Delights by John Masefield over the Christmas season.

I had immediately ordered the DVD of the BBC series last year (as yet unwatched as I always have to read the book first), but have only just ordered a copy of the book having NEVER read it before. I found a nice copy of the NYRB edition very reasonably priced on eBay.

But how can this be.

How have I missed such an iconic children’s classic first published in 1935 and by the Poet Laureate of the time too.

'Strange things begin to happen the minute young Kay Harker boards the train to go home for Christmas and finds himself under observation by two very shifty-looking characters. Arriving at his destination, the boy is immediately accosted by a bright-eyed old man with a mysterious message: “The wolves are running.” Soon danger is everywhere, as a gang of criminals headed by the notorious wizard Abner Brown and his witch wife Sylvia Daisy Pouncer gets to work...’

I’m not promising a series of lucid and in depth blog posts all over the festive season because as usual the scribbles will be shifting into its habitual doze, bar the odd post now and again, but it wouldn’t it be nice to think some of us were reading and enjoying the same book. I will of course create a post where anyone can add comments as and when, with no pressure at all, so maybe some of you would like to join in....

What do you think...

 

 

 

St Kilda - The Silent Islands ~ Alex Boyd

I still have this ridiculous idea that I want to go to St Kilda. Even though I know it's unlikely and not all 'otters and primroses' as Kathleen Jamie would say, or quaint little cottages gathered around Village Bay and the voices of the departed residents echoing on the wind. Nice coloured aerial shots of the island on a sunny calm day...

You know me, I'm a sucker for all this, village children, women knitting on clifftops...

The chaps gathering barefoot...

I even bought the wool...

And before you ask, no of course I'm not wearing it yet. This is slow-knitter-do-it-dreckly me remember.

I bought the music too, thanks to Carol S who told me about it here...

Hirta Songs, and now I see it features Robin Robertson whose latest book The Long Take I read recently, so I must listen to this one again.

But how often I've looked at those pictures of the women and children...the likenesses, the low-set hairline, the clothing, the headscarves, and then just wondered about the sheer toil of it all.

No matter that I'd probably be as a sick as a dog on the three hour sea journey to see for myself where they, whose 'way of life broke on the wheel of the world' (Kathleen Jamie) had lived. In fact Kathleen Jamie did go to St Kilda, as a gift for her fortieth birthday even though it took repeated attempts to land, and she did put me right about all this, the 'modern myth', in her essay Three Ways of Looking at St Kilda (Sightlines) . If you still don't know of Kathleen Jamie's writing then hie thee there instantly. Sightlines and Findings would be two books on my Desert Island list without a doubt. 

None of it has been enough to stop me reading every book that comes along though, this was my last hefty investment...

St Kilda - The Last and Outmost Isle by Angela Gannon and George Geddes and exquisite and informative it is too. I've just checked the comments on that post from 2016 and I wonder if / hope Jane from Derbyshire is still reading here. Jane’s OH had a potentially very exciting opportunity coming up and I think we’d all love to know how that particular adventure went. 

 

So when I heard about St Kilda The Silent Islands by Alex Boyd I was on it  and had pre-ordered a copy from here in a nano second.

 

Alex Boyd, a landscape and documentary photographer, previously based in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland and now living on the mainland. I'd been to the Hebrides on another armchair journey with Madeline Bunting in her far-reaching and deeply informative book,  Love of Country - A Hebridean Journey; a book which explained clearly much of which I had never really had an understanding. In the preface to his book Alex Boyd is compared to Fay Godwin, ' that great seer of cultural landscape', Godwin a photographer whose work is synonymous with Ted Hughes, and with which I was very familiar.

The paradox of St Kilda, thousands of years of continuous habitation rendered unsustainable by the twentieth century, and to be replaced by militarisation and the need for Cold War surveillance, is a stark and perhaps uncomfortable reality for anyone nursing romantic notions about the island.

The cottages of Village Bay, abandoned during the evacuation of 1930, were left to decay until restoration work began in the 1960s

©Alex Boyd (with kind permission)

Making several trips to the islands Alex Boyd seeks a balanced view (and achieves it) aiming to dispel distorted and romanticised perceptions whilst incidentally using a camera that once belonged to Faye Godwin. To this end the book includes 'a hard hitting' essay on the myth and reality of St Kilda by Dr Kevin Grant who was the island's archaeologist. The series of  monochrome images and commentary are compelling, arresting and quite beautiful. Radar stations and military installations juxtaposed with the more familiar scenes of wild landscapes, all brooding and desolate, and I have pored over them at length. There is an honest intensity to the images, a truthfulness that puts my imagined visit into a new perspective.

Dùn and Ruabhal in the mist 

© Alex Boyd (with kind permission)

Images laden with mood, atmosphere and a narrative that all adds to my informed appreciation of this place, making this book an essential addition to my St Kilda shelf.

Ab Mullach Bi from Ruabhal. The precipitous cliffs reach a height of 358m.

  © Alex Boyd (with kind permission)

And, the thing is, yes,  I still want to go.

On the other side of Village Bay is the island of Dùn (fort), which provides protection to the bay from the prevailing south westerly wind. It is separated from Hirta by a narrow strait 

©Alex Boyd (with kind permission)

 

With grateful thanks to Alex Boyd for permission to use the images on dovegreyreader scribbles.

 

 

 

At the Loch of the Green Corrie ~ Andrew Greig

Continuing this week's Scottish travels we're going fishing, because At the Loch of the Green Corrie came highly recommended at a recent Endsleigh Salon evening where our book theme had been 'Hunting, Shooting, Fishing'.

The selection of reads that evening was broad from my choice of Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicolson ( I somehow made it fit) to The Power by Naomi Alderman, A Monstrous Commotion by Gareth Willams (about the search for the Loch Ness monster), Angle of Repose (get it?) by Wallace Stegner, Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon, The Domesday Book of Giant Salmon by Fred Buller (this a lovely coincidence as unbeknown to the chooser Bookhound had worked on this book with Fred for many years) The Catcher in the Rye by J.D.Salinger and The Shooting Party by Isobel Colegate.

As always we all come away with a list of books we want to read and At the Loch of the Green Corrie was at the top of mine. I had come across the poetry of Andrew Greig whilst staying on Orkney. The Tinker had bought me Found at Sea, one of his collections in the bookshop in Stromness, so I was intrigued to see what this was about, a poet writing about a poet seemed promising.

 Andrew Greig sets out to fulfill dying poet Norman Macaig's challenge to him..

'I should like you to fish for me at the Loch of the Green Corrie,' MacCaig commanded months before his death.' ' Only it's not called that. But if you go to Lochinvar and ask for a man named Norman MacAskill - if he likes you he may tell you where it is. If you catch a fish, I shall be delighted. If you fail, then looking down from a place in which I do not believe, I shall be most amused.'

He duly sets out on his mission with two companions. First driving to the Assynt in the far north west of  Scotland to find his man and his loch.

It strikes me that fishing is one of the ways men bond with each other...if you have a fisherman in the house you might know what I mean. Or perhaps you have seen the new TV series with Paul Whitehouse and Bob Mortimer, both recovering from heart surgery and counting their blessings in a very amusing way from the riverbank as they fish. The place and the moment gives them the opportunity to say things to each other, sensitive thoughtful things, that I doubt these two comedians would have felt able to say anywhere else.

And At the Loch of the Green Corrie is, in part,  a perfect example of men doing just that. Andrew along with lifelong friends Andy and Peter find their way to the loch (eventually), set up camp and start to fish. They go their separate ways along the bank for the necessary solitude (I think fishing requires that as well) and for their own piece of water, occasionally calling across to each other, dashing along with the landing net when required, coming together for a brew and a chat, whilst sharing memories and moments and life events with each other, and the result is a really heart-warming read. The mission empowers Andrew Greig to examine his own life and loves, the mistakes and the memories, the fault lines that have brought him to where he is and to consider what may lie ahead.

Geology plays its part too. The Assynt in particular has been the source of much debate and disagreement. The limestone layers beneath actually younger by five hundred million years than the upper strata of metamorphic rock. Pre-Cambrian lies on top of Cambrian apparently. It all became very controversial but fascinating nevertheless, and what is not to love about the old geological maps.

Published in 2010, At the Loch of the Green Corrie is an intensely candid and personal memoir, as I suppose they should but so often aren't. Andrew Greig deals unflinchingly with painful moments in his life, exploring how he arrived there and where he has travelled since. What may have happened to him in the eight years since I have no idea, or whether he is still a resident Orcadian, but I do wish continued good things for him along with the ever-present memory of catching that trout on the Loch of the Green Corrie and Norman McCaig smiling down from the place he didn't believe in.

In the way that books about poets do, this all led me to explore Norman MacCaig's poetry too. I knew nothing about him so I read The Many Days alongside and feel as if I have sojourned in the highlands along the way..

So Many Summers

Beside one loch, a hind's neat skeleton,
Beside another, a boat pulled high and dry:
Two neat geometries drawn in the weather:
Two things already dead and still to die.

I passed them every summer, rod in hand,
Skirting the bright blue or the spitting gray,
And, every summer, saw how the bleached timbers
Gaped wider and the neat ribs fell away.

Time adds one malice to another one–
Now you'd look very close before you knew
If it's the boat that ran, the hind went sailing.
So many summers, and I have lived them too.

I don't know the Assynt but of course the sign of a good bit of armchair journeying is that the reading makes you want to go there, and now I really do. 

Meanwhile please do add any more suggestions of your own for that theme of 'Hunting, Shooting, Fishing'...

Into the Mountain - A Life of Nan Shepherd ~ Charlotte Peacock

With St Andrew's Day coming up on Friday this seems like a good week to go to Scotland with some reading and I did, via an adventure to Penzance for the day back in May.

Pootled down on the train for £14 return to meet Barbara (once but no longer writing Milady's Boudoir) and a mutual friend staying with her in the Egyptian House, a Landmark Trust property in the centre of town. It was all very exciting, and of course it is always imperative to buy a book on these days out as a memento of a happy time. I was delighted to find a copy of Into the Mountain - A Life of Nan Shepherd by Charlotte Peacock for half price in the very delectable Barton Books. We squeezed a lot more into the day...the exhibition of Newlyn paintings at the Penlee Gallery, a tour and wine-tasting at the Polgoon Vineyard (well I tasted the elderflower because I don't drink) and a good trawl of Penzance's other fantastic emporium The Edge of the World bookshop.

Once I had waved farewell to friends, Penzance, St Michael's Mount etc, and watched the sunset from the train I settled down with Nan, reading the book for the two hours back up to Plymouth and the forty minutes back out to Gunnislake, and for the days thereafter until I had finished it.

My love for Nan Shepherd's non-fiction book The Living Mountain knows no bounds. I've read it about six times now, each time it welds to me a little bit more and I took a copy (which Robert Macfarlane very kindly inscribed for me) to give to Offspringette on my last trip to New Zealand. Every time I read the book something Nan says will have new relevance, and I think I know Nan Shepherd well enough from those readings, as she contemplates the might and power of the Cairngorms and the impact on body and soul of walking there, but of course I don't, so it has been fascinating to read more about her life.

I find that some biographies keep you at arm's length from the life, others plunge you straight in, as did this one, and with little on the record about her life and much destroyed (presumably to make the task more difficult) I wonder if the notoriously reticent Nan ever imagined that anyone would be remotely interested, let alone that her face would appear on a Scottish bank note.

Yet Nan Shepherd did leave three novels, The Quarry Wood, A Pass in the Grampians and The Weatherhouse, all of which are known to be, in varying degrees, autobiographical. Along with commonplace books and poetry plus some correspondence Charlotte Peacock has scoured available material extensively for her research. Thus, whilst it could be argued that much of the information is supposition and speculation, I sensed I was reading an accurate enough picture of the Nan Shepherd I felt I have come to know from those readings of The Living Mountain.

Born in 1893, Nan's life is clearly constrained by the times and setting aside any notions of a 'famous person' the book also offers a wealth of insight into the social mores of the time. But Nan is also constrained by a mother who for whatever reason 'went off her legs', as we used to say in nursing parlance, becoming an invalid for reasons unknown, in need of care and confined to her own home. Nan's education leads her to employment as a trainer of teachers in Aberdeen, a job she held for her entire working life until retirement.

Everything that lay dormant, all Nan's hopes, dreams and unfulfilled potential... and can you sense her imagining it all in this picture...

...everything seems to unfurl at the point where she takes to the hills seriously in 1928.

Walking in the Cairngorms gives Nan the opportunity to shake off the constraints of her existence and to experience real freedom, both from disappointments in love, and the responsibilities of home and family as the main bread-winner for her ailing mother following the death of her father. I sensed the other light in her life came from a regular literary and critical correspondence with the writer Neil Gunn. 

The disappointments in love are heart-rending and fascinating. The man Nan loves marries her best friend, but within the open marriage that John McMurray and his wife create there is some speculation that Nan's affections and desire may not have been entirely thwarted. 

Meanwhile her correspondence with Neil Gunn provides the literary and cultural exchange that Nan craves and thrives on, and a mutual respect and openness and honesty between the two is evident in their letters...

'Poetry means too much to me - it seems to hold in intensest being the very heart of all experience: and though I have now and then glimpsed something of that burning heart of life - have intimations and hauntings of its beauty and strangeness and awe - always when I try to put these things into words they elude me. The result is slight and small. And then when I read something like Hugh McDiarmid's

" You cannot sing until your flight
Leaves you no audience but the light."

and go away humble, chastened and shut my lips.'

Nan's lack of confidence and self-belief in her own ability would endure throughout her lifetime.

But how sad it always is to read of a life full of such vigour and energy drawing to its close. I walk on Dartmoor and often think of Nan striding purposefully yet mindfully up a mountain while I puff my way up a tor. Who can know how Nan must have felt, eighty-seven years old, packed and ready to leave hospital after a collapse, to move into a cottage next door to Sheila a long-standing family friend, only to be told Sheila had suffered a heart attack and the move cannot happen. A place is found for Nan in a nursing home where she will end her days, but thankfully in sight of the hills.

'You're like a lovely day in the hills', says the last line of Neil Gunn's final letter to Nan, who accepted it as a lovely compliment 'an all sufficient goodbye,' her own farewells to life made on February 27th 1981 just two weeks after her eighty-eighth birthday.

What a surprising legacy this seemingly ordinary life has left us, perhaps proving that this is exactly what ordinary lives can do. It is indeed ' a grand thing to get leave to live' and Into the Mountain a book I can highly recommend if you are a lover of all things Nan Shepherd or reading about women's  lives in general. 

 

 

Little ~ Edward Carey

I have spent an awful lot of time whilst reading Little by Edward Carey, and since, trying to remember if I ever went to Madame Tussaud's as child.

Have I ever been there...

Surely I would never forget a visit...

I can clearly remember interminable hours on school trips to the Planetarium next door. The tedium of staring at the night sky on the domed ceiling which seemed to lose its appeal after the first five minutes, and we'd all wish we were next door in Madame Tussaud's instead. 

The verdict is that I have never been to Madame Tussaud's.

No matter, I have now read Little by Edward Carey, a re-imagining of the life of Marie Grosholtz who would eventually marry Francois Tussaud ' a nice enough man but useless,' and find herself living in Baker Street, London and the rest, to coin the cliche is history.

Except not a lot is known about the prior history given that the only record is apparently Madame Tussaud's own, and doubt has often been cast on her own account. It would seem the story is there to be written and Edward Carey has cleverly engaged in a fictional re-imagining of little Marie's life and I was transfixed by it all.

You know how some books take a good few pages to warm up. By pages thirty or forty I'm seeking encouragement to continue, plot, character, setting, voice, please jump out and drag me in. Well, setting the scene for 1761 on the first page worked like a charm, steeped me in the moment and installed me into the book within minutes. I was interested and committed, in for the long haul with a book  that I sensed was going to be slightly bizarre and unusual and all the more compelling for it.

1761..

The Mozart minuet for Harpsichord...

The British capturing Pondicherry from the French...

The first publication of the melody that would become Twinkle Twinkle Little Star...

The Coronation of George III and Queen Charlotte..

'Many miles from all this activity, in a small village in Alsace, in the presence of a ruddy midwife, two village maids, and a terrified mother, was born a certain undersized baby.

Anne Marie Grosholtz was the name given to that hurriedly christened child, though I would be referred to simply as Marie...Pig-headed, pocket-sized thing.'

 

And when Marie's father dies and she and her mother move to Basle to keep house for a Dr Curtius, little could they know what they would be walking in to. As an anatomist and creator of replica wax body parts it will be unusual packages that are delivered to the Doctor's house from the hospital. Too horrified by it all Marie's mother commits suicide, leaving six-year-old Marie (and it has to be said her young but cast-iron stomach) in the care of the gentle and diligent doctor, and thus does the future Madame Tussaud's apprenticeship begin...

'There is a melancholy to wax heads: they were never born, they capture life, but life shrugs away from them.'

Moving to Paris, Marie and the Doctor find themselves in the midst of revolutionary maelstrom at the court of Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette, and when Marie is engaged as a companion and teacher of sculpture to the over-indulged Princess Elizabeth she finds herself at the...well... at the cutting edge of things.

There is a lot of story to be told before arriving at the expected London waxworks era and I had to think 'what did I know before?'

How much was fiction and invention,how much was based on truth. In the end I didn't really care 

As Bastille Day approached I had to put out a call for 'No Interruptions' because I was gripped.

Little is unique, different and compelling and with splendid illustrations by Edward Carey. First person narratives can often seem limited by scope of vision, experience and point of view, but not in the case of Marie Grosholtz whose eyes don't miss a thing.

Her years living in a cupboard and at the behest of the Princess...

The years under the tyrrany of Dr Curtius's live-in 'friend' the Widow Picot...

The apprenticeship in wax modelling which see young Marie matter-of-factly receiving heads hot (and dripping) from the guillotine in order to create a mask . It really should be gross but somehow it wasn't. 

Literary agent Jonny Geller put a list online recently 'What we look for in novels' I think as a vade mecum for authors sending in their manuscripts (he says' love writing your book but don't expect to love reading it' ), but several points seemed pertinent to us readers too.

Plot is key but not at expense of character, we'll go anywhere with a full character but question every move with a thin one.

How a story makes you feel is as important as how it makes you think

We read to learn, experience and feel something new. Comfortable is anathma to a writer and readers can sense complacency instantly

Take your characters to the limit

I don't know whose desk the manuscript for this book landed on, but impose those criteria and Little comes out all-singing and all-dancing and I commend it the house.

Meanwhile I’m expecting that you have all visited Madame Tussaud’s...

It’s longevity and ongoing existence surely defies the odds in the age of the Internet, but the queues are always a mile long whenever I happen to be in London and walk past.

What is about standing next to wax effigies of the real thing...

 

 

 

 

 

 

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