I think everything becomes a Pleasing the minute the sun starts shining doesn't it so I'll just select a few...
A brief girls-only sojourn in Dorset and then a wonderful day in London last week, and the chance to see The Lost Words exhibition again at The Foundling Museum before it heads off to the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh. I know the book so well now that it was like visiting old friends. I said 'Hello' to Bluebell and thought 'Any minute now...' because our woods are about to burst forth...
I met up with Helen Rappaport and Adele Geras in London and we were ladies who lunched. I love meeting friends for lunch or coffee and a couple of hours of good nattering and have decided it's mostly a Woman Thing. It's all an enigma to Bookhound, I'm not sure men quite understand it, or do it a much as women do... or do they. Helen's next book The Race to Save the Romanovs will be published in June and it was good to talk to her about it and of course more about it on here then, whilst Adele also has irons in fires various and is very busy too.
Adele's late husband Norm was a huge supporter and encourager of all things dovegreyreader scribbles. Norman Geras was a political theorist and Professor Emeritus of Politics at the University of Manchester and he blogged over at Normblog. I think we all miss his incredibly wise, sane and reasoned observations on controversial world issues...there is so much I would really value Norm's opinion on right now. But Norm left a superb legacy in the form of a reading list , '100 works of fiction you might enjoy', which he published on Normblog just nine days before he died in 2013. Adele, Helen and I talked about Norm, what he might be making of current events and the list over our lunch and herewith a link to it for you all...
And here's what Norm had to say about the list...
'Now, in all my experience of such book lists, this one has a unique feature. Which is that I've read all the books on it. Yup, every single one - 100%. That's because I compiled the list from... the books I've read (choosing titles, as well, that I liked enough that I'm happy to recommend them). Why should I let other people make lists to browbeat me with? If I make the list myself, I get to have read everything on it. Enough bullying is what I say. You, too, can make your own list and rebel against the tyranny of the book-dictators. I suggest you do it.'
My instinct at the time was to tick off all the books I had read and make a note of those I hadn't. This week it has been good to remind myself about Norm's list, check again those I haven't read, and also to think now about compiling a list of my own.
Watch this space.
We have been working hard in the garden (my right knee says so...I've had the miracle injection in the left one so it is not complaining at all) before it reaches the wilderness point of no return, which it is always threatening to do, and we have done a lot of work on the Tinker's dahlia bed. This has included lifting all his dahlias to see which might have survived the winter (we don't usually have to worry) and I am now bringing them on in pots in the greenhouse along with some new ones, while we dig the bed and 'beef up the soil' a bit, as my Dad would have said. The Pleasing is getting most of the graft done, the extra Pleasing will be the first green shoot that I see in the pots.
Meanwhile I have potted up a dozen deep red and scarlet geraniums for windowsills...
Everything has a lot of catching up to do that's for sure but I am most pleased about the Honesty patch in front of the summer house.
I have been trying to persuade it to naturalise ever since we saw swathes of it at Hemingford Gray (Green Knowe) but to no avail. I mean how hard can it be, the thing seeds prolifically and I scatter them and nothing happens where I want it to. I hadn't even tried with this patch, it just made up its own mind and got on with it...
That's enough from me, your turn, and while you’re there how about adding three of your own Top 100 Best Reads in comments too.
An upcoming theme for our Endsleigh Salon book group is ‘Never Judge a Book By its Cover’. My plan is to re-read a certain book from last year that had a stunning cover but for me didn’t live up to the hype or the expectations (I know it did the opposite for many of you). The book was bought for me as a special gift and it was one I was committed to enjoying on that basis alone...maybe I try even harder when a book is given to me in that way. To no avail, I just couldn’t make it work past the things that annoyed me intensely but I will try again, different year, different mood etc.
It was Angela Harding’s distinctive and eye-catching cover that first drew me towards The Salt Path by Raynor Winn, even prompting me to create a homage piece for my Journal Quilts once I had read it, because this is a book that has left a deep and lasting impression.
Devastated by the loss of their savings and their home in a failed business investment with a friend, and with the simultaneous diagnosis of a degenerative neurological condition for Moth, the couple decided to throw any remaining caution to the wind, the South-Westerlies in fact, and walk the South West Coast Path.
'I was under the stairs when I decided to walk. In that moment, I hadn't carefully considered walking 630 miles with a rucksack on my back, I hadn't thought about how I could afford to do it, or that I'd be wild camping for nearly one hundred nights, or what I'd do afterwards. I hadn't told my partner of thirty-two years that he'd be coming with me.
Only minutes earlier hiding under the stairs had seemed a good option. The men in black began hammering on the door at 9am., but we weren't ready. We weren't ready to let go...the bailiffs moved to the back of the house.'
I’d seen the book cover hither and yon around the Internet and then saw Raynor and her husband Moth interviewed on the local news and before you could blink I had ordered and the book arrived. I started reading it at the breakfast table and didn’t lift my head until supper about two days later. I may have slept in between but it was a fitful sleep as I thought of the Winns camped on cliff tops, nursing the day’s fatigue, shivering in their lightweight sleeping bags from Tesco’s having watched the world around them eating pasties while they made do with noodles.
From its punishing beginnings the walk becomes redemptive and life-enhancing. Untrained and unfit the couple slog up and down the coast path with little clue about the potential difficulties. Maybe sometimes this is the best way to do it and sort it all out as you go along.
Sometimes maybe not...
As I read it all came back to me. Entirely different circumstances but also involving a tent and being woefully unprepared, I'm almost ashamed to repeat it...
Bookhound and I had set off to walk the Two Moors Way in August 1979. We were young, fit, keen and naive. It had been a gloriously dry summer, what could be better. We kitted ourselves out with what we thought were the right things plus the dog and off we went. The GP I worked with had warned me that the biggest danger would be adders biting the dog, so much so that he sent me off with Adrenalin and a syringe just in case (not sure what would have happened if we had got bitten). We walked seventeen miles from home onto the moor on that first day ( in new boots and carrying a bungalow each) when it started to rain...a lot...and a lot more. I’m not sure we’d even looked at the weather forecast, or was it still a bit amateurish back then. Anyway it turned into the weekend of the Fastnet disaster, a thunder and lightning storm like no other. Don’t ask me how we managed to pitch the tent ( heavy old things back in the day) or survive the storm through that night, the tent surrounded by huge moorland cattle who clearly would have liked to get in there with us.
All I could think of were the metal tent poles inviting the lightning, and to be honest I think we were lucky to get off the moor in one piece the next day. No mobile phones, the map disintegrated to pulp so we just followed a river. We were drenched with not a single dry piece of anything between us and the dog’s collar went rusty. We retreated back to home on the bus, water running in rivulets down the gangway from us and our rucksacks, licking our wounds, cursing our stupidity and Bookhound immediately joined the Dartmoor Rescue Group. There are no photos because the Instamatic was an early casualty of the rain. But at the time we had options, we could choose to go home. Raynor and Moth had no such option other than to carry in walking. But there was still much I understood about their vulnerability to the elements, the vagaries and uncertainties of where they might sleep or what they might eat.
As well as its focus on loss and the reinvention that a journey makes possible, The Salt Path is an education in what we really need from life, the meaning of home and especially homelessness and its impact on ‘ordinary’ people who find themselves in this predicament. The prejudice and misplaced judgements waiting out there become a stark reality for the couple, But above all I was impressed with the the book’s lack of bitterness. If a friend had shafted me out of my home, my savings and my livelihood I think I might have spent an inordinate amount of time plotting their demise with recourse to a virtual doll and needles if necessary ...indeed perhaps Raynor and Moth have done so (I’d like to think it wasn’t just me) but to their credit not an ounce of this seeps through into the book. This is a journey into the couple’s future, about acceptance with the chance to shed the past and walk into new beginnings, and if that sounds a bit fanciful I don’t mean it to, but all the ‘de’ words... desolation, despondency, depression, despair, are slowly transformed into all the ‘re’ words...renewal, reaffirmation, redemption.
Whilst that future may be uncertain the couple head into it with hope and optimism, The Salt Path a testament to their own resilience and a book that will give strength to anyone who feels their life is under the cosh for whatever reason. That aside I’m never taking a bath or shower for granted ever again and, like Raynor, I too find that the minute you nip behind a bush for a comfort break every dog walker in Christendom will appear over the horizon.
Welded to the book from start to finish, I trod every step of the way with Raynor and Moth and wish them much success and happiness for the future... this book has to be a shoo-in for The Wainwright Prize short list for starters, and if you have read or plan to read The Salt Path please do share your thoughts in comments.
At my request Bloomsbury very kindly sent proof copies of A Black Fox Running to three people who I thought would enjoy the book. My thanks to Fran and Carol for leaving comments on yesterday's blog post, I've promised them both some Black Fox walking on Dartmoor when they visit soon and herewith a longer piece from third reader, Dartmoor photographer Chris Chapman.
Chris is a true man of the Moor who knows and loves it like no other, so my thanks to him for taking the time to read the book and share his thoughts and memories. Please be aware that the first paragraph does contain some details about the hunt..
When I was an art student I lived in a caravan on a farm in South Wales. One Saturday morning Llewelyn, the farmer’s son, knocked on my door and asked if I fancied going hunting. ‘Bring your camera’. It was an extraordinary day. We watched two foxes give the hunt a good run for its money, one leading them on a merry dance round and round the woods on a knoll near Penhow Castle. Towards the end of the day Llewelyn and I saw this particular fox change course, slip down the hill and cross a lane into the garden of a small cottage. We hollered at the huntsman and pointed excitingly to the spot. He brought the hounds into the garden but they could find no fox and he was just about to call it off when we both spotted a steam of breath coming from a small tree smothered in ivy. We both screamed. As the hounds approached the fox leapt from the tree and made his escape across a field and into a bramble covered ditch. But there was nowhere to hide. As the sun set we walked back to the farm in almost total silence. Later we drank beer and both wished we had kept quiet.
It was only after reading Brian Carter’s book that the above story came flooding back and I now know why. Llewelyn and I had both felt the fox deserved to get away. Carter’s main character, Wulfgar, is clever too, and I found myself for the first time being drawn into the mind-set of the fox. Carter isn’t sentimental. His language is rich in sound and smell and he carries you over the country as if you were on four paws. Here is Wulfgar confidently giving the hunt a run down the banks of a Dartmoor brook: ‘the thrushes hit the trees like bullets. The noise of the wind and water blended in a dull roar, and to the east and west the clouds fumbled the hilltops. Distances were dark under rain. Wulfgar ghosted through the scrub birch and sedges, and plashed along the Rookery path. The rain hissed through branches that writhe and flailed. He was still running flat out, carrying his fur close to his body, wet and spiky’.
Although he lived on the South Devon coast, Brian Carter was passionate about Dartmoor. The reader soon realises that the 10 year old blonde haired boy, who collects eggs on the high moor and one day spots Wulfgar and his Vixen Teg with her three cubs, is he. Carter imbues every chapter with detail seen through a naturalist’s eye. Even a country dweller born and bred will learn something new (I had to look up the word ‘Cockchafer’, despite having them crash landing into the bedroom on warm spring nights!).
There is a danger when one weaves a story about animals laden with human traits of becoming mawkish but this book succeeds in that the story is earthy and plausible, especially when we meet the humans. The grubby cider drinking Scoble, mentally maimed forever after his time in the trenches, together with his deranged lurcher Jacko, see ‘Blackie’ as the arch enemy. Both are determined to bring Wulfgar to his end but both are bewildered by the fox’s human like cunning. I have known people like Scoble and he is well portrayed by Carter, as is the author’s detailed understanding of the world of hunting and farming.
A Black Fox Running will delight all lovers of Dartmoor and beyond. Here is nature in the raw, woven into a tale that Carter himself describes as a Saga. Life and death are met head on, and the book reminded me of what the late Exmoor artist and writer Hope Bourne once said to me when she was telling me why she loved her moors and the hunting:
‘It’s no good being sentimental about nature, because believe you me, nature won’t be sentimental about you………….’
He appears after dark, reads the wind with his nose, mirrors the moon in his eys, laps the dew, feels the grass sing in his blood. Ebb and flow of stars, waves of trees breaking on the sky -these are the nightworld things.
And I shall go, foxwise, in the darkness that is scent and touch and wind and torment. on those blowy nights of September, all gales and roaring moonlight...
Brian Carter (1937-2015) Extract from 'Foxwise in the Darkness' (Where the Dream Begins 1979)
Melissa Harrison, in her foreword to the republished edition of the late Brian Carter's story of Wulfgar, the 'dark-furred fox of Dartmoor and Scoble the trapper', made me realise just how very, very fortunate we are to live here...
Here's Melissa...
'A Black Fox Running is not a children's book, but I first encountered it as a child. I must have been seven or eight when my mother first read it to me, the Devon landscape it so vividly described thrillingly familiar to me as the beloved country of our summer holidays...'
Though I was born in Devon and lived here until I was four, and though every holiday we had was spent either at my grandparents' cottage at Coleford near Crediton, or further down into Cornwall with family friends at Tintagel (long before the world discovered it), it would be twenty years or so before I came back. I brought a husband with me for good measure and of course our children were all born and raised here... and mostly out on Dartmoor. When you have such a wonderful go-to place to run the steam out of little legs and send them to bed exhausted, you don't waste the opportunities, and now, each time our wanderers return, Dartmoor is the place of choice they head to first. I would like to think we have filled their imaginations with wonderful (if frequently cold and wet..nothing ever stopped us) happy memories of Dartmoor too.
Set in the 1940s, A Black Fox Running, in the time-honoured tradition of Tarka the Otter, Watership Down and War Horse gives voice to the animal kingdom, and there might be your first concern, because it was certainly mine. How do you successfully invest such a magnificent creature with human voice and feelings,and also a spiritual life...this the chap Bookhound and I met out at Bel Tor last year..
'On the far side of the brook stood the big dark fox...Wulfgar did not flinch...The fox seemed to grow larger and brighter like the image on a negative...'
Giving a genuine literary voice to animals is a tricky business fraught with danger and great huge sinkholes of disaster if an author doesn't get it quite right, but we are talking about Brian Carter here. He lived and breathed Dartmoor and gave its wild beauty expression in his artistic output, knowing the moor and its wildlife intimately, walking great swathes of it and preferably alone. Brian Carter understood 'wilderness', here writing in another excellent book Dartmoor - The Threatened Wilderness...
' Going alone up the East Dart to Cranmere I am confronted by the familiar invested with a splendour springing directly from the whole wilderness experience....many find bleakness and solitude intolerable; but what can seem a hostile environment to the casual visitor may be an area of immense interest to those who love it for what it is...
Brian argues in favour of solitude, a feeling I understood walking out to the head of the East Dart and Cranmere last year...
'He walked up the East Dart to the great marshes beyond Sandy Hole Pass...by noon he was jumping the black ditches of Cranmere Pool ...' Black Fox Running Country - East Dart Head, Dartmoor (Aug 2017)
'What can we give of ourselves to the place? We cannot increase the beauty of the high moor. Caring deeply for a landscape does not sweeten the larksong or make the grass radiant. But we can tarnish that beauty or destroy it out of stupidity, avarice or carelessness. By remaining faithful to Nature we remain faithful to our better selves...'
The more I read his writing the more I realise that Brian Carter was one of the original footprints for the current resurgence in nature writing, and a heightened awareness of the fragility of it all, that we are benefiting from today.
And it's so clear, from reading A Black Fox Running, that all this feeds into the book. Brian Carter knows every inch of the moor he describes, he feels it as if a fox and he understands it as if he is any one of the animals he brings to life. You sense that he has been watching and taking it all in for the lifetime that he was given.
'Hay Tor was bursting out of the cloud. Dartmoor was the colour of a hen kestrel....the wind keening through the heather sounded like a stricken shrew...' Black Fox Running country - Smallacombe Rocks & Holwell Tor (Jan 2018)
Bookhound and I first discovered Brian Carter in the 1970s, soon after we had moved to Plymouth and found Dartmoor on our doorstep. His book Where the Dream Begins became a substitute for owning one of his original pictures which were way out of our price league though I think we went back to the exhibition several times. In his foreword to the book, the much missed Robert Hardy wrote...
'An awareness of what we have been busy destroying for generations, of what we stand in the most imminent danger of losing from the world for ever, and therefore of wilfully and wickedly denying to the generations that come after us, is dawning very slowly on the general consciousness...'
Remember this was 1979...
'Tap anyone's shoulder and ask, and almost all will admit to some sort of regret for a pace, and a space, and a simplicity of life that we have almost civilized out of sight and sound...'
1979... the internet still twenty or so years away...
'...the only hope lies with those who care enough to tell us what we are missing; the best of that hope with artists, writers and poets. Brian Carter is all three...'
And so Brian Carter a trusted pair of hands for the task of bringing Wulfgar, Stargrief, Ashmere, Thorngold, Brackenpad, Briarspur and all the other foxes to life.
And Stormbully and Fallbright, the buzzards...
And Thorgil the badger, Earthborn the hedgehog, Trollgar the barn owl, the otter Romany, Scrag the heron..
As you can see the names are a work of art in themselves but the prose is exquisite too. A book crammed with Carter's poetic vision of Dartmoor, so many moments that I had to note down...
'When the moon rose the farmland became suddenly radiant. The silence had a silver gleam. 'No matter what happens the stars won't stop shining,' Stargrief said...'
Pitched against the bitter and vengeful hatred of Scoble the trapper there are going to be some tragic moments to cope with here, and fair warning that there was a particular moment when I could have howled with sadness. But this is nature red in tooth and claw and Brian Carter doesn't shy away from the realities. Scoble, a veteran of the trenches of the Somme, has his own tragic reasons for a hatred of foxes and is contrasted powerfully with another veteran of a later war who has emerged with a very different perspective, all of which makes for some fascinating contrasts on the impact of war on the individual. The interesting thing as a reader was that I found myself firmly in Team Fox and I won't say another word for fear of spoilers.
Meanwhile my Walking Friend and I have been doing some Black Fox Walking, recently from Jay's Grave out to Hound and Holwell Tors...
'From the highest granite outcrop he looked up at Black Hill...' Black Fox Running country - Black Hill from Hound Tor (Jan 2018 )
' Other foxes came to mind as they walked up the slope of dead bracken to Holwell Tor. Light was ebbing from the sky and the wind had dropped to a gentle breeze...' Black Fox Running country - Holwell Tor and Hay Tor (Jan 2018)
I think you can probably tell that A Black Fox Running is a book that I loved and one that has seeped into my consciousness in the best possible way, so I hope, for those who don't know Dartmoor, the pictures have shared some of that visual imagery which made the book so powerful for me.
One of the joys of the book are the wonderful names that Brian Carter gives his animals so, before you scroll down for gifts, I'll leave you with these three, the fox cubs that we watched playing in Mowhay Meadow to the front of our house one bright autumn morning. We think this their last rough and tumble together before the more pressing business of being a grown-up.
Who knows, maybe these are reincarnations of Teg and Wulfgar's cubs, Oakwhelp, Nightfrond, Dusksilver or Brookcelt...
Hello Chums, Magnus here and as you can see I've been very busy supervising work in the greenhouse...
I'm a bit confused about all this sewing...
and then there's this other sowing, but never mind.
I'm a bit averse to foxes I have to say, and I'm grateful to the humans who don't put a collar with a bell on me. This means I can make a hasty and silent exit when old Wulfgar comes a-sniffing around the garden. But let not my aversion get in the way of offering you the chance to win one of five copies of A Black Fox Running by Brian Carter, published by Bloomsbury and many thanks to them for this.
Leave a comment on this post (and if you are reading via email you will need to follow this link to this blog post to do that) and we'll choose the winners dreckly.
My penchant for writing down the names of the inns and pubs of In Pursuit of Spring (more than seventy by the end of the book) is only matched by Edward Thomas's obsession with noting the names and epitaphs in churchyards, and it is something that has really made me pay attention.
I wandered across to the village church (in Sydenham Damerel, the neighbouring parish to ours but nearer to home) a few days ago with a notebook in hand. We can see the church from here and on a high summer's day it looks quintessentially Devon ...
I'm envious because this parish has an original copy of its tithe map framed and on display in the church and thankfully it can't have been in there when the church suffered the devastating fire in 1957. The tower and the bells survived but only one chancel was rebuilt.
I walk over to St Mary's several times a week, and I frequently amble between the graves, reading the headstones and wondering, but I have never taken notes before. Well, after a very engrossing hour with my notebook I realised that if ever I have a novel in me (very unlikely) there was surely a story to be written here, though it might be a bit miserable..
I could include James and Elizabeth Giddy Jasper whose son Robert died on April 2 1858 aged three months followed by another son Richard aged 2 3/4 in 1859. I usually feel sad when I see these gravestones, but I spent some time imagining their lives before the sadness...much better.
In fact perhaps there was an epidemic of something in 1859 because Richard and Eliza Freeman lost Mary Ann that year too, born in April, died in July. " Cease to grieve for children taken early from a life of pain. Ripest fruit is quickly shaken, Death to them must needs be gain."
And what on earth happened in the Serpell household...
Eliza wife of Samuel died on January 25 1879 aged thirty years along with their son Samuel aged six days
" Not dead but sleepeth."
But maybe there was some happiness in the preceding months, just a bit in the midst of the hardships.
And I'm thinking all these people probably knew each other, were friends and neighbours with the church at its centre, because unlike ours it is a tiny parish, a very knowable community and one that, unlike ours, didn't benefit from the benevolence of the Duke of Bedford. The Duke slowly bought up vast tracts of land in Milton Abbot and provided copious employment; I always envisage the Sydenham Damerel-ites having to fight for their livelihood in comparison. In fact I imagine a bit of rivalry, maybe a touch of envy because if you worked for the Duke you at least had a modicum of security.
I had been dipping into The South Country by Edward Thomas when I came across this...
'The names of the local families - gentle and simple - what histories are in them, in the curt parish registers, in tombstones, in the names of fields and houses and woods.'
And with it comes the encouragement to make notes and explore...
'Better a thousand errors as long as they are human than a thousand truths lying like broken snail-shells round the anvil of a thrush.'
I'm not a historian, I'd be dangerous if I was, so I suspect I'm going the long way around the hedges to discover what I am about the local field names along with the people who lived here in the mid-nineteenth century. Hours spent online in the library where I have free access to Ancestry and cheap printing, so the Textithe project has my full attention now I have a stitching method that feels right.
I've finished the piece about the fields surrounding us here and it is now hanging on the kitchen wall, but one of the things I noticed on the 1842 tithe map were a number of farms around us that have long since vanished, swallowed up by their neighbours, no longer in existence, their names unknown by all but a few in 2018. It seemed a natural progression to quilt some of them back into life so I am currently busy resurrecting Newton Farm on the banks of the Tamar (owned by the Duke of Bedford), with its four long-gone dwellings and home to twenty three people on the 1841 census yet no trace of the farm by 1871.
I've been to visit our neighbours who now farm the land and we spent a fascinating hour poring over old maps and making then-and-now comparisons. They have also very kindly given me permission to hop over the gate and walk the fields whenever I want to. My Tex-tithe version of Newton is now tacked and ready for quilting and I am really looking forward to settling down with it and a good audio book (suggestions welcome).
Which book would I like to quilt into this...
What I'd give to find an old photo album, but who could afford that back in the day, so who can know what happened to farm labourer John Geake, his wife Elizabeth and their children John, Jane and William who lived at Newton in 1841...
Well in fact we do know because by 1851 our house has been built (about two miles across the fields) and they are living here with William and two more children, Alice and Ann.
Isn't that an amazing thought.
I hope the children played in the garden, and with thanks to Edward Thomas, still providing the inspiration a hundred years on.
Whilst taking nothing for granted, I would like to think the summer Wednesday Walking season is almost upon us. The portents are looking favourable.
My Walking Friend and I were determined to keep our boots a-roving through the winter if we possibly could, but we have been meteorologically thwarted. We have managed a few forays but really neither of us fancied the inconvenience of a fractured neck of femur, so we have done a great deal of sewing and chatting at her kitchen table, while her border collie snoozes away next to the Rayburn, glad of the reprieve. It hasn't stopped us heading up to Fox Tor Cafe for soup though...Parsnip & Parmesan still our most coveted.
We are not quite out of the snow zone though because we can both recall the year our men were called out with the Dartmoor Rescue Group to search for someone lost in deep snow at the end of April (1981) and there was the year Ten Tors was abandoned because of snow in May. But we are almost there and this week felt like a turning point as we limbered up with a favourite walk up and over the Staple Tors ( Little, Middle and Great) and onto Roos Tor and the cairns beyond.
The moor has been properly scoured and bleached by ice for the first winter in a while so the grass is looking an attractive shade of blonde right now and the clouds were looking very jolly too.
You might be able to see the 'rock basin' marked on the map at Roos Tor. As is always the way with these things I only find it when I am not looking for it. so here it is last September...
It was such a clear day that we could see across to Plymouth & the Tamar Bridge...
Last time we went to the Cairns (little more than a small circle of rocks) we were plagued by a mini-swarm of very cross black bees (in the middle of nowhere) this time nothing to report, just space, and skylarks ascending all around us and the sort of complete peace and path leading onwards that we relish.
And the best news of all...
It was Parsnip and Parmesan soup when we finally trudged into Fox Tor Cafe.
I've had a very big book Pleasing this week, in fact several, so here's one of them and it followed on from an email from author and historian Rachel Trethewey.
Rachel wrote the definitive book, Mistress of the Arts, about Georgiana Duchess of Bedford and our local environs here around Endsleigh, now a hotel but once the Duke and Duchess's holiday 'cottage', and we were lucky enough to hear Rachel talking about the book at Endsleigh too, here a few extracts from a 2010 blog post...
'...Mistress of the Arts the reason we all know locally that years ago it took someone from the village three days to plump up all the feather mattresses when the Bedfords were planning a local sojourn in their holiday cottage. Fascinating then to hear the background to the writing of the book, the countless phone calls around the museums to check the existence of letters from Georgina which unearthed some really unexpected gems, including the love poetry of one ardent admirer of the Duchess (one of many it seems). Lord Holland fired with the sort of imagination you'd want an admirer to possess when he manages to capitalise on the shortage of words to rhyme with Duchess, and so settles frequently on 'crutches'. The research proved an invaluable insight into Regency life with marriage for dynastic reasons, for life and for the heir and the spare, but infidelity rife and accepted practice.
In the end, after fruitless trips to Ireland and the archives of the Abercorn family, into which Georgina's daughter had married, it was the Devon Records Office that produced the research jewels for Rachel Trethewey, an archive of every bill and receipt for monies paid out by the Bedfords in the construction of Endsleigh.
In total £120,000, the equivalent of £4 million today. Within those records fascinating details... Georgina joined the Tavistock Subscription Library Her favourite scent was Esprit de Rose She regularly bathed in asses milk But all was not lost on the research trip to Baron's Court in Ireland, the seat of the Abercorn family. Here were revealed the sketches by Edwin Landseer, almost certainly Georgina's lover (yes, another one) and whilst poetry may not have been Edwin's bag, art was and the sketches revealed an intimate, tender and sensuous evocation of their love, much like a photo album. The drawings seemed as fresh as the day they had been drawn and in the words of Rachel Trethewy, the 'distance between the past and the present evaporated'. Georgina, exiled from Endsleigh by the family after the death of the 6th Duke, died in Nice in 1853, sadly a trip to Nice could not locate her grave.
Rachel and I met on several occasions thereafter and had also done an event together at Dartington, with Justin Picardie, on Justine's book Daphne (Daphne du Maurier),so it was good to hear from Rachel last week with news of her latest book and the offer of a copy. As both a historian and a journalist Rachel's research is always diligent and thorough, and will translate into a highly readable account so I was on tenterhooks waiting to see this one.
Pearls Before Poppies - The Story of the Red Cross Pearls, this information from the publisher's website...
In February 1918, when the First World War was still being bitterly fought, prominent society member Lady Northcliffe conceived an idea to help raise funds for the British Red Cross. Using her husband’s newspapers, The Times and the Daily Mail, she ran a campaign to collect enough pearls to create a necklace, intending to raffle the piece to raise money. The campaign captured the public’s imagination. Over the next nine months nearly 4,000 pearls poured in from around the world. Pearls were donated in tribute to lost brothers, husbands and sons, and groups of women came together to contribute one pearl on behalf of their communities. Those donated ranged from priceless heirlooms –one had survived the sinking of the Titanic – to imperfect yet treasured trinkets. Working with Christie’s and the International Fundraising Committee of the British Red Cross, author Rachel Trethewey expertly weaves the touching story of a generation of women who gave what they had to aid the war effort and commemorate their losses.
Those of you who live in the South West may also have seen Rachel talking about the book on BBC Spotlight.
Any book published by The History Press is a pleasure to read and to hold because their production values are high, so I have made a start and am deeply engrossed in something I knew nothing about. Indeed Rachel apparently knew very little either until she saw the World War One commemorative exhibition at Port Eliot in 2014. The exhibition featured information about the pearl, donated by Emily, Countess of St Germans in 1918, which had once belonged to the Empress Josephine. As I read I am finding so many connections to other names which have cropped up on here down the years too, not least Ettie Desborough and her son Julian Grenfell.
Much more about Pearls Before Poppies to come, but I thought I'd tip you the wink for those who like to get their library reservations in before word travels too far and the list is a mile long.
It is the anniversary of the death of Edward Thomas today so there will be a couple of posts dedicated to him this week.
'Winter may rise up through mould alive with violets and primroses and daffodils, but when cowslips and bluebells have grown over his grave he cannot rise again: he is dead and rotten and from his ashes the blossoms are springing....I had found Winter's grave; I had found Spring and I was confident that I could ride home again and find Spring all along the road.'
I'm not sure what Edward Thomas might have made of the month of March 2018. It would all have been a terrible trial on a bicycle that's for sure. Devon has had double the usual rainfall and been the wettest county in the UK, we can vouch for that.
But it rained in March 2013 too, whilst Edward Thomas was on his cycling journey In Pursuit of Spring, so what did he wear...
I have a feeling it was a suit, tie and a mackintosh but he has something to say about the whole waterproofing situation...
'I have also discovered that sellers of waterproofs are among the worst of liars, and that they communicate their vice with their goods. The one certain fact is that nobody makes a garment or suit which will keep a man dry and comfortable if he is walking in heavy and beating rain...'
What would Edward have made of lycra and breathable Gore-tex...
'At first thought it is humiliating to realise we have spent many centuries in this climate and never produced anything to keep us dry and comfortable in rain.'
I seem to remember we were still getting wet in the 1970s, Gore-tex had only just been invented and most of us were still making do with gaberdine and and ridiculously luminous cagoules. Mine was bright yellow, you saw me coming from a long way off.
'We must solve the question by complaint and experiment or by learning to get wet - an increasingly hard lesson for a generation that multiplies conveniences and inconveniences rather faster than it does an honest love of sun, wind and rain, separately and all together.'
I tell you, Edward rightly has a real bee in his bonnet about all this, and when you think he still had the trenches to come.
In Pursuit of Spring and Edward Thomas and I reached the last stage of our journey on March 31st having set off on March 21st (I got a bit of a head start on 15th)
Edward and his bicycle actually arrived in the Quantocks of Somerset on March 28 1913, but I was lagging behind a bit (puffing up those hills behind him). It all seemed like double-quick time to me and made me think what a joy the arrival and ready availability of a bicycle must have been in 1913. Few cars passed us on the road and I suppose the only other means of transport to cover this route would have been by horse or on foot. We did cross a few railway lines but most of the journey has been off the beaten track.
I have found so much to love about this book, especially the descriptions of landscape and place. enough to make me think that plenty of people have surely followed in Edward's cycle trail and repeated this journey (if there isn't a book on it there really should be) though I suspect they might have paid more than four shillings a night for board and lodging.
Take the city of Wells for example. Wells is one of my favourite Cathedral cities and within a day's journey of us here. If we go to Bath we often go via Wells where I have a fondness for pacing out Mary Rand's Tokyo Olympic Gold medal-winning jump inset in brass in the pavement near the Cathedral.
As he approaches Wells, Edward Thomas sets the scene...
'At a turning overshadowed by trees, at Dulcote, a path travels straight through green meadows to Wells, and to the three towers of the Cathedral at the foot of a horizontal terrace-like spur of oak, pine and beech, that juts out from the main line of Mendip leftwards or southwards.'
I'd like to think those meadows haven't been consumed by a housing estate or a motorway now, but if they have at least there is a record of the way it was. (worse things may have happened, I've just done a search and seen the words 'Dulcote Rubbish Tip')
Moving swiftly on to Wells itself...
'Rooks inhabited the elm tops and swans the water. Rooks are essential to a cathedral anywhere, but Wells is perfected by swans. On the warm palace roof behind the wall - a roof smouldering mellow in the sun - pigeons lay still ecclesiastically...'
And Edward talks about the houses that you see in close proximity to any Cathedral, 'discreet, decent, quiet houses.' I had never thought of that before but Exeter has them too, in Cathedral Close. In fact, doesn't the fictional (but no less real for that) Simon Serraillier live in just such close and peaceful circumstances to the Cathedral in Susan Hill's Lafferton.
More pursuing of Spring to come because this has been exactly the right read at the right time for me this year, lots of inspiration. And meanwhile, in pursuit of more Edward Thomas reading in recent weeks I have found a couple of little gems.
Here is the first...
Edward Thomas A Mirror of England by Eliane Wilson with calligraphy and illustrations by Frederick Marns. Published in 1985, I took a chance on this at 1p plus postage from You Know Where.
A pristine hardback copy appeared from a prolific marketplace seller whose usual assessment of a second-hand book's condition I always find a little optimistic, so this was a Pleasing. The book has an informative introduction that added more to my knowledge rather than repeating the usual biographical information and the selection of poems is beautiful. Somehow made even more so by the exquisite calligraphy.
Which means the winner is AnnP who guessed 294. A book in the post to Ann dreckly.
That was fun, thank you for having a go everyone, and thank you to Rebecca for the suggestion that I take some eggs along to the Endsleigh Salon Book Group this week. It's a plan.
Some fun for Low Sunday, apparently named because events are less exciting than those of the Sunday before in the Church's Easter calendar (but please correct me if I'm wrong). One local church, where I sang in the choir many years ago, always used Evensong on Low Sunday to celebrate a local men's walking group called the Gilders & Colts and it was one of my favourite services. The singing would raise the roof and the spirits no end.
Anyway, last Saturday, driving across to Cowslip Workshops, my driving glasses broke. The arm fell off, the screw was lost in the detritus of the foot well of the car and I stopped off in Launceston en route to get them repaired.
This would involve taking them into the first optician I could find.
'I'm really sorry, this is a bit of a cheek, but could you mend my glasses for me?' I asked the young woman at the counter. ' I didn't buy them here though...'
'Oh that doesn't matter,' she said,' of course I'll mend them for you, won't be a tick.' And she disappeared off round the back.
Perched on the counter was a large jar full of mini-Easter eggs and a sign.
'Guess the number of eggs and win the jar - 50p a go.'
The shop was empty and quiet. I had a quick glimpse at the clipboard and all the previous entries...1452... 980...457... 161. So I stood there and did a bit of mental arithmetic based on no formula whatsoever to while away the time.
Presently the young woman reappeared with my glasses, repaired and cleaned.
'How much do I owe you?' I asked.
'Oh no charge, you're very welcome...but maybe you'd like to enter the Guess How Many Eggs competition.'
'Oh yes, of course I will...but I don't really want to win them because we'll eat them all,' and we laughed.
I mean really, it's Type 1 Diabetes and a trip to the dentist in a jar isn't it.
I always find these things really hard to judge, except obviously not on this occasion because a week later I got a phone call and am now the proud owner of a jar of chocolate eggs (as yet unopened).
Now fear not, I have no plans to post the eggs off to anyone, but add your guesstimate in comments (just the one) and I will post a book to the person whose guess is exact or nearest to mine... and if hundreds of you guess correctly Magnus will do one of his famous prize draws to choose a winner.
A few weeks ago, at the end of another memorable series of Call the Midwife on BBC 1, I had a bit of a pang. And whilst I dare say plenty of people switch the TV off the minute they hear the theme music followed by the dulcet tones of the Vanessa Redgrave voice-over, Bookhound and I are settling down to watch in that Never Miss An Episode way that we do with a series that we really enjoy. We’ve watched every episode of every series, and all the Christmas specials.
The babies slither out week after week and cords will be cut, there will be traumas in the clinic, Doctor Turner will diagnose something else obscure ( for the era) and I'll try to beat him to it , Sister Monica Joan will wander off on another amusing frolic of her own, Nurse Crane (we adore Phyllis) will be a right softie underneath her no-nonsense exterior.
Meanwhile caretaker and handyman Fred will sort yet another plumbing disaster and we love it all.
I'm always intrigued by the old midwifery ways...remember Chummy delivering the breech baby, letting it dangle by its head for a while, and I'm hard-pushed (sorry) not to think I see real joy on everyone's faces when a baby is born.
There have been weddings and funerals and personal crises galore (come back soon Cynthia) and real life weddings and births; the vicar (Jack Ashton) and Trixie (Helen George) have had a beautiful baby of their own, and somehow I'm in danger of conflating the original book, with the fiction of the series, with the reality of the now.
It is sixteen years since I bought and read Jennifer Worth’s book in its very first edition published by Merton Books. My copy quickly did the rounds of the health visiting team at the time, because two of my colleagues had worked as midwives with those very same nuns in the East End of London. We had some fascinating diversions at our team meetings for a while as they shared their memories. So it has been a fine refresher to take the book off the shelf and look at it again, not least to be reminded of Jennifer Worth's preface...
'In January 1998 the Midwives Journal published an article by Terri Coates entitled Impressions of the Midwife in Literature. After careful research Terri was forced to the conclusion that midwives are virtually non-existent in literature.
Why, in heaven's name? Why in heaven's name? Fictional doctors strut across the pages of book in droves, scattering pearls of wisdom as they pass. Nurses, good and bad, are by no means absent. But midwives? Whoever heard of a midwife as a literary heroine?
Yet midwifery contains within itself the very stuff of drama and melodrama every child is conceived either in love or lust, is born in pain and suffering followed by joy and elation or tragedy and anguish. A midwife attends every birth; she is in the thick of it, she sees it all. Why, then, does she remain a shadowy figure hiding behind the delivery room door. Terri Coates ended her article with the words : " Maybe there is a midwife somewhere who can do for midwifery watch James Herriot did for veterinary practice."
But how real it all seems now as I browse the pages and read about Sister Julienne, (small and plump in the book in contrast to Jenny Agutter's screen portrayal) . And remember awkward but adorable Chummy (Miranda Hart.)
Here is Chummy, desperate to be a missionary, being kitted out with a bike...
'Cynthia, Trixie and I went with her to the bicycle shed and selected the largest - a huge old Raleigh of about 1910 vintage, made of solid iron, with a scooped out front and high handlebars. The solid tyres were about three inches thick, and there were no gears. The whole contraption weighed half a ton, and for this reason no-one rode it. Trixie oiled the chain and we were ready for the off.'
Now Chummy must learn to ride it...
'Several times she fell heavily to the ground. She hit her head on the kerb and said " Not to worry - no brains to hurt." She cut her leg, and murmured : " Just a scratch." She fell heavily onto an arm and proclaimed : " I have another..."
I was convinced that Fiona’s legs seemed to go on forever. The bike was called Persephone as it came from the underworld.
Fiona on Persephone which was the only bike that would fit her long legs.
Reading the book again I find that everyone's there, except this time around I know them. Sister Monica Joan, Sister Evangelina, Conchita Warren expecting her twenty-fourth baby and there they are all fixed in my imagination thanks to the TV series. I would rarely go back to re-read a book once the TV has got its hands on it but I think Call The Midwife might be the exception. Jennifer Worth wrote a really excellent starter for ten which has become a hugely popular best-seller.
Now I'm sure plenty of you will either be of the 'Never watch it' category, or the 'Loath it' category, and for reasons various which is fine, it's not for everyone, but if anyone is in the 'Never miss an episode' of Call the Midwife category please do leave a comment... or is it just us.
FOOTNOTE : Please be aware that we have had a jolly good discussion in comments since this post was published and you may find SPOILERS. If you are only just starting to watch the most recent series maybe read on with your eyes closed.
One of my reading resolutions this year has been to try to keep up to speed on the literary 'now', though, given the number of books that are published each month, it's easy to slip way behind. So here I am dashing to catch up with Jon McGregor's Reservoir 13, winner of the Costa Novel Award and also longlisted for The Man Booker Prize 2017, and which came ecstatically recommended by my Reading Friend
My admiration for Jon McGregor's writing is enshrined on here with my thoughts on
and Jon even braved the armchair back in the day when I did a series of author interviews asking each the same questions , dovegreyreader asks... Follow the link if you want to know a bit more about A.S.Byatt et al too.
And so to Reservoir 13... oh my word...
Thirteen-year-old Bex / Rebecca / Becky Shaw has gone missing whilst on holiday in the midst of a rural community somewhere in the Midlands of England. In fact there seemed to be enough clues to locate the book in the Peak District of Derbyshire with the proliferation of reservoirs, traditional well-dressing etc. Despite extensive searches no trace of Becky is found at the time, her disappearance remains a mystery, but one that hangs over the community as the complexities and connections play out in the years to come. As the years pass the village becomes infamous for that connection and the people shoulder the burden, many unwittingly, some unwillingly.
Time passes and Jon McGregor slowly populates the community into something knowable. As a reader it's a bit like moving into a village and slowly getting to know who is related to whom, finding out more about them with time and slowly building up a picture.
But here's the thing.
Think book as experience and I found myself screaming with anxiety and the expectation of a discovery any minute, because Jon McGregor skilfully sets up tantalising chance after chance, after opportunity after opportunity, for a body to be found. The reservoir levels rise and fall, the wild animals dig and burrow, people walk out with inquisitive dogs and the narrative is peppered with feints and wrong-footing.
A.n.y. m.i.n.u.t.e. n.o.w....
I kept thinking, and about that I can say no more because the will it / won't it kept me on the edge of my seat...mostly.
Because suddenly there was a moment in the book when I realised I had been cleverly steered towards not being quite so anxious, not being quite so worried. Time was passing, the community was ageing and changing; decay and diminishing for some, new beginnings and increase for others; the youngsters were growing up and I was changing too. I found myself settling into the annual familiar round, as if I lived there. Recurring motifs bred a familiarity, a settling in... nature immutable pays no heed to the preoccupations of the humans, year on year the fox cubs emerged, the heron flew, the bluebells flowered. Meanwhile the humans carried on too, the annual village cricket match was lost or won, the allotments were dug, the pheasants were released, the school boiler broke down again and the caretaker assumed control, the annual well-dressing happened. There was a sameness, fortunes waxed and waned as they do in life; things were left unsaid and now, knowing the community as I did, I could fill in the gaps.
I was reminded of Raymond Williams, the literary and cultural critic, and his work on 'knowable communities' but only vaguely, its all now lost in the mists of the Open University degree. No, I didn't even want to go there, this was pure reading as experience and deep involvement.
And still the opportunities for discovery continue, but for me it slowly became less about the disappearance of Becky Shaw and more about the people left behind, and what lies beneath the cracks. Worryingly, after ten narrative years, I found myself almost feeling at home here.
I'm quite good on names, or I was when I was working with an average caseload of say 300 children under the age of five and their parents, so this will make you laugh, but I realised I'd need to keep track of this Reservoir 13 community somehow. I really enjoyed doing this as I read, creating a genogram of sorts but in the end it was almost as if I was compiling a Christmas card list...
Come December and I'm going to be disappointed not to be sending a card to Irene, or Su and Austin and the twins.
I turned the final page with a welter of mixed emotions whilst thinking ' Crikey, that was a fantastic read,'...you know, that moment when you sort of exhale and blow your cheeks out, and need time to recover.
So for me Reservoir 13 enters the 'Terrific Read' pantheon, rightfully taking its place on the top Best Books shelf with Jon McGregor's other work. And as I go to place it up there I suddenly realise that I may not have read his first novel If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things. How can this be...I can find no record of having read it, no sign of the book. Something is amiss and I must rectify that pronto.
Meanwhile I have since read The Reservoir Tapes, recently published and a sort of add-on-with bells to Reservoir 13 . I'll save that for another day, but 'breathtaking' will do for now.
If you have read Reservoir 13 I would love to know your thoughts (spoiler-free...you'll know what I mean) in comments.
"We are not surprised to have found so much to admire & inspire us here...we leave with an even longer list of books to find & read, material to cut up & sew ...we shall miss the quiet, such a luxury - as well as the sounds of streams & rivers, and can't wait to return..." K&L.Please contact us for details about booking Tinker's Cott via dovegreyretreats at gmail.com
Recent Comments