dovegreyreader scribbles

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.

 

 

Autumn on Dartmoor

Please do come for a virtual walk today because I am still walking out on Dartmoor each week with my Walking Friend if weather permits and I haven't taken you along for a while (though do usually put some pictures on Instagram <<<<) 

If weather permits means we can talk ourselves out of going out in the pouring rain and sit at the kitchen table and sew instead...

Can be persuaded to go if it's a bit drizzly but the seaweed promises an improvement...

And are mostly unstoppable if it's merely cold.

We had a splendid summer, even a bit of wild swimming in the River Dart, and some fabulous walks across open terrain that for once was unusually dry. Our big day-long challenge walk out to Cranmere Pool  saw the pair of us puffing up steep hills to reach the high moor before hopping over miles of bogs (these never dry up) to reach our destination. 

That little square stone box in the middle of the high moor that holds the visitors books and stamps.

Incidentally we both use these Osprey Women's 'Tempest 20' rucksacks and rate them as the most comfortable we have ever had. Even with a full load I can't really feel that I am wearing it. We both carry basic emergency equipment and first aid 'stuff', along with waterproofs, extra layers, maps and sundry items that we have deemed 'might come in useful if we were in a fix.' Plus a water bottle with a filter that can be filled from any water source. 

Last Wednesday dawned thick with mist here in the Tamar Valley but that is never a predictor of Dartmoor conditions so, as I drove towards my Walking Friend's cottage on the edge of the moor, what delight to see clear blue skies and wall-to-wall sunshine.

A few weeks ago we had planned a walk out to Grimspound along a small part of the Two Moors Way, starting up near the Warren House Inn, but we had been stymied by mist. On that day we decided if the sun was out we needed to enjoy it and so revised our plans and headed back down to the lower moor.

No such problem this time.

I'm not sure I have ever seen Dartmoor looking quite so lovely in autumn. It was heart-singing weather.

The temperature was 18 degrees, the sun actually burning faces as we strode out to Grimspound via Hookney Tor, putting the world to rights along the way, catching up on family news, debating the best place to buy some fairy lights and dissecting the Ikea experience amongst other issues of world importance. We have known each other for over forty years, are godmothers to each other's sons and just rub along happily in conversation or silence as we walk. I'm sure many of you will know and treasure these golden friendships too. We did a lot of stopping and staring because Dartmoor was breathtakingly beautiful and we never cease to be thankful that we live here and can walk it whenever we choose. 

The 'gurts', those gullies on the hillside clearly visible in the autumn shadows. These were the open-cast workings for the tin miners back in the days when Dartmoor yields were high. They would run water down the hillside and wash the ore down with it.

Grimspound is your original Bronze Age settlement, complete with the remains of twenty-four stone huts and this time we approached it from the top of Hookney Tor...

We always opt for the Chief's Hut and settle down with drink and snacks to take in the view. Looking across Headland Warren Farm and to that little white dot in the distance which is the Warren House Inn near where we have started from. 

It was here back in April that I took some video of the skylarks. Where do they go in winter we wondered and realised that neither of us really knew. Lower altitudes, coastal marshes and winter stubble, that's where. Hopefully they will be back in the spring.

Meanwhile, as if the gods hadn't been kind enough to us already it was Cauliflower Cheese soup on the menu at Fox Tor Cafe.

Next to Parsnip and Parmesan this is our absolute favourite.

Let joy be unconfined.

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

Housekeeping gremlins...

I could pretend that I'm an expert in all this but I won't... and Magnus hasn't been much help either.

My apologies if the scribbles have been a bit slow to load (or not loading at all) over the last few days. Typepad have been experiencing 'issues' perhaps associated with the fact that their blog platform is now https compatible. If I knew what I was talking about I could explain it all, but the most I know is that there's now a padlock on the search bar and the site does not now flag up as 'untrusted' on google searches (maybe).

Apologies too for the muddle that is Instagram over here <<<<<. 

The old widget wasn't compatible with the https 'thing' so I am in the process of removing that and finding and embedding new codes ( can you feel my pain) when I can remember where to do that. Please don't click on it until it shows images again. Some nice Dartmoor ones from today.

And while I am about it, apologies to those who follow the blog via Facebook. Facebook have changed their somethingorothers and the automatic link is now incompatible until Typepad make it friends again.

Oh and another thing, if you receive the blog via email I am reliably informed that the posts are heading straight for the junk mail rather than the inbox. I'm not even going to try and say anything funny about this but maybe, if you do happen to read this and think I've been quiet for a while (I never am without an explanation), check your junk files and see if you can find me in amongst the emails telling you about the enormous inheritance you are party to, or 'much worse.' Maybe add filters to make sure the emails arrive where you want them to.

Normal service will be resumed once I've had a lie down.

UPDATE: Instagram now sorted

 

 

 

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.

The Masterclass with Dame Hilary Mantel @BudleighLitFest

I'm still wittering on, to anyone who will listen, about the Masterclass given at Budleigh LitFest by Dame Hilary Mantel, which means Bookhound and Magnus are well-versed in all aspects of the two hours that I sat in on the four hour session. I'd only meant to stay for first ten minutes or so...

I overcame the temptation to just sit and be over-awed and took copious notes which are now like gold-dust to me, and as a few of you have asked for more details I will share a few nuggets. I won't flesh them out with too many of my own words so this may all seem a bit disjointed, but it wasn't it flowed so I hope you can get a sense of the wealth of information that was shared.

The premise of the class, in Hilary's words (I'm dropping the 'Dame' and the 'Mantel' which I hope is OK) was to address the fact that so many of the questions she is asked at the end of any talk are about process, and there is never enough time to answer them. This leads to a sense of short-changing people about this long and never-ending road to becoming a writer and wanted to offer more, explaining, with apologies to any experienced writers in the room, that she would treat everyone as a beginner because 'I am one too, every time I sit at my desk to write.'

What followed was an extraordinary thing...

An incredibly generous thing from a modest and self-effacing writer who displays no over-weaning sense of her own importance whatsoever.

Because there we all were, sitting in the room with this country's Greatest Writer (let's not mess about with 'One of...') and we were privy to everything Hilary had wished she'd known when she started out...

All the things that didn't go well...

The first twelve years when she published one short story and earned £100 in total...

The trajectory of A Place of Greater Safety, written over a five year period from 1974 at the age of twenty-two, 300,000 words that nobody wanted; demanding historical fiction was out of fashion. The book would eventually be published in 1993 (and I'm on page 400...now listening to the audio version while I sew or knit, which feels highly appropriate.)

Patience and self-belief were the watchwords because there is no such thing as 'overnight success', this takes a lifetime.

It was encouraging to hear that nothing is wasted, not even the most unproductive day because 'everything remains in potential.' And also to hear that it is common to get stuck at some point in a book.

And don't believe that every good idea is a novel. Don't assume and experiment with different mediums. 

We were all very amused to hear that Hilary has returned to nursery school, using coloured pens, drawing, and much cutting-out, gluing and sticking as she works.

The advice around using your own experience was invaluable and backed up by some interesting encounters in Hilary's life whilst teaching a writing class. Don't write off your own experiences as dull, 'everyone has a pot of gold in their possession.' You are the sum of your own experience, it's where your voice is.

Live with the incomplete. You don't have to resolve everything for your reader. Arouse their need and mobilise their own sense of possibility.

A good writer has to be a good reader. It is where you absorb templates and build resources.

I was fascinated by the suggestion about each person's life paths not taken, and how feasible (and permissible) it is to 'imagine' these into your writing...let those inner people out for some exercise on the paper, nurture an openness to these lives and the ideas will come.

There were several book recommendations along the way, namely

Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande. Published in 1934 you need no other book about writing. It is universally true and helpful.

Except you also need How to Write Like Tolstoy by Richard Cohen which also received much praise, 'it provokes an overwhelming urge to read and write.' 

Likewise The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron which, for all its 'California-ness' was a good friend in times of trouble.' (And of course now kicking myself because my copy went to the charity shop.) Please don't be offended by that any readers in California, it was a way of explaining that a book might work to slightly different parameters to UK expectations.

Onwards, and the advice not to judge your ideas too quickly ,'they could be angels in disguise.'

There was further elaboration on the mechanics of plot, structure and character with advice about what makes a good story...it must hold the attention and the reader must want to know what happens next. Identify the big turning points in the lives of the characters and don't trap your story before it has revealed its potential. 

Much about the difficulties of split narratives too, as Hilary outlined with reference to a book that caused her the 'more trouble than any other' A Change of Climate, 1950s Africa and 1980s Norfolk. Of greatest imperative ' get your reader thoroughly engaged with one of them before introducing the other and the writer who Hilary feels achieve this brilliantly is Elizabeth Jane Howard, (not the Cazelets, though they have merits in their own right) read The Long View to see how it should be done. 

There were various questions from the participants before the break for lunch, all answered in detail and with examples...

How do you deal with historical uncertainty....don't shut things down, look for maximum opportunity and ambiguity. The reported version of history is a simplification of what may have occurred. Assimilate all the contradictions. You can't have truth but you can have verisimilitude...

What about writing in accents or archaic language ...don't write phonetically, suggest through syntax, give flavour with word order, not what they say it's what they think, get inside the system of thought.

And then it was off for lunch and me to other events whilst the 60-strong group reconvened for the afternoon session.

I doubt anyone will forget this amazing day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.