dovegreyreader scribbles

Surfacing with Kathleen Jamie

I suspect great screeds have already been written out there about Surfacing, the new collection of essays by Kathleen Jamie. We've all been waiting a long time, or so it seems, but here's where the writing of Kathleen Jamie differs from so much else that I read, because Findings and Sightlines have each become a sort of vade mecum on my shelf and I hoped that Surfacing would do likewise....become not two but three books I couldn't manage without.

Findings became a true vade mecum. Inspired by Kathleen Jamie's account of her visit to Maes Howe it was a book that travelled to Orkney with me three times. In 2012, when Bookhound and I took the Tinker back there, I pencilled in our own journeys around the islands,next to Kathleen Jamie's, in my copy of Findings. I read it again now and can remember the days so clearly.

On June 3rd we drove out to Hoxa tapestry gallery at St Margaret's Hope

On the 4th we went to Maes Howe and my dad bought me the Complete Works of George Mackay Brown...

At 8pm on June 5th the three of us stood in the middle of the Ring of Brodgar...

Each morning we woke to the distant whale humps of Hoy..

For those who might not know of it, Maes Howe is a

'Neolithic chambered cairn, a tomb, where 5000 years ago. they interred the bones of the dead.'

On the Shortest Day the sun sets directly in line with the entrance tunnel and shines on the far wall of the chamber. It's a moment that Kathleen Jamie goes in search of in Findings, but in doing so sees and finds a great deal more.

When I went back to Orkney with my dad for the Royal Oak commemoration in October 2013, and knowing it would probably be his last visit and memories must be stored like treasures, he and I went inside Maes Howe with a guide and he was enthralled. That evening, as we watched the sun set over Loch Harray, I read bits of 'Darkness and Light' from Findings to him.

'You are standing in a high, dim stone vault. There is a thick soundlessness, like a recording studio, or a strongroom...the world you have entered into is not like a cave, but a place of artifice and skill. Yes, that's it, what you notice when you stand and look around is cool, dry, applied skill. Across five thousand years you can still feel their self assurance.'

If I could have scattered a thimble-full of my dad's ashes in Maes Howe when Bookhound and I went back for our Ruby wedding anniversary in 2016 I would have done (I know, I know, you're not supposed to and I didn't) instead they went safely, and with much love and sadness, into the tidal waters of Scapa Flow at Waulkmill Bay.

I found it incredibly hard to leave Orkney after this visit.

And, with so much riding on it, I'll admit I opened Surfacing with some trepidation...

Supposing Kathleen Jamie had somehow gone off the boil...

Lost that vision for which I am so grateful...

Those seemingly tiny observations, often just a few words, but that work like depth charges in my mind.

Maybe, I've got older and wiser (yes to the former, jury out on the latter) and the alchemy I first discovered in 2005 wouldn't still be there...

As if.

And I knew I would have no worries from the first line of the first essay 'The Reindeer Cave'

'You're sheltering in a cave, thinking about the Ice Age...'

That first essay calibrated my senses, eased me away from the present and back in time. I thought about it, imagined it, sensed it, knew it.

This was all excellent preparation for a much longer journey to the Alaskan village of Quinhagak where Kathleen Jamie joins an archaeological dig. As the tundra melts artefacts are surfacing but this recovery of the past is not without controversy...is it unwarranted interference with the dead, or an opportunity for the young to learn about a heritage that has been lost to them for a generation or more.

There will be a return to Orkney for another dig...more surfacing...

And a piece I loved with a passion 'The Inevitable Pagoda' about those shards of crockery so often found in a ploughed field, or in our case the garden and yes, there is always the pagoda from the Willow Pattern

Each is a glimpse of a life and a time. It begins to sound like a clamour rising like mist from an empty field. All the stories, the voices, the dead...'

You look out over the new-ploughed acres as over human history, and the next field too and the next, all the fields...

Ach.

They fill your hands, these fragments, these stories, but with a wide gesture, you cast them back across the field.'

Whilst Kathleen Jamie casts her pieces back into the field ours are kept in a jar. Our stories have surfaced over twenty-five years of digging this garden and we have kept them in a jar because, from the census returns, we 'know' the people who may have touched them...

John and Betsy Geake (both born in the 1790s) or maybe it was their granddaughter Alice who dropped the plate.

Maybe Ann Hendy threw a dish at husband William...

Honestly the stories we invent. 

And then Surfacing, the essay of the title...

'You're losing their voices. When did that happen? You're forgetting the sound of your mother's voice, and your grandmother's...and today you realise you can't quite bring their voices to mind...'

My eyes actually welled up at this.

Never so true.

And when Kathleen Jamie mentions that her grandmother had diphtheria as a small child a memory of my own surfaced out of absolutely nowhere... that my mum had also had diphtheria as a baby in Liverpool in the mid-1920s and I knew next to nothing about it, and never will....

'And where did they put her, to isolate her and her infection in that crowded house? You can't reach her now to ask.'

How on earth did my mum survive that.

And as I turn the final page on Surfacing I realise that thankfully, whilst I may have got older, so has Kathleen Jamie. She too has surfaced, her memories surface as do mine, the experiences that are universal for so many of us; the empty nest and independent children (and in my case barn owls too) the loss of her father, that sense of time regained as your family responsibilities shift and what to do with it, the opportunities that present themselves, the chance to see and do new and different things and view them in a changed light. And to view the past in a changed light.

In a recent interview Kathleen Jamie suggests that she is not an emotional person and I suspect this might be a favourable asset for an essayist. Maybe it leaves plenty of space for the reader's emotions to flood in, because mine have and will continue to do as I spend time unlocking everything that this book holds. I will read it over and again. It will hold different meaning and relevance each time I pick it up and I will be grateful that such writers exist.

If you are new to the writing of Kathleen Jamie I can promise you these are books for our times. Someone prepared to look at the world without the rose-tints and reveal what matters.

Books that will make you see and think differently.

And if you know Kathleen Jamie's writing and had been wondering about this one, dither no more, you need it on your shelf.

Scroll down for gifts...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Under the Rock -The Poetry of Place ~ Benjamin Myers

Are unremarkable places made remarkable by the minds that map them...

It is so long since I finished Under the Rock by Benjamin Myers, and now I'm thinking again about that first line in the book. It was back in March, when I went on a journey to Mytholmroyd with the author of The Gallows Pole, a book I raved about on here last year, so I was intrigued to found out more about his home turf in and around the Calder Valley in Yorkshire where both books are located. I've thought long and hard too about the early observation that

'the countryside is meanwhile idealised by some and dismissed as retrogressive by others.'  

Especially when you live in the middle of it, with all its realities and occasional challenges and know well the often precarious livelihoods it supports, often misunderstood by the centre yet where the decisions can be made on our behalf and supposedly for the national good...well, yes, I wonder on. 

With a foot experienced in both camps Benjamin Myers, moving from London to settle under the shadow of Scout Rock in Mytholmroyd in West Yorkshire, casts his keen and observant eye over it all and I loved this book. This is not your typical writer-moves-to-country-and-puts-us-all-straight type of book, not in the slightest, but it is an intense and unwavering focus on one place, the multiple perspectives of historical, social, geographical and cultural references allowing me to know it. I know too that sense of walking the same place over and over again, to see difference and change and find the voices of the past.

I sensed a Ted Hughes bass line running through the book, homage to what has gone before acknowledging that he was there first; why reinvent the wheel that the one-time Poet Laureate, born and raised in Mytholmroyd, had set in motion with his poetry and writing about this place   

There was plenty in Under the Rock that chimed with my own experiences living here in the Shire. Reference, for example, to the changing names, words that are 'gradually chiselled and chipped away by time and even 're-sculpted in the changing shapes of our mouths, teeth and tongues.' There is a green lane here known as Maggie Purley's and local lore has it that Maggie hanged herself at one end of said lane. But I can find no record... was it Maggie Burley or Durley or anything else really. No one seems to know any more and I'm guessing that soon the story will be lost.

Blending history with legend, myth and local lore there is a burrowing down below the surface of the seemingly impenetrable millstone grit to find the meanings that surround a place that can at times seem light-less and downright depressing. Many's the time I wanted to shout 'Come and enjoy our great big West Country skies to lift the winter spirits,' because even in deepest winter we have light and sun and sky, something which life beneath Scout Rock seems to lack. Of nearby Hebden Bridge 'If you live there you'll be depressed then,' and you have to wonder what the local mental health and prescription statistics are.

And there is a lot of water for swimming in, and a valley that can suddenly become 'a low budget Venice'. We watched the Calder Valley floods on the news and of course thought 'how awful,' but to read of the reality was far worse...

'How quickly we can be pushed back through the ages when robbed of all that we take for granted...'

Through his constant walking of Scout Rock and the surrounding area, with his little dog Cliff alongside, and an exercising of a right to roam, slowly Benjamin Myers achieves a congruence with the place, but one that can be shattered by the imposition of sudden restrictions...

'My moral compass is, I hope, correctly calibrated to the basics of goodness, yet I struggle particularly with the concepts of borders and boundaries, In short, I like to trespass....perhaps life is too short to go only where we are told to go...'

Even though the restrictions were based on the discovery of an asbestos dump, therefore wise to accede, but I understand that powerful sentiment ..completely.

A measure of the involvement, and sense of belonging to the place and the people that Under the Rock had invested in me, was the stomach-churning plea on social media recently that, having been spooked by fireworks, Cliff had gone missing.

It was a long four hours until Cliff was found I can tell you.

The book is interspersed with greyscale photographs and poems entitled  'Field Notes' and has a useful bibliography of sources at the back... incidentally, am I the only person to go through these and tick off the books I have (sixteen) ...and soon I will be moving on to a new book from Benjamin Myers, The Offing..

'One summer following the Second World War, Robert Appleyard sets out on foot from his Durham village. Sixteen and the son of a coal miner, he makes his way across the northern countryside until he reaches the former smuggling village of Robin Hood's Bay. There he meets Dulcie, an eccentric, worldly, older woman who lives in a ramshackle cottage facing out to sea.

Staying with Dulcie, Robert's life opens into one of rich food, sea-swimming, sunburn and poetry. The two come from different worlds, yet as the summer months pass, they form an unlikely friendship that will profoundly alter their futures.'

I'm reminded at once of A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr and that H.E.Bates novella, The Triple Echo. I will report back dreckly.

Meanwhile, if you know the Calder Valley does this sound something like the place you would recognise...

And does light, and year-round access to it, matter or am I being a bit precious about our big skies...

 

 

 

A Reading Gallimaufry

Fleishman is in Trouble ~ Taffy Brodesser- Akner 

I fell for the 'Best Book of the Summer' hype and bought a copy just to see. Well, I quite enjoyed it in parts, but I don't think I loved it as much as everyone else.

New York-based liver specialist Dr Toby Fleishman faces the end of his marriage to high-flying business woman Rachel with some trepidation until he discovers dating apps and realises there may be advantages to his new found freedom. Let's just say he tests that freedom to the limits (many times, all described in detail) whilst also caring for his two children, because just as he's starting to enjoy himself Rachel disappears. Juggling the demands of his job and the needs of the children, life spools back and forth as the past is slowly revealed. The USP of the book, flagged up in the reviews, is the use of what has been termed a Trojan Horse narrator, Libby, an old friend of Toby's, who slowly takes over the narration bringing her own life events with her. It is seamlessly and cleverly done and a relief towards the end of the book to finally get Rachel's version of events, but it seemed to take me an awful long time and oodles of patience with the premise (was I really that interested) to reach the final page. I nearly surrendered at page 250, and would have done had I not spent £15.99 of my Waterstones loyalty card points buying the book. In the end I was mostly glad I finished it or I'd have missed the last line.

Brideshead Revisited ~ Evelyn Waugh

Isn't it funny when you think you know a book so well via lifelong osmosis that there really is no point in reading it...until you find a really nice, floppy-paged edition with 1.5 line spacing (thank you Penguin Modern Classics) and the book group theme is England. I dived in assuming this was a book about an Oxford student and his teddy bear only to find it's about so much more.

When Charles Ryder returns to Brideshead as an army officer and to the house now commandeered for the war effort, memories of his student years come flooding back. His relationship with Sebastian Flyte, sister Julia and parents Lord and Lady Marchmain slowly unfolds and laden with Evelyn Waugh's consummate wit and irony and lashing of Catholic guilt. Sebastian, who fades into an alcoholic stupor somewhere in Europe, is overshadowed by his sister Julia in the plot. All of this was a complete and very enjoyable surprise because I hadn't watched the TV series or the film (on the basis it was about a posh boy with a teddy bear).

I loved the book and it has set me off on a reading trail through more Evelyn Waugh starting with Scoop, also in the delicious floppy Penguin edition and I have the Sword of Honour Trilogy lined up. 

 

The Photographer ~ Meike Ziervogel

Several books I've read recently have focused on photography, On Chapel Sands by Laura Cummins and The Photographer at Sixteen by George Szirtes and maybe that tempted me to pick up this book by Meike Ziervogel. I once visited a new mum called Meike, she was Dutch and she very helpfully told me that her name rhymed with 'formica' and I've never forgotten it. That's an aside but after our humiliating Belvoir experience I do like to get pronunciation right.

Trude, married to photographer Albert and living with her son Peter and her mother Agatha in Germany in the early days of the war.  A cataclysmic betrayal separates the family and it will be many years before they are reunited. Trude and Albert are both traumatised and changed by events and must learn to compromise if they are to succeed as a couple again. There is a defining and decisive moment in the book when Trude must decide where her loyalties lie and Meike Ziervogel sets up such a tense situation that I could barely breath and not could I predict the outcome. 

A great read from Salt Publishing and as another aside, the cover photo is Meike's grandparents.

Footnote : The Belvoir Humiliation was Bookhound and I arriving at the gates for a country fair at and asking if this was the way to Bel-voir? '

‘Yes. Welcome to Beaver,' said the person on the gate.

Any good summer (winter) reads to report over your way?

King of Dust - Adventures in Forgotten Sculpture ~ Alex Woodcock

Welcome back to normal service. The West Country is emptying of visitors and Bookhound and I will be wandering off hither and yon after weeks of going no further than town one way (Tavistock) or town the other way (Launceston). I hope you’ve all had a restful holiday season and are ready for some good reading and commenting in the weeks and months ahead.

It’s fair to say that a book about Romanesque stone- carving in the forgotten churches of the West Country might not be top of the most exciting books I would want to read, but I can't tell you how excited I was about King of Dust by Alex Woodcock. Having read his articles in Elementum Journal I had a feeling I was going to enjoy this one and I wasn't wrong. Incidentally, edition five of Elementum, published recently, won't disappoint anyone who has come to love this journal of nature and story as much as I have.

Billed as 'a craftsman's journey through the landscapes of ancient sculpture', Alex Woodcock weaves in his own journey into stone carving, which would eventually lead to him working at Exeter Cathedral and a journey around some of the most beautiful little churches in this area.

'Now I speak ruins. I'm fluent in the language of decay. The years working at Exeter Cathedral have completely reorientated me....I was part of the cathedral's immune system, intervening when and where necessary to slow the processes that lead to damage and repair parts that had already succumbed.'

I'm an Exonian, Exeter, the city of my birth and a place very close to my heart. We visit frequently and I wander around the cathedral whenever I can. And I have learned so much from this book; new and interesting things that make wandering around a church an even greater pleasure than it already is

From Gunwalloe near Land's End to Toller Fratrum in East Dorset each church is beautifully described and all enough to make me set off on a day back in April, with sandwiches, flask and the book in my hand, a notebook and a hand-drawn map (I traced it) to guide me and off I went to find some of those churches near to us here.

With no idea about the Romanesque I was a blank canvas ready to be filled and there was much to discover about this architectural sculpture, 'bold geometric patterns, fantastical creatures and humans in states of rapture or distress' along with...

Round arches...

Solid masonry walls...

Small windows...

Bulky Columns..

My first stop, St Stephens, Launceston was only open because everyone was gathering there for a funeral, so a quick glimpse of the font and I departed. But I'd seen my first bit of Romanesque and it was a bit exciting. And suddenly I'm also a complete expert on the tympanum, usually found above doorways and rarely noticed (by me). This was my first tympanic encounter at the church of St Gregory, Treneglos not far from Launceston...

Carved in the twelfth century and located in the porch of a little out-of-the-way church, the imagery on the tympanum (in this case a Tree of Life flanked by lions) is all about finding salvation and renewal in this building and placed above the doorway to remind worshippers of this as they enter. How sad then that St Gregory's is now closed to the public for safety reasons, a building in need of its own salvation and redemption, one that is failing fast.

A single broken lattice pane allowed me to peek inside and glimpse the font and the general disarray of a disused building...

Alex Woodcock writes eloquently, quoting Rebecca Solnit as he takes in the silence that surrounds St Gregory's and ponders the 'fragments from another world' that the Romanesque has left behind,

'In medieval culture, churches were considered liminal places, thresholds between one space and another, places where the supernatural merged with the everyday...

Peering through the window and I understood that. Echoes of the past and a desperate sadness about the deteriorating condition of the church now. And how unlikely it seems that it will be fully restored.

I motored on towards Egloskerry; a thriving church it would seem in a thriving village  and by now I spot the tympanum the minute I walk in.

I head for Tremaine  a bit further up the road and eventually find the church, up a hill along a narrow lane and a fair old stroll from the village itself. Dedicated to St Winwaloe...Cornwall knows how to do saints, goodness me was this tiny church worth the finding...

I would never have known of it but for Alex Woodcock's book and his quote from the guru of the Romanesque, Edmund Sedding...

'To one whose mind is still full of the memories of some great English Abbey or Cathedral, this desolate little sanctuary would hardly seem worthy of notice...but to the few who love the work of the medieval craftsmen, these works they have left us are beyond price...'

And with just six people on the parish electoral roll what a miracle it is that the place is open and still used. 

Now a complete expert (after a single afternoon) I spotted the font immediately..

And sat in the church and read Alex Woodcock's thoughts about it...

'Sitting on a pew for a moment...enjoying the complete absence of sound and the smell of damp plaster that permeated the nave... sculpture as a point of connection with the unseen, the doorway into another world. In the small nave of the church at Tremaine, I could understand that.'

A little meadow alongside the churchyard was awash with orchids and bluebells...

'In some parts of the South West the past hangs like a veil across the land, refusing to fully make way for the present...'

suggests Alex Woodcock...

and the unchanging view across the Cornish countryside that day seemed to confirm the idea.

All in all no more perfect and peaceful a-sitting place than this to sit and read King of Dust and knwoing I have a lot more days like this with churches to visit. If you are heading west and you enjoy a meander around forgotten churches then let this book be your guide. Failing that enjoy it from the comfort of your armchair knowing they are there; solid ancient sanctuaries clinging on to the twenty-first century for all they are worth.

Meanwhile does anyone else love a good wander around an old church...

I wonder what you look for...what interests you most...

I had always been drawn to the stained glass until now...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not all those who wander are lost...

I've been on some amazing journeys to far off places (from my armchair) so far this year.

Underland (with Robert Macfarlane),  Doggerland (Time Song by Julia Blackburn), Antarctica (Erebus by Michael Palin) and I'm currently in the middle of a really surprising and very exciting journey through the audio book of The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien and Middle Earth are synonymous with the Tinker. It was his most favourite book alongside anything by Charles Dickens, and which he had read at least twenty times, and though I've read The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring several times I've never made it onto the other two. I famously took one in my rucksack on our Silver Wedding Eurorail trip and deserted it in Barcelona (along with The Secret History by Donna Tartt ) as a completely wrong holiday reading choice. Then we went to see the films with the Tinker and I really didn't feel the need to bother with more...until recently.

Robert Macfarlane mentioned that he was going to start reading The Lord of the Rings to his six-year-old son and I suddenly remembered how much my dad had also loved his cassette version. I think it may have become a shared escape when my mum's confusion increased and their social world narrowed down; they could both listen to it, and whilst my mum would be soothed by the cadence and rhythm of the words, my dad would be enchanted and deeply engrossed in the story, as am I. Every time I see this box on the shelf, because it's become a family heirloom that none of would ever part with, I think of them.

I am listening to a newer version (via Audible) narrated by Rob Inglis and have nothing but praise and admiration for the joy, excitement and sensitivity he brings to the book. He sings the songs, he does all the voices superbly and creates the characters much as I imagine them to be. Tom Bombadil, larger and jollier than life, Strider/ Aragorn as serious and measured as he needs to be, Gandalf, wizard supreme and all the lovely hospitable hobbits, always ready for their next meal. Together we have some exciting adventures ahead and I am making any excuse I can to listen.

All that is gold does not glitter

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes, a fire shall be woken,

A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

The crownless again shall be king.

I suspect the entire Lord of the Rings 'thing' might be adored by some and loathed by others and that is entirely understandable, but I would still be interested to know of your encounters with the book or the film, and your thoughts about it...for good or ill.

 

 

Invitation to the Waltz ~ Rosamond Lehmann

Susan Hill has been urging me to read Rosamond Lehmann for months now and I can't quite believe that I had never read her before when I finally picked up Invitation to the Waltz. Published in 1932 but set in 1920 it has been a hugely enjoyable read, the perfect foil to some uber modern novels of late.

It is her birthday and seventeen-year-old Olivia, woken by her sister Kate the svelte natural beauty, prepares for her day...the family breakfast at The Lodge with her parents, her sister and her young brother James. The table, the presents, the good wishes, the slight self-consciousness about opening gifts and appearing delighted with them even if not,  and all set against the backdrop of the house so perfectly described by Rosamond Lehmann.

Olivia's parents give her a length of startling red dress fabric (chosen by Kate) which she takes round to Miss Robinson the dress maker to be made into something suitable for the dance. Both sisters have been invited to the evening at the Spencer's grand neighbouring estate. Themes of class, the vulnerability of women and the instability of their lives quickly become apparent, and with it the unspoken sequelae of the war... a dire shortage of available men. In contrast there is a surfeit of grieving needy women along with gentlewomen; spinsters living in reduced circumstances and scraping a living. Everyone is struggling in their own way, especially the mothers who are frequently portrayed as both selfish and possessive, controlling their daughters by various means, whether through illness or emotional blackmail, in order to keep at least one of them nearby. Yet still no mention of the war.

There are splendid contrasts between the social classes. Olivia's family have clearly fallen on harder times and a rather creepy uncle lives with them which adds to the difficulties, whilst nearby live the happy-go-lucky Wainwright family, the chimney sweep and his wife with eight children and counting. And then I remembered that I had read another book by Rosamond Lehmann, a novella entitled The Gypsy's Baby because the Wainwrights are surely the trial run for the Wyatt family.

The dance becomes the focal point for Olivia and Kate and it becomes apparent it is one of the few social opportunities for the girls to meet and socialise with men, but with it comes the trauma of Olivia's unfilled dance card and the misunderstandings with the men. It begs the thought that those men who have survived the war are damaged both emotionally and physically, and as this becomes increasingly apparent through the evening so Rosamond Lehmann slowly filters in the details about the war. Allowances are made for the men's unusual and exuberant behaviour whilst the women must adhere to the rules. Suddenly the unspoken is unleashed as Olivia remembers her own version of the war.

I knew very little about Rosamond Lehmann but more urging from Susan and I ordered the biography by Selina Hastings which I can't wait to read.  Born in 1901, the Oxford DNB has Rosamond down as tall, beautiful with almond-shaped eyes, a firm mouth and a warm impulsive manner, which all sounds like a green light for trials and tribulations to come. A lengthy affair with C.Day Lewis, who then goes off and marries Jill Balcon leaving Rosamond deeply traumatised, suggests I am not wrong.

Lots more about Rosamond Lehmann to come but if you have read her books, which I feel sure some of you have, please do share thoughts in comments.

I'm very late to this particular party but what a fine discovery. 

 

Sisters

I'd have loved a sister and spent a good proportion of my childhood praying/begging for at least one. I grew up with a brother, male cousins, male sons of my parents' friends and had to go out and find a girl-friend to swap Judy and Bunty comics with. That said, if there was a single upside to losing my brother when I was twenty-one it was that I gained a very lovely and special sister-in-law who I am still very lucky to have in my life. Mind you, I'm sure there are plenty of people who may not be as close to their sisters as they would wish, or as the rest of us sister-less folk might assume happens naturally.

But a new book came my way via the Literary Review and a trip to Waterstones and it's all made me think how many books I have on my shelves about famous sisters. The book in question is Noble Savages - The Olivier Sisters, Four Lives in Seven Fragments by Sarah Watling. This from the 'blurb'...

'From the beginning of their lives, the Olivier sisters stood out: surprisingly emancipated, strikingly beautiful, markedly determined, and alarmingly 'wild'. Rupert Brooke was said to be in love with all four of them; D. H. Lawrence thought they were frankly 'wrong'; Virginia Woolf found them curiously difficult to read.

The sisters seemed always to be one step ahead of their time. Margery and Daphne studied at Cambridge when education was still thought by some to be damaging to ovaries. Noel became a doctor; Daphne a pioneering teacher; Margery's promising trajectory was shot down by mental illness; Brynhild, the great beauty of the four, excelled as a Bloomsbury hostess yet gave it up for love and a life of uncertainty.

In this intimate, sweeping biography, Sarah Watling brings the sisters in from the margins, tracing lives that span colonial Jamaica, the bucolic life of Victorian progressives, the frantic optimism of Edwardian Cambridge, the bleakness of two world wars, and a host of evolving philosophies for life over the course of the twentieth century.

Noble Savages is a compelling portrait of sisterhood in all its complexities, which rediscovers the lives of four extraordinary women within the varied fortunes of the feminism of their times, while illuminating the battles and ethics of biography itself.

I've finished the book (splendid, more thoughts soon but I definitely commend it to the house) and it has all got me thinking just what a fruitful source sisters are for biographies. A quick run around my shelves and I'd found these without really trying and I'm sure there are more because I haven't even gone near Bloomsbury Corner or the Bronte Shelf...

A Circle of Sisters by Judith Flanders : The Macdonald sisters ...Alice (Kipling) Georgiana (Burne- Jones) Agnes (Poynter) and Louisa (Baldwin) who all started life among the ranks of the lower middle classes but would marry a poet, a painter, the President of the Royal Academy and a Prime Minister. I haven't read this but I will soon.

The Sisters - The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary Lovell. Jessica, Debo, Nancy, Diana and Unity.

Four Sisters - The Lost Lives of the Romanov Grand Duchesses by Helen Rappaport. Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia and Helen's book breathes light and voices into their world. 

The Wild Wyndhams - Three Sisters at the Heart of Power by Claudia Renton. Mary, Madeleine and Pamela, surrounded by the work of the Pre-Raphaelities, a family famed for its 'Bohemian closeness and whose lives 'were intertwined with some of the most celebrated and scandalous figures of their day.

If I looked harder I could probably find more but I'm going to leave further 'sisterly' reading suggestions to you...

Meanwhile just to balance things up I thought I'd put together a pile of books off my shelves about brothers...

Perhaps you have some suggestions there too...

 

 

 

The Easternmost House ~ Juliet Blaxland

The shortlist for the 2019 Wainwright Prize was announced last week. This the book prize which celebrates the best books about nature, the outdoors and UK travel 

 

Time Song by  Julia Blackburn
The Easternmost House by  Juliet Blaxland

Our Place by  Mark Cocker

Thinking On My Feet by Kate Humble

Underland by Robert Macfarlane
Wilding by Isabella Tree

Out of the Woods by Luke Turner

 

It's a list I always look forward to not least because it's my favourite genre, so perhaps there's a chance I'll be ahead of the game on the reading...I never am. With Time Song by Julia Blackburn and Underland by Robert Macfarlane under my belt, but none of the other five, I turned to The Easternmost House by Juliet Blaxland. In a way it connected seamlessly with Julia Blackburn's book, set as they are on the East Anglian coast and concerned as they both are with land disappearing under the sea.

 

By rights it has to be a source of great anxiety when you know your house is on the brink of disappearing into the North Sea, but Juliet Blaxland quickly puts this into the wider perspective of a husband serving in Afghanistan and I would also suggest the fact that the house is rented not owned. The financial loss of the house will ultimately be someone else's burden which perhaps allows Juliet Baxland to focus more on the spatial and emotional losses instead.

 

'The portrait of a place that soon will no longer exist. It is a memorial to this house and the lost village it represents, and to our ephemeral life here, so that something of it will remain once it has gone.' 

 

It's as if the house has been fostered until of an age. This felt like a studied emotional attachment that knows its bounds, will know when to let go and thus comes with less baggage, anxiety, worry or fear allowing for a clearer-eyed look at it all.

 

And I loved it for that.

 

Living as we do in the countryside, away from mains drainage and water, in the middle of farmland and a lot of wildlife, and with a son who is a gamekeeper, we have also come to learn, as has Juliet Blaxland, that it is all a question of balance requiring a breadth of understanding, pragmatism, compromise and common sense along with a realistic outlook, and The Easternmost House has it by the shovel-full. Juliet and I agreed on just about everything from living with inclement weather...you just have to accept and brace for it which we do. From foxes to pheasants, from restrictive diets  to hay-fever, the impact of 'ecological bad news', the sirens of doom and the vested interests involved in its dissemination, just how useful rural skills might be one day and what we would be both do when confronted by mile after mile of sawn timber 'unloaded' from a cargo ship and washed ashore on the beach as far as the eye could see... Juliet and I were in complete and generally optimistic and hopeful accord.  

 

Each month begins with a poem, each a perfect choice, some I knew, some I didn't and one in particular that I didn't know and now love, an extract from God of the Open Air by Henry Van Dyke (1852-1933)...

 

These are the things I prize
       And hold of dearest worth:
       Light of the sapphire skies,
       Peace of the silent hills,
 Shelter of forests, comfort of the grass,
 Music of birds, murmur of little rills,
 Shadow of clouds that swiftly pass,
       And, after showers,
       The smell of flowers
   And of the good brown earth,—
And best of all, along the way, friendship and mirth.

 

 

Month by month the bounty of the land is recorded...the wildlife, the natural resources, the weather, the local traditions and way of life, and the practicalities, of which there are many. And also recorded the measurement of cliff loss. Both elegy and eulogy, Juliet suggests that living with erosion has been a life-changing experience. As the land shifts so do perspectives, tolerance increases and what rises to the surface are the things that really matter and, in a less urgent way, I can understand that.

 

It's been an interesting year for us with our resident barn owls. Suddenly no spraying of weeds on the path, not even an organic slug pellet in sight. This year, thanks to a local establishment I have used buckets of coffee grounds. It smells like Costa around the garden and the slugs seem to hate it. Either that or they can't sleep a wink and are too tired to even bother with my dahlias. We've allowed much more of the garden to go semi-wild rather than flogging ourselves over immaculate edges and 24/7 weeding (this is harder than you might think) mowing a path through the grass and daisies in the orchard,  keeping the lawns in shape and leaving the rest. We have been rewarded with the sight of the owls swooping from the nest box into the long grass and returning with dinner and one less creature for Magnus to catch. Poppies, borage, nigella and aquilegia are springing up on the paths along with islands of clover that the bees adore. Juliet Blaxland sees something similar on the cliff edges, as once ploughed land is allowed to naturalise, and in doing so ably achieves her aim of making the cottage on the cliff and its surroundings as familiar to the reader as it is to her. 

 

I understood this conclusion exactly...

 

'This place has quietly taught us how to carry its still small voice of calm within us, always and wherever we go...'

The Easternmost House an excellent read and one most deserving of its Wainwright Prize short listing.

 

And oh alright, here's another picture for you...one very clever Mrs Barn Owl. Wild and free and very busy feeding her noisy brood.

 

 

 

 

 

A Reading Gallimaufry

Further to my discovery of Backlisted Pod I followed up with a read of The Year of Reading Dangerously by Andy Miller, one of the hosts. Famed on Twitter for his skyscraper stack of books read each month which is often followed by some heated trolling about whether he has a life, or a job or a family, nevertheless his reading prowess (it's his job) is extraordinary and his choices fascinating. The Year of Reading Dangerously is about one man's attempt to up his reading game by filling in the gaps, exploring how and what we read and 'why we should make time to do so.' There's something of the mid-life-oh-my-god-I'm-almost-forty to the premise and with a sense of renewed enthusiasm and some urgency Andy sets about a chosen list of titles to read in the year. Time must be carved out of seemingly non-existent hours and it is surprising how it mounts up into a good chunk of reading time per day. 

One early saviour, when the project looks doomed to failure at the second hurdle known as Middlemarch, is for Andy to set himself a set number of pages in a day. Now I'm remembering our year long read of Middlemarch on here a few years ago, when Bookhound carved a spare copy into eight equal segments to mirror the instalments that the Victorians had read and we were up and away.

If you love other people's reading journeys then this is the book for you. If you don't then I'm sure Andy Miller (who has a very self-effacing sense of humour) would say just get on and read the books you do want to read and pass this one by...except you'll miss...oh well, never mind.

 

Spring by Ali Smith

I really feel I should devote a whole blog post to Spring but to be honest, much as I enjoyed reading it, I'm not sure I've really grasped the nettle and fully embraced the project. This might be sacrilege, and I may be cast out, but perhaps I should have read Autumn and Winter, the first two in this seasonal quartet first. I'm a devotee of some but not all of Ali Smith's writing and suspect this might be more about whether my reading mood is ready to be challenged by the post-post modern approach or whether it just needs a jolly good story. How clever am I feeling in other words, because I think Spring is a  very clever book that requires some application. Nevertheless, returning to Backlisted Pod (who aren't sending me cheques in the post or anything, but are informing my reading a little right now) there is a brilliant episode where Andy Miller (see above, he's not sending me cheques either) reads out the first few pages and I was transfixed among my 150 dahlia seedlings in the greenhouse as I listened. If you have read Hard Times by Charles Dickens then you will get the Gradgrindian gist of Ali Smith's opening pages and perhaps proceed to relate the book to our own times.

 

The Heavens by Sandra Newman

This might be another book that left me feeling slightly bemused. Not for the quality of the writing but for what was actually going on, but Heavens has garnered some good reviews so what do I know.

Set in New York in 2000 and London in 1598 time travel is my first potential for confusion, which is not helped by the intentional incongruences...a flag has been planted on Mars, there is no war anywhere and a Green Party senator is about to become the first female president of the United States. 

Kate seems to live both in the present and via her dreams in the past, frequently 'waking' as Emilia, 'the mistress of a nobleman and surrounded by the plague. My recent plague and pestilence affinity helped, as did the occasional location of Nonsuch Palace for the action. The Palace long gone but replaced by a girls' school in the 1930s, and of course my alma mater in the 1960s. I'm not sure we gave much thought to the fact that Henry VIII might have galloped over our hockey pitch, but anyway the slightest mention in any book and I'm right back there bullying off. 

It is  certainly a story of love and madness  and I begged my Reading Friend to read it too (especially  given her workaday psychiatric experience) in the hope that we might figure it out between us. To be honest we didn't so if you have read The Heavens and have some thoughts to offer about this, or any of the other books, please do.

Meanwhile, what have you all been reading?

Let’s have ourselves a list of good suggestions for the summer holidays....

 

De Profundis: Robert Macfarlane talks to Horatio Clare at the Hay Festival

I'd bought the tickets in December and there they'd sat on the kitchen shelf ever since, but in the end time was against us in the run up to the opening of Tinker's Cott a few weeks ago. Bookhound and I agreed that a long day trip to Hay-on-Wye to hear Robert Macfarlane in conversation with Horatio Clare was just not feasible, so, knowing the event was a sell-out, I offered the tickets free via Twitter. I was delighted to hear from Gail Simmons because by coincidence Gail's book has been to hand recently. 

The Country of Larks - A Chiltern Journey. Subtitled In the footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson and the footprint of HS2, Gail takes to the roads and countryside of her childhood almost 150 years after Stevenson to 'peel back the layers of history, recording forever a world destined for change.'  The Chilterns is not an area I know particularly well but I will be reading the journey alongside Gail once I've got Odysseus safely into port with my month-of-June read of Homer. It's a beautiful little pocket-sized book too. 

Anyway I posted the Hay tickets off to Gail and asked (cheekily)  if she would mind writing a blog post about the event for us here, and I am really grateful because she has...

De Profundis: Robert Macfarlane talks to Horatio Clare at the Hay Festival

Writers are solitary creatures. Reading is a solitary activity. So should I be surprised that book festivals are today such popular and gregarious experiences?

Bill Clinton may have described Hay as ‘the Woodstock of the mind’ but my first experience of the festival last month reminded me of Wimbledon - all deckchairs, picnics and Pimm’s.  A uniquely British gathering, with books instead of tennis. And like those for Wimbledon’s Centre Court, the queue for Robert Macfarlane’s fixture with Horatio Clare at the Baillie Gifford stage was long, patient and good humoured.

Macfarlane has an almost rock-star following, with over 150,000 devotees on Twitter alone. So it was no marvel that all 1,700 seats in the marquee were taken. Some fans had even brought along their copies of Underland, the author and academic’s latest bestseller.

Still, the two authors managed a relaxed conversation, seated in front of changing images accompanying Underland’s theme. Short questions were followed by full answers. Macfarlane thinks clearly, and possesses the exceptional (and enviable) gift of speaking in fully-formed paragraphs. 

Many reviewers have highlighted the author’s visits to potholes, mines and catacombs, but Underland is a book about time rather than place. And not just regular human time, but deep geological time. Underland is profound in more than one sense. Macfarlane has explored the earth’s deepest, darkest places and he’s emerged a troubled man. As he commented, ’we are shallowing deep time with our actions.’ There’s now even a term for humanity’s geological impact: the anthropocene.

Macfarlane is no pulpit-thumping, evangelical preacher. Rather, he reminded me of a benevolent Anglican vicar trying to deliver a message of hope while gently urging us to repent. Speculating about the future, he asked the audience ‘will we be good ancestors?’ He’s plainly frustrated with politics, and with politicians who have no incentive to consider future generations, invoking the example of schoolchildren like Greta Thunberg who show no such constraints. They have little interest in the past - only concern for the future.

I’ve not yet read Underland. But like his other books, it’s clearly an intellectual journey full of word-wizardry, dizzying knowledge and classical allusions. At one point during the talk, Macfarlane even joked about the inclusion of a rare joke. But then anxiety about our fate is no laughing matter.

The book’s themes may be complex, but Horatio Clare – himself a distinguished author - posed lucid, concise questions, prompting Macfarlane’s anecdotes and reflections. I wonder how many other authors might have tried to make this more about themselves, but Clare left his ego at home and handed the spotlight to the star of the show.

While the event felt like a fireside chat the staging matched a rock concert, complete with a live piece of Underland-themed music by The Bookshop Band which charmingly concluded the conversation. Then, after a few audience questions, it was back out into the evening sunshine for a final glass of Pimm’s.

I know some of you were there too so please do add your thoughts in comments if you want to, and perhaps some of you have encountered a Robert Macfarlane event during his current US tour so we'd love to hear from you too.

Maybe you have read Underland by now, if so please do leave a comment with your thoughts...

Meanwhile my thanks to Gail for this post and for giving our tickets a good home. 

 

 

Summer in February ~ Jonathan Smith (redux)

Before I tell you about our trip to see the Munnings in Cornwall exhbition last week I thought I would revisit this post from five years ago about Summer in February by Jonathan Smith and which actually has its origins ten years ago. Tempus fugit etc.

 

March 31 2014

A very funny thing happened as I was reading Summer in February by Jonathan Smith... the novel about the Lamorna artists. It was a book that had been on my shelves for a while. I couldn't remember where I had heard about it, but on the balance of probability it had to be one of you here in comments, and a quick search of my own blog came up with a comment and link to her blog from Lizzy Siddal back in 2009.

It was the trip to Lamorna (more searching) in 2012 ...



and sitting on those very rocks...



that filled me with the sense of place and persuaded me to buy the book, because by then there was news of a film version too. As always it felt imperative to read the book first, rather than allow the film to infiltrate my imagination with characters and setting before I have had the chance to do it for myself.

I wonder if you have preferences about this??

Book first...

Film first...

Not bothered...

I'll bet some of you share my preference for avoiding  film tie-in editions of books though don't you...

So I started the book...twice.

On the first occasion getting no further than Munnings's speech at the Royal Academy before being diverted.

Then the film was out there...

I had done some snippeteering and found the cuttings in the book when I opened it again in the summer of 2013. Everyone is telling me the film is fantastic... Carol goes to see it twice because she loves it so much (sorry to divulge that Carol!) and I think I must get a wriggle on.

I make another start (are you keeping up, by now this has taken me four years to get around to this read) and I am cracking along nicely. The brash, extrovert, gregarious artist Alfred Munnings is leaping irrepressibly off the page as are the Lamorna artists...Laura and Harold Knight and the sad and disconsolate land agent Gilbert Evans. The artistic community is revealed in all its eccentric glory and into its midst has arrived Florence Carter-Wood, a young London woman of privilege whose father, under duress, has agreed to fund some art lessons for her. 

The beautiful Florence is nicknamed Blote.

Blote??

I am a little off-put by that...

By this time I am halfway through the book but, despite my best efforts at avoidance, news has seeped through the review pages that this story isn't going to end happily, and all of a sudden, and quite unheard of for me, I stop reading the book and decide I want to see all this unfold in the film.

The film stars Dan 'Downton' Stevens as a mild and gentle Gilbert Evans, Dominic Cooper as quite a menacing Munnings, and Emily Browning as a wide-eyed Florence, trapped in a love triangle and torn about her choices.

There's a wait for the DVD to come out of course, but when it does I buy a copy.

Then there's another delay while we find time to watch it, and that is eventually prompted by a talk at Plymouth City Museum & Art Gallery as part of the Laura Knight 'Portraits' exhibition. The subject to be Love, Art and Tragedy – Close encounters in a Cornish Art colony.

I have to say the whole long-winded process has been duly rewarded by all three components, half the book, the entire film, the most brilliant and engaging talk by Catherine Wallace a few weeks ago, followed by the rest of the book.

The first half of the book had set the scene for the film which I really enjoyed (Carol, you are not alone, I will certainly watch it again) even though not filmed at Lamorna. The community springs into life, and having been there it's not hard to envisage how life in this remote little Cornish valley could know no bounds. Carousing and creativity going hand in hand and plenty of anything-goes behaviour. It does end in tears ( I won't give anything away for fear you haven't seen it) and the film plays to that strength with great drama towards the end... suffice to say I would have been blinking and sniffing unashamedly in the cinema.


Catherine Wallace painted (sorry) a much more varied picture of Arthur Munnings at the gallery talk which somehow balanced out that of both the film, the book and my imagination (which by now has Munnings sitting at the brutish end of unpleasant with the word 'dislike' hanging over his head) showing us a wonderful slide show of some of his lesser-known paintings. Famed for his horses, and indeed, in the context of Summer in February, for this picture Morning Ride, of Florence seated side-saddle on Merrilegs...



But I had been unaware of Munnings's Lamorna coastal paintings, all of which favourably compared with the best of the Newlyn school and many of which can apparently be seen at Munnings home Castle House at Dedham in Essex.

Of interest too, as Catherine Wallace elaborated, was the fact that all the artists painted each other..

Munnings painted Laura painting...



Harold Knight painted Munnings reading, this picture we learned, was found concealed behind another one, someone unwittingly bought a 'buy one get one free'...

This sorry tale became a period of his life about which Munnings neither spoke nor wrote in the years to come, leaving Morning Ride behind in Cornwall with Laura and Harold Knight, to be given to Gilbert Evans should he return from his self-imposed exile with the Royal Engineers in Africa. Gilbert had enlisted in April 1914 to flee the impossibility of his love for Florence, by this time herself in the loveless and unconsummated marriage to Munnings, and from which she desperately needed to escape. The source of the book's title to be found in an entry in Gilbert's diary written on 22 February 1914...

'Had early lunch with Blote in my room, and then for a walk over the cliffs to Penberth where we had tea, then back by the road in the evening. A summer day to be remembered'.

The whole Summer in February saga has a been a wonderfully extended reading, watching and looking trail...

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

My thoughts on the Munnings in Cornwall exhibition dreckly.

 

More anticipating... Surfacing by Kathleen Jamie

Happy Summer Solstice to all those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, and stand by to receive the baton of light and lengthening days down there in the Southern Hemisphere, though we'll keep it for a little while longer yet if you wouldn't mind. Summer hasn't really found its feet yet, more its flippers.

The fifth book...ah yes the fifth proof copy that has flown straight into my life, bypassing all the checks and balances and maybes. I've had to upgrade the house insurance and have been too scared to take it out with me because for sure someone will snatch it and run off with it. No it's not the next Hilary Mantel, I doubt I'll see that before publication date, and in fact I don't want to read it until everyone else does next March, but I'll be first in the queue in a real bookshop.

No, not our 'ilary but surely the next best thing is a new collection of writing from Kathleen Jamie.

I've worn my copies of Findings and Sightlines into well-thumbed very best friends. They are littered with marginalia and thoughts and journal entries of my own, I'm nigh on word -perfect.

That day in February when the light floods back...

The stroll through the whale hall, the Hvalsalen, when I measured out the length of a blue whale along the lane in front of the house...

'Still I walked on, counting until the spine ended. Fifty-seven paces. Less an animal, more a narrative. The ancient mariner.'

Three ways of looking at St Kilda and I still want to go...

Mapping the cells of Heliobacter pylori through a microscope...

' What vistas I'd seen. River deltas and marshes, peninsulas and atolls. The unseen landscapes within.

And Orkney, the visit to Maes Howe on the Shortest Day, just in case the sun might set through the tunnel...

I took Findings to Orkney with me three times, to read in situ and went on the pilgrimage to see for myself the whale's eardrum that Kathleen Jamie sees in Stromness Museum ...

The Tinker sat in an Orkney chair while I stared at this thing...

and then we both stared at the best scrimshaw ever and loved it...

On the 800 mile drive up from the Shire, on our first visit, the Tinker (my dad) and I had 'played' caravans. Kathleen Jamie says 'and what is a caravan if not a shieling hut on wheels.' We totted up the wheeled shielings, the Viking Marauders, the Unicorns, the Pageants.

We went to Skara Brae and I thought of Kathleen Jamie's words..how it re-calibrates your sense of time, the domestic normality of the late Stone Age...'beds and cupboards and neighbours and beads.'

And on our next visit, the one that I knew would be about storing up memories of the Tinker for my future self, when we were invited to go to the Royal Oak commemoration on Scapa Flow, we flew into Kirkwall on a tiny plane that my dad fondly named 'The Paraffin Budgie.'

He and I went into Maes Howe and he didn't want to leave, asked every conceivable question of the guide...

'Many visitors come crawling along the entrance tunnel to marvel at the tomb, and they breathe. The building wasn't designed to be breathed in and lit. It was designed to be dead in, and dark...'

The Tinker bought me a copy of The Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown in the shop at Maes Howe. I've read it through and through and treasure it. And of course we went to 'the huge brooding stone circle, the Ring of Brodgar' 

I read him some of Kathleen Jamie's Orkney observations and together we kept an eye out for the 'scraps of rainbow' that she mentions. 'There's one of Kathleen's scraps' my dad would say...

'Oh look, there's another one, a proper scrap that one...'

By accident the Tinker and I discovered Waulkmill Bay late one afternoon..

We were both transfixed by the peace and the beauty and, though I didn't say so at the time, I knew I had found the place where one day the family would scatter some of his ashes in the waters of Scapa Flow, and we did in 2016. Waulkmill is on Scapa Flow where my dad had been stationed as a fourteen-year-old boy bugler on the battleships in 1939. He felt an affinity and a connection with the place. It was something of a totemic place representing the loss of his teenage years spent doing his bit in the defence of the country. It seemed right that he'd be sailing in and out on the tide there. I think of it often.

I'm not sure that authors perhaps realise how important their words can be, or how they can creep into a reader's imagination, invested with their own personal resonances and lodge there, ready to surface when required, but both Kathleen Jamie's books have done that for me and I doubt I'm the only one. So how apt, in that case, that the new collection is titled Surfacing.

 

Surfacing by Kathleen Jamie will be published in hardback in September 2019

'Under the ravishing light of an Alaskan sky, objects are spilling from the thawing tundra linking a Yup'ik village to its hunter-gatherer past. In the shifting sand dunes of a Scottish shoreline, impressively preserved hearths and homes of Neolithic farmers are uncovered. In a grandmother's disordered mind, memories surface of a long-ago mining accident and a 'mither who was kind'.

In this luminous new essay collection, acclaimed author Kathleen Jamie visits archeological sites and mines her own memories - of her grandparents, of youthful travels - to explore what surfaces and what reconnects us to our past. As always she looks to the natural world for her markers and guides. Most movingly, she considers, as her father dies and her children leave home, the surfacing of an older, less tethered sense of herself.

Surfacing offers a profound sense of time passing and an antidote to all that is instant, ephemeral, unrooted.'

I can't tell you how much I am looking forward to sharing it all with you.

Meanwhile, have you read Findings and Sightlines...

If so please do share your thoughts in comments...

And if not you have two incredible treats awaiting to help pass the time until September.

Oh yes, and one more Kathleen Jamie-related thing...

I happened to catch this delightful programme on Radio 4 Extra yesterday. The Whitsun Weddings, first broadcast in 1999...

A verse drama by Kathleen Jamie, based on the poem by Philip Larkin.

On a Whit weekend at the end of the 1950s, Philip Larkin caught a train from Hull to London which was boarded by a number of newly-wed couples.

He turned his observations about them into one of his best-known poems.

40 years later, three of the couples and the daughter of the fourth look back on the day to consider if its promises have been fulfilled.

 

It’s all made me revisit the poem...

 

That Whitsun, I was late getting away:

   Not till about

One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday

Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,

All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense

Of being in a hurry gone....

 

 

Anticipating...

Proof copies come and proof copies go, plainish covers giving little away, flagging up books ahead of publication, but of course they all come with dire warnings about 'not quoting without reference to the final copy' and then it's all a palaver to ask for a final copy, or hope one will be sent...or wing it and hope for the best.

If I'm honest only a small percentage make it through as 'of interest' and onto the 'anticipating' shelf, from whence there's another leap onto the 'pending' shelf, however five proofs (three from Bloomsbury, one from Harper Collins and one from Sort Of Books) have arrived in recent weeks that have all bucked the system. They are all bypassing and heading straight for the Must Read shelf. The next hurdle is that I have to really enjoy them before I will share thoughts on here so we're not home and dry yet. Publication dates are a way off , August and September but it's never too early to add them to your list and gee up the library system with a request is it...

The Offing ~ Benjamin Myers ( 22 August 2109)

My love for The Gallows Pole last summer was no secret and having since read Under the Rock (thoughts coming dreckly) by Benjamin Myers I was delighted when a proof of The Offing, his first novel since signing for Bloomsbury, arrived.

'One summer following the Second World War, Robert Appleyard sets out on foot from his Durham village. Sixteen and the son of a coal miner, he makes his way across the northern countryside until he reaches the former smuggling village of Robin Hood's Bay. There he meets Dulcie, an eccentric, worldly, older woman who lives in a ramshackle cottage facing out to sea.

Staying with Dulcie, Robert's life opens into one of rich food, sea-swimming, sunburn and poetry. The two come from different worlds, yet as the summer months pass, they form an unlikely friendship that will profoundly alter their futures.'

With comparisons already being made to J.L.Carr's A Month in the Country it's not hard to see why The Offing flew onto Must Reads of its own accord.

 

This is Happiness ~ Niall Williams (5 September 2019)

I had a wonderful run of reading Niall Williams a few years ago, Four Letters of Love , Only Say the Word, and As it is in Heaven swept me away on a tide of adoration. I read a few more and then seemed to be the only person to stumble over History of the Rain (did it start in the present tense...was I in an 'oh not the present tense' mood). I have plans to try again alongside Niall's forthcoming book This is Happiness

Change is coming to Faha, a small Irish parish unaltered in a thousand years.

For one thing, the rain is stopping. Nobody remembers when it started; rain on the western seaboard is a condition of living. But now – just as Father Coffey proclaims the coming of the electricity – the rain clouds are lifting. Seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe is idling in the unexpected sunshine when Christy makes his first entrance into Faha, bringing secrets for which he needs to atone. Though he can't explain it, Noel knows right then: something has changed. 

As the people of Faha anticipate the endlessly procrastinated advent of the electricity, and Noel navigates his own coming-of-age and his fallings in and out of love, Christy's past gradually comes to light, casting a new glow on a small world. 

Harking back to a simpler time, This Is Happiness is a tender portrait of a community – its idiosyncrasies and traditions, its paradoxes and kindnesses, its failures and triumphs – and a coming-of-age tale like no other. Luminous and lyrical, yet anchored by roots running deep into the earthy and everyday, it is about the power of stories: their invisible currents that run through all we do, writing and rewriting us, and the transforming light that they throw onto our world.

 

A Single Thread ~ Tracy Chevalier (5 September 2019)

What's not to love about a new novel from Tracy, especially when even the proof copy has a pair of those wonderful stork scissors on the cover..

'It is 1932, and the losses of the First World War are still keenly felt. Violet Speedwell, mourning for both her fiancé and her brother and regarded by society as a ‘surplus woman’ unlikely to marry, resolves to escape her suffocating mother and strike out alone.

A new life awaits her in Winchester. Yes, it is one of draughty boarding-houses and sidelong glances at her naked ring finger from younger colleagues; but it is also a life gleaming with independence and opportunity. Violet falls in with the broderers, a disparate group of women charged with embroidering kneelers for the Cathedral, and is soon entwined in their lives and their secrets. As the almost unthinkable threat of a second Great War appears on the horizon Violet collects a few secrets of her own that could just change everything…'

 

The Dutch House ~ Ann Patchett (24 September 2019)

I've had a patchy (sorry) reading relationship with Ann Patchett over the years and admittedly the Patchett shelf is a bit sparse, but I sense that this one is going to be a winner, and as always the arrival of a new book makes me revisit the backlist which I shall do...

'Danny Conroy grows up in the Dutch House, a lavish folly in small-town Pennsylvania taken on by his property developer father. Though his father is distant and his mother is absent, Danny has his beloved sister Maeve: Maeve, with her wall of black hair, her delicacy, her brilliance. Life is comfortable and coherent, played out under the watchful eyes of the house's former owners in the frames of their oil paintings, or under the cover of the draperies around the window seat in Maeve's room.

Then one day their father brings Andrea home: Andrea, small and neat, a dark hat no bigger than a saucer pinned over a twist of her fair hair. Though they cannot know it, Andrea's advent to the Dutch House sows the seed of the defining loss of Danny and Maeve's lives. Her arrival will exact a banishment: a banishment whose reverberations will echo for the rest of their lives. 

For all that the world is open to him, for all that he can accumulate, for all that life is full, Danny and his sister are drawn back time and again to the place they can never enter, knocking in vain on the locked door of the past. For behind the mystery of their own enforced exile is that of their mother's self-imposed one: an absence more powerful than any presence they have known. 

Told with Ann Patchett's inimitable blend of wit and heartbreak, The Dutch House is a story of family, betrayal, love, responsibility and sacrifice; of the powerful bonds of place and time that magnetize and repel us for our whole lives, and the lives of those who survive us.'

I did say five proofs but I think the fifth one probably needs a post of its own. But now all I need is some fine August weather, a recliner behind the summer house, 'someone' to bring me cooling drinks and tasty snacks and I think that's my Summer Staycation sorted.

 

 

The Lost Words ~ Spell Songs

Some of you might remember an evening that I will never forget because I did sing its praises quite loudly on here at the time. Bookhound and I had gone to London last year to hear Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris talking about The Lost Words. There was to be a musical interlude with a couple of the 'spells' set to music and I hadn't really given that bit much thought...probably a bit of twiddling on a mandolin and some folksy ear-holding singing. In fact we were the luckiest audience in the world because we heard Kerry Andrews' performance of 'Wren' and premiere of 'Bluebell'

I've just listened to this again and NOW, because we hear it every night, I hear the whirr of the barn owl in Kerry's music.

And (to steal another spell), from that 'acorn' something marvellous has grown.

The Lost Words Spell Songs.  'a new musical companion piece to The Lost Words book where musicians unfold the “dreams and songs” living within the pages of the book.... Eight visionary musicians, an astonishing book of magical spells - a chance to sing nature back to life...'

Karine Polwart, Julie Fowlis, Seckou Keita, Kris Drever, Kerry Andrew, Rachel Newton, Beth Porter and  Jim Molyneux have created something very special indeed and the minute I knew this was in the offing I had a copy on pre-order. Incidentally I've added links to the individual artist's websites because one of the glories of this project is the coming together of eight very talented and award-winning musicians who combine their talents to create and share as one.

 

To my delight, and something of a consolation having missed the Hay Festival events, Spell Songs arrived in the same week and I have been listening and reading ever since.

 

The CD is presented within a beautiful book and the result is frankly stunning. Encouraged to pursue their own musical trails with the spell songs, taking the words to new and different places, a collaboration of voices and fascinating musicality has emerged. Each artist brings their own unique interpretation and sound, but the skill is surely in the blending and the sharing, the creative connections, along with the generosity of spirit involved in letting others take centre stage when the music calls them. Surprising affinities emerged and these became increasingly apparent the more I listened...

 

Seckou Keita, plays the kora, an instrument from his native Senegal with twenty-two strings and a very unique and new (to me) sound and I defy anyone not to be singing 'Here hunts heroon' (intentional spelling there) and mentally filling in the 'twiddly bits'...

 

Or Willow... with Rachel Newton's unique (to me) pronunciation of 'willow'...

 

Willow when the wi-ind blows
Whisper while we listen so we learn what
    wordsyourlongleavesloosen

 

Whisper when the wi-ind blows
Listen for a day, a week ;til we know what
    the willows say, what willows speak...'

 

I'm humming along as I type that. There are a lot of words to squeeze into a line but then a willow seems like that sort of tree to me, often a great deal growing very fast in a small space.

 

Though Kerry Andrew, who gave the musical project its first premiere, had to leave because of illness, she has created a song that I was always going to love...Ghost Owl...

 

Silence

all silence

owl hunts in silence...

 

And as we watch 'our' barn owls hunting each evening, Kerry's voice and spell song are right there in my mind. Research has shown that barn owls are indeed silent flyers, something to which we can now testify.

 

'Will you listen with owl ears for a while?'

 

 

And I have listened with 'owl ears' to every song many times over and each has settled into place..

 

Kris Drever's  Little Astronaut, a tribute to 'Lark' ...

 

Kingfisher, Selkie Boy, Heartwood, The Snow Hare, Acorn, Conker...

 

By all accounts The Lost Words has grown into something entirely unexpected and heartwarming. Copies of the big book making their way into every primary school, children working on outdoor projects and writing  'spells' of their own, reconnecting with nature as a counter to the lure of the screen. Robert and Jackie created something very special and the magic lives on.

 

And isn't it always good to end with a Blessing...

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A Journal of the Plague Year ~ Daniel Defoe

I’ve been dipping into A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe having for years thought it was a sort of memoir only to discover it is fiction. I'm ridiculously proud of my Plague, Pestilence & Poisons shelf but I rarely go there or I might have known this.

This plague thing all started because I have been listening to Backlisted Pod whilst working away in the greenhouse growing for the garden (my give-it-a-go dahlia seeds morphed into about 150 plants which then became a bit of a crisis). I’m sure I'm very late to the party on all this and you all discovered Backlisted ninety episodes ago, but  if not you might like to seek it out. John Mitchison (of Unbound) and Andy Miller (author of My Year of Reading Dangerously) and a guest or two, share their thoughts and breath new life into an old, perhaps forgotten book and author and the result is a very entertaining hour of bookish chat. The rapport is splendid, the results both humorous and entertaining as well as informative. I’m there in the greenhouse scrawling down titles on old seed packets and getting all sorts of reading ideas, while Bookhound thinks I’ve got a gaggle of people in there having a great time. In fact it’s just me and my little Bluetooth speaker and 150 dahlias.

I’d listened to the Penelope Fitzgerald Human Voices episode, and the J.L.Carr Month in the Country episode,  before moving on to  A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe. I had started reading the book in readiness (which I find adds to the enjoyment) and of course means I can chip in as the discussion proceeds. My own observation about Daniel Defoe was a complete surprise to me, because having avoided 18th century literature and the pestilence shelf like...well, like the plague, I was actually really enjoying this book and beyond impressed at the details.

Despite the fact they didn’t really know what they were dealing with, or the disease’s true source or means of spread, Daniel Defoe has some forthright and sensible ideas about infection control in the eighteenth century. We tend to think of them as clueless when in fact far from it.

Isolation and confinement were key factors in his process. Now admittedly barricading people in their houses and then posting a guard outside was a bit barbaric but the principle was there. Keep infected people away from others and each house of infection would be 

’marked with a red Cross of a foot long in the middle of the Door, evident to be seen, and with these usual printed Words...’Lord have Mercy upon us’ to be set close over the same Cross.’

There had to be notification at the first sign ‘either of Botch or Purple, or swelling...’ within two hours  to the Examiner of Health.

There was also an extended period of no access to ‘infected’ houses for a month and contents had to be aired with the aid of ‘Fire and Perfumes’. No clothing or bedding could be sold or passed on for at least two months. 

Anyone who had knowingly been in contact with infected people or homes also had to be isolated. 

No infected person could be removed from an infected house unless it was to another house he owned and in which case the transfer must be done at night.

Likewise burial must be between sunset and sunrise and no neighbours or friends could attend and no children could come near. Graves had to be six feet deep.

And so it went on and it was all a complete revelation. 

I learnt all I know about infection control the hard way. As a student nurse, had I had the slightest penchant for cutting corners it would have been well and truly knocked out of me by a twelve week stint on Cohen ward, infectious diseases, at Gt. Ormond Street. Fortunately Sister Beech had already performed that painful task in my previous twelve weeks with her. Catching me idly diluting the Milton bottle sterilising tanks on the babies’ lockers one day (instead of carefully measuring each one) she made me go around with her and taste them all.  I didn't die exactly but I didn't have a very good day, and it all stood me in good stead for Cohen where my life probably did depend on doing things properly.

We tend to think we invented all this but writing in 1722, about the plague of 1665, it’s clear Daniel Defoe knew plenty.

Public gatherings were also seriously curtailed 

‘That all Plays, Bear-Baitings, Games, singing of Ballads, Bucklerplay, or such like Causes of Assemblies of People be utterly prohibited..’

Likewise ‘publick Feasting’ and ‘disorderly Tipling in Taverns’ ...

’be severely looked unto as the Common Sin of this Time and greatest occasion of dispersing the Plague.’

I plodded on hither and yon through the carnage until my plague interest had been sated, before reaching the fascinating medical note at the back of my OUP edition.

It would be 1894 before the transmission of plague via rats and fleas would be identified. Yersinia pestis lives in the digestive tract of the fleas who live off the black rat Rattus rattus and happily bite humans. The bacillus can survive in ‘excrement, old nests or even textile bales for up to a year in warm and humid conditions.’

By way of a local diversion I’m on the trail of the origins of a nearby church and its designation as a Plague Church. The story goes either that the children were shut in there to protect them whilst everyone else died and they were discovered in there alive by some monks...or were the adults shut in there to die to protect everyone else. The story has many versions and I’m no nearer discovering whether it is myth or fact, or a story invented for the Sunday School children. 

Anyway, this has all been a fascinating excursion that is leading me (eventually) towards The Ashes of London, the first in Andrew Taylor’s series of books about the Great Fire in 1666. Apparently the theory that this somehow caused the plague to abate holds no substance according to my OUP medical notes; the fire caused little damage in the places were the plague had wreaked the greatest havoc, public and private hygiene improves little, and rebuilding with brick and tiles rather than thatch and timber had little impact either. The simplest explanation may be herd immunity where the strongest have survived and the weakest have died, coupled with a milder mutation of the disease. In any case, and thankfully, it all but disappeared from the British Isles.

Anyone else suffer from an overwhelming interest in plague and pestilence, or is it just me...

Any good reading recommends...

And what about eighteenth century literature.. have I been wise to avoid it or am I missing a trick...

 

 

 

The June Odyssey

Well, I lasted precisely 4.25 days before bailing out of the Robert Fagles translation of The Odyssey and jumping back on board my beloved copy of Emily Wilson.

This for my book-a-day read through June.

Much as I loved the floppy comfortable feel of the book in my hand, with its deckle edges, Fagles felt too studious and academic (and complicated) for my needs, whilst Emily Wilson's translation is so readable and amenable  but no less challenging for a non-Homer person like me.

And I discover that, as I read last year, I wrote in life happenings, on odyssey of my own through the month of June 2018, so I'm adding in this year's events too.

I've sifted out a pile of related fiction, though have no idea how many (if any) I might read. I've discovered it is entirely possible to overdo this Greek reading theme. Maybe its the sheer volume of names and gods and their offspring, but nevertheless a great selection here when the fancy takes me.

Meanwhile wishing anyone else, who might be reading along on an Odyssey of their own, safe passage through the torrid events to come, no looking at the Gorgons now and take care navigating Scylla and Charybdis. 

 

The Wainwright Prize Longlist 2019

It's here, my favourite prize list of the year...

The 2019 Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize Longlist:

Underland by Robert Macfarlane (Hamish Hamilton)

Wilding by Isabella Tree (Picador)

Lanny by Max Porter (Faber & Faber)

Landfill by Tim Dee (Little Toller Books)

Time Song by Julia Blackburn (Jonathan Cape)

Our Place by Mark Cocker (Jonathan Cape)

How To Catch A Mole by Marc Hamer (Harvill Secker)

The Stopping Places by Damian Le Bas (Chatto & Windus)

Thinking On My Feet by Kate Humble (Aster)

Wild Woman Swimming by Lynne Roper (The Selkie Press)

Out of the Woods by Luke Turner (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

The Easternmost House by Juliet Blaxland (Sandstone Press)

Ghost Trees by Bob Gilbert (Saraband)

Maybe the book I am most thrilled to see alongside those I have shared thoughts on here,  Underland, Lanny and Timesong, is Wild Woman Swimming by Lynne Roper. Lynne lived locally and was a regular swimmer on Dartmoor until her death a few years ago. It was her dying wish that her swimming journal be published and hats off to Tanya Shadrick who honoured that wish, set up her own publishing company and made Wild Woman Swimming a reality.  Roger Deakin and Waterlog may have sowed the idea years ago, but it was Lynne Roper's inspiration, courage and enthusiasm that finally made me take the plunge in the River Dart last summer, and if it would warm up a bit I'll be having another dip this year too. I also know for a fact that several local friends have also read the book and dipped an unlikely toe in the moorland waters...I like to think Lynne would have been delighted.

I enthused a bit too much about the book to Offspringette, and my copy of the book went back to New Zealand with her at Christmas as a happy reminder for her of Dartmoor from 11,000 miles away. Meanwhile, huge congratulations to all the longlisted authors, and I see I have some catching up to do.

Have you read any of the longlist...

Any recommends...

Wild swimming anyone...

Good Listening...

I have listened to some brilliant audio books in recent months, mostly whilst making a quilt and sewing eight nine new sets of curtains for Tinker's Cott, and I can't for the life of me remember whether I have mentioned the books here or not. However they can all cope with some repetition, all excellent and though I don't take any notes so can't offer detailed descriptions, I can offer impressions. I sit and sew wearing my noise-cancelling head phones and am completely at the mercy of the book, so it has to be better than good and all these were.

Erebus The Story of a Ship ~ Michael Palin.

This was a recommendation from one of you and thank you for it because I absolutely loved every minute, helped no end by Michael Palin's narration.

Michael Palin – Monty Python star and television globetrotter – brings the remarkable Erebus back to life, following it from its launch in 1826 to the epic voyages of discovery that led to glory in the Antarctic and to ultimate catastrophe in the Arctic.

The ship was filled with fascinating people: the dashing and popular James Clark Ross, who charted much of the ‘Great Southern Barrier’; the troubled John Franklin, whose chequered career culminated in the Erebus's final, disastrous expedition; and the eager Joseph Dalton Hooker, a brilliant naturalist – when he wasn't shooting the local wildlife dead.

Vividly recounting the experiences of the men who first set foot on Antarctica’s Victoria Land, and those who, just a few years later, froze to death one by one in the Arctic ice, beyond the reach of desperate rescue missions, Erebus is a wonderfully evocative account of a truly extraordinary adventure, brought to life by a master explorer and storyteller.

 A case of not even knowing I was interested until I started listening, and for all us fans of his Monty Python days it wasn't hard to hear the humour in both the narrative and his voice as Michael Palin read. I was completely engrossed and of course reliving our wander around Stromness Museum on Orkney where John Franklin and the expedition to find him were both very evident. Each time I emerged from a sewing/listening marathon I'd update Bookhound on events in Antarctica and then the Arctic as Franklin goes missing. I made an uninteresting interesting discovery that Mrs Franklin's family lived in Bedford Place in Lonodn, in the house that is now the Penn Club. She was nothing if not persistent in the search for her husband...and of course the ships were finally found in 2014 and 2016, so the adventure of discovery and the story of Erebus and her sister ship Terror, lives on.

 

The Lost Man ~ Jane Harper

I have now read or listened to each of Jane Harper's three books and this one is the best so far for me, in fact superb...

'Two brothers meet at the remote border of their vast cattle properties under the unrelenting sun of the outback. In an isolated part of Australia, they are each other's nearest neighbour, their homes hours apart.

They are at the stockman's grave, a landmark so old that no one can remember who is buried there. But today, the scant shadow it casts was the last hope for their middle brother, Cameron. The Bright family's quiet existence is thrown into grief and anguish.

Something had been troubling Cameron. Did he choose to walk to his death? Because if he didn't, the isolation of the outback leaves few suspects...'

I was gripped and hot and thirsty and completely wrapped up in the sense of place, the hotter than hot Outback and a family full of secrets and mysteries with plenty of red herrings along the way. I didn't see the end coming until the characters did which is always a good sign.

 

Let Me Lie ~ Claire Mackintosh

Someone had read this at the village book group and recommended it so I downloaded the audio version and waded into the lives of the Johnson family. Both Anna's parents have committed suicide a year apart by jumping off Beachy Head, leaving their daughter grief-stricken and vulnerable. Anna marries Mark who she has initially gone to for bereavement counselling (big tsk about that) and they now have a baby, but the past keeps coming back to haunt Anna who becomes convinced that somehow her parents were murdered. Nothing is what it seems in this really cleverly plotted book by an author who was once a serving police officer. The twists keep on happening until the very last page, and no I didn't see those coming either.

 

Pompeii ~ Robert Harris

Another of your recommends and this one was a good old romp through the volcanic ash as the early signs started to create problems with the town's water supply. Of course I knew what was going to happen,but they didn't and I found it all fascinating and set against the backdrop of politics and slaves being fed to the eels and things. Robert Harris never fails, good books all.

Right, that's my listening but now I need some more recommends from you. We have welcomed our first guests into Tinker's Cott this week, the three months hard graft of preparation is done and so I can turn to some craft projects again...and more listening.

ON YOUR MARKS...GET SET...GO....

 

 

A Stranger City ~ Linda Grant

'It was impossible...to tell London's story; it was too large, too ancient, too many layers obscured, its stories were too contradictory, the the poor lives, in the journalistic phrase, cheek by jowl with the wealthy was a shallow simplification - the place simply defied narration.'

A copy of Linda Grant's new novel A Stranger City landed in my postbox by a stroke of good fortune because I'm quite careful about buying hardback fiction these days, and truth be told I wasn't that over-enthused about yet another London-centric, state-of-the-nation (bound to be) book (the last one I encountered was dreadful in more ways than I can detail here for now) when there's a whole lot more world to read about.  However, my Reading Friend had an advance copy on order and somehow two copies arrived. 'Would you like a giftette of the spare one?' came the message, 'Oh yes please,' went back the reply. By some miracle a hand-delivered copy appeared invisibly in our post box and I made a start, because our six-weekly-two-hour-non-stop-book-talk meeting was imminent.  None of this reluctance is to denigrate the centre, or the place, or the people who call it home, or the times we live in, it's just...well, you know. I'm losing touch with the capital as I get older and it gets increasingly expensive to get there, and stay there, and it isn't worrying me as much as it would have done, and I'd rather read about Antarctica or The Odyssey and go to art exhibitions in Penzance, so any book about real time London now has to sell itself to me very quickly.

It is February 2016 and the funeral of DB27 has just taken place over at Wanstead Flats east of the city. An unknown woman has jumped off London Bridge and police have been unable to find any trace of her. Detective Sergeant Pete Dutton has been investigating the case for seven months to no avail. One of the pall-bearers is busy bidding for a car on eBay (1965 Triumph Herald, colour olive and cactus, very unusual), Pete Dutton is late for the funeral and misses it, and a camera crew are filming events as part of a documentary about missing persons. I'd need to be sold by page thirty I had told myself before I opened the book, but as luck would have I was sold by page thirteen. DB27 ( Dead Body 27) buried in a deep pauper's grave where the coffins are layered, each life over-laying another it was clear I was in for a palimpsest of a read...or I'd just read too much into this space-saving method of burial about which I had no idea.

The plot is instant. Other people go missing, their lives will unfold and overlap, actual events are alluded to but never quite detailed, tragedies will happen, life will take a different track from the norm for some, others will have change imposed upon them, but each and every character is skilfully wrought, both human and knowable. To add to my enjoyment  this is a London well aware of its own shortcomings, delineating the difficulties of community, and the finding of and belonging to one in such a huge and seemingly faceless city. However another London is to be found just below the surface cracks, the London often hidden to outsiders. There is a timely reference to the hidden rivers of underground London, and likewise there exist those hidden but ever-present satellite communities, and when film maker Alan stumbles on one he has to work very hard to persuade his wife to move from their rented and centrally convenient but expensive rented flat to an old railway cottage..  

'Alan (and eventually even Francesca, who had stumbled and grazed herself badly against the double digits of the postcode) understood that this forgotten enclave behind the railway line was a tiny sequin in the fabric of London...'

Isn't that priceless. Francesca kicking and screaming against the move finally has to admit that perhaps there are benefits to this whole community thing after all and why not open a shop selling Persian rugs. Yes, why ever not.

Meanwhile the plot flows along, others, like Chrissie the nurse, live the peripatetic life of the flat share, or the room in a house, and with little sense of permanence and belonging other than, as Linda Grant suggests, in that 'most ephemeral place of all, online.' 

Of her many writerly skills one of Linda Grant's best, and one that I have come to associate with her, is the ability to cast a wry and perceptive eye for the humorous without being cruel. It's all about observation, seeing the amusing and then relaying it in subtle ways. I could mine the book for so many instances none of which would work out of context, but trust me I forgave all my own London misgivings as I read on. Humour is a tricky course to steer without descent into comedy but its presence in A Stranger City works and regularly grounds the book in the realities of life and sometimes their absurdities.

This brings me onto another of Linda Grant's specialities...fashion.

I'm guessing if I ever wrote a novel (I won't) it would probably major on illness and disease (human) and barn owls (I know a lot about them now). A Stranger City is liberally sprinkled with no barn owls but more fashion and cultural references than I knew existed. Google was my best friend for assuaging my ignorance about the Mies Van de Rohe chair, the Ligne Roset sofa, the Edwin Jeans,  Basquiat prints. There is Jo Malone in the bathroom (not Lidl's Handwash) the Hugo Boss suit (not M&S) hangs in the wardrobe, but these references are all about image and image matters. This is the world of parties and PR, about socialising and impressing people, and first impressions rely on image and cultural identifiers. I don't want to spoil the plot but suffice to say there is a moment when a mask is involved (for perfectly good reasons, not to rob a bank or anything) and for me this epitomised the invisible masks worn by each character in order to survive city life. In the end I was struck by the fact that the quest for community, and belonging to one, is probably no easier in rural Devon than it is in London, or Liverpool or Weston-Super-Mare, or anywhere. 

I mentioned  Chrissie the nurse, not the stereotypical nurse either, and I could write reams about her, it is my specialist subject along with barn owls after all, but suffice to say this moment crystallised it for me....

'On the wards people died, most often four in the morning, that's when the heart gives up at last, when there's no hope of dawn ever coming. She's sat by them and watched them leave and gone to tell someone who'd call to the family.'

Yes they do, yes it is, yes it does and yes you do... and many's the time I've sat alone with someone at that dawning final hour. I'd do the honours and then wander out and watch sunrise across London from the sluice and wish them well on their next journey. Linda Grant encapsulates that moment simply yet perfectly.

So there you have it. A Stranger City, and I survived this foray into London life as did my Reading Friend, both of us rating it a 'terrific' read over a pot of tea and toasted teacakes. Hie thee to library reservations if you are in the mood for a sensitive and well-written read for our times.

If perchance you have read A Stranger City I would love to know your thoughts...

And am I alone with my latter-day London literary aversion...

But what about 'old' London...any good reading recommends...

I've made a start on Fires of London by Andrew Taylor because I'm heavily into the plague and the city in 1666 and think this might be a fruitful reading trail...

By the way, in case you were wondering, this is a Basquiat print....

 

 

 

Simon Armitage - Poet Laureate

Having had a delightful ten years steeped in poetry and thanks in some part to Carol Ann Duffy, our last Poet Laureate, I am hopping around with delight at the selection of Simon Armitage as our next one.

I’ve made my way through much of Carol Ann Duffy’s oeuvre, even championed The World’s Wife on the radio ( A Good Read, some years ago now) and benefited hugely from the way that poetry is given greater exposure thanks to the Laureate’s different and developing role of providing more than an ode to mark a National Occasion. Mind you, weren’t we all grateful for Carol Ann’s reflections on David Beckham’s pre-tournament achilles heel injury...

Achilles
(for David Beckham)

Myth's river – where his mother dipped him, fished him, a slippery golden boy – flowed on, his name on its lips. Without him, it was prophesised,

they would not take Troy.

Women hid him, concealed him in girls' sarongs; days of sweetmeats, spices, silver songs . . .

but when Odysseus came,

with an athlete's build, a sword and a shield, he followed him to the battlefield, the crowd's roar,

and it was sport, not war,

his charmed foot on the ball . . .

but then his heel, his heel, his heel . . .

 

and I’m probably the only one who still reads and loves Ted Hughes’s Rain Charm for the Duchy., his 1984 'paean to the West Country rivers,' celebrating the occasion of Prince Harry’s christening. 

To digress, while we are on the subject of Odysseus you might remember that  through June last year I read a book a day of Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey and then told you afterwards (in case I didn't manage it). It was a marvellous reading experience, a wonderful summer journey and I'm planning to do it again this year though perhaps with a different version...maybe even Simon Armitage's. If anyone wants to read along too please do. There won't be any great literary merit to any posts...probably just occasional nice pictures of rosy fingered dawns, but it's always good to feel that I am part of something a bit bigger as I read. If you've always meant to tackle The Odyssey and never quite managed it, well this might be your incentive...that and the fact that the paperback edition of Emily Wilson's Homer is very covetable indeed.

Ted Hughes was frequently ridiculed and derided for accepting the laureateship, his poetry lampooned, but what a good job he did of dragging the role into the modern age, followed by Andrew Motion (who never quite took to it) then Carol Ann Duffy and now here we are with Simon Armitage and the whole thing thoroughly upgraded. This, from the Faber website cheered my heart no end 

'It’s a huge honour to be appointed Poet Laureate, one of the great high offices of literature. Over the past two decades the laureateship has become a working role, with previous laureates actively involved in the promotion of poetry and in numerous initiatives to identify and encourage talent, especially within education and among younger writers; I hope to build on the work of my predecessors with energy and enthusiasm.

Since the laureateship was first conceived many hundreds of years ago, Britain has changed enormously and the position of Poet Laureate has changed accordingly – I want to celebrate and speak on behalf of the variety of voices who contribute to the rich chorus of British poetry from a wide range of personal, literary and cultural experiences, and to help poetry explore its potential in a multifaceted, multivocal and multimedia age.

The poetry of these islands is one of our greatest achievements, and, as well as being proud of its traditions, I want poetry to feel confident and at home in the contemporary world and to demonstrate that, in a hectic and sometimes frenetic age, the combination of considered thought and crafted language is more relevant and vital than ever. I hope poets, readers and audiences will support me in my efforts.’

Yes, yes and yes, consider it done here and I have my Armitage shelf at the ready...

Last word to Matthew Hollis, Poetry Editor at Faber...

'Simon Armitage cut his own cloth from the outset. His boyish, fresh-faced poems made an unmissable impression upon the 1980s: political, tough-minded, astute, funny, realist and surreal in opposing measure. They persuaded readers that no barrier should curtail their adventure, no dogma and no gatekeeper. They spoke to the experiences of our streets and our schoolrooms, and walked around in the lives about us, marking a place for popular and literary cultures alike, freeing our vernacular from the locked cupboards of received learning....

It is more than a quarter-century since Faber & Faber became the proud publisher of Simon Armitage. Over that time he has led countless readers to new territories and made maps for a better nation. We cannot wait to see where he takes us next.'

 

Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile ~ Alice Jolly

Imbecile - A stupid person.

Mid 16th century (as an adjective in the sense ‘physically weak’): via French from Latin imbecillus, literally ‘without a supporting staff’, from in- (expressing negation) + baculum ‘stick, staff’. The current sense dates from the early 19th century.

I thought I'd better look up the meaning and origins of the word 'imbecile' because its one of those words that has floated along and possibly changed its inference down the years. I'd suggest used mostly as a form of friendly mockery or intense frustration of or with a. n. other person these days, but used quite seriously in Mary Ann Sate's day. Turning to Wikipaedia ...

The term imbecile was once used by psychiatrists to denote a category of people with moderate to severe intellectual disability, as well as a type of criminal.... It included people with an IQ of 26–50, between "idiot" (IQ of 0–25) and "moron" (IQ of 51–70).

What became clear as I read my way into this fictional 'found memoir' of the life and times of Mary Ann Sate was that she was none of these.

It was my pleasure to be invited to 'champion' a book from the current Rathbones Folio Prize short list prior to the announcement of the winner on May 20th, and I was delighted when my plea for Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile was granted. The book had crept quietly onto my radar not via the review pages because none had reviewed it, but via a couple of prize lists thus confirming the importance of their existence. Published by Unbound and therefore crowd sourced, Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile by Alice Jolly has been long-listed not only for the this prize and the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize but also commended by  the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. Yet no press reviews (until very recently) and its absence from the Women's Prize long list will remain a mystery to me, but then perhaps being passed over in this way segues well with the narrative of Mary Ann's life, because here is a book that gives a voice to the 'unheard' as the elderly maidservant Mary Ann Sate writes the  story of her life throughout the nineteenth century.

In 2008, in the very early days of the scribbles, I was invited by Oxford University Press to share a platform at the Oxford Literary Festival with Mark Thwaite and Professors John Mullen and John Carey. It was one of those nerve-wracking (for me)  'Bloggers v Critics' events when comparisons and inevitably criticisms of the latter day amateurs were being made and I was braced for the onslaught. We were seen to be scaling the ivory towers and it was all very contentious, however John Carey saw all this very differently (as you might expect from the author of  The Intellectuals and the Masses Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939)). He had read here extensively and was very complimentary about the way that the voice of the people was now becoming a matter of record. 'What we would give to hear the voices of the ordinary people from earlier centuries.. ' he said. At the time the scribbles were being digitally archived by The British Library as a social record for the future (they may still be, I gave permission).

Back in harness to a member of the family she has served in the past and who is now dying (painfully) Mary Ann Sate writes her own story alongside that of her 'master', though his takes second place to hers. Mary Ann privileges her own experiences, looking back on her life and creating tantalising shadows of events yet unknown and still to be explained. Set in the valleys around Stroud in Gloucestershire it quickly becomes clear that facial disfigurement is the cause of much misjudgement of Mary Ann's abilities and prejudice against her; she has been born with a cleft lip...

'A Devil Hare did cross your mothers' path...'

Destined to a live a life of struggle and servitude, first at The Heavens and then at Stocton Hall, where her employer Mr Harland Cottrell has taken her in as more of an interesting and useful oddity, there is little doubt that Mary Ann is in firm possession of all her faculties and no slouch at using them. Cottrell , a man of kind heart but uneven temper and possibly even more 'uneven' medical practice, employs Mary Ann as an unpaid servant and, against a backdrop of social change and civic unrest (Chartist riots, the 1832 Reform Act ) life in the mill town through Mary Ann's eyes is slowly but steadily revealed. Cottrell gives Mary Ann the opportunity of an education as well as repairing her cleft lip, and written in short stanzas the book  creates a vivid picture of the traumas and threats of change, and the dangers of the nineteenth century, especially for those living in poverty.  I was reminded of Hilary Mantel's words at Budleigh Literary Festival a few years ago...

'My greatest joy is to take a name and give them person-hood...a particle of being...doing honour to what is lost...'

Don't be phased by the size of the book at 600 pages, nor the vernacular which soon becomes familiar, nor the versified layout, but this was a book that required my full attention while I was reading it. I ended up setting everything else aside to concentrate on this one life, paying time to check into the spaces, the gaps that Alice Jolly creates in which to visualise the characters, the landscape, the work, the trials and the challenges, the smells and tastes too. And relishing the opportunity to get to know the indomitable and pragmatic Mary Ann.

The narrative is a tour-de-force, a stunning achievement, beautifully paced and measured, often as slow as the times, but how often have I looked at the tithe map and wondered about the people...seen the names in the village churchyard and conjured up the people here ...their life in this house, and yes, their deaths too. 

This is a book that transported me there and more.

There is a wonderful moment when Mary Ann realises she can read...

'Sudden it all clear as drops of dancing water
The words flow away from me
I know them all
My eyes fly down the lines
Inside I am leaping
For I can read

I leapt with Mary Ann because I wonder if you can remember the moment you knew you could read...I can. Literacy, never to be taken for granted in the nineteenth century, will be Mary Ann's shining glory and her greatest asset.

The impact of industrialisation and the threat it created for the workers is profound. There are no safety nets, life is precarious for many and punishment for protest and dissent is severe. Looking through the archives for our local press there are plenty of notices of transportation for poaching on the Duke of Bedford's land here too, as in Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile, many a villager dispatched to Van Diemen's Land. There is scorn for the lower orders and a mocking of new ideas, but Mary Ann is made of strong stuff. The poor woman's lot is not a happy one; powerless and subservient and at the mercy of one and all, but what she may initially lack in self-confidence Mary Ann makes up for in resilience and resourcefulness and most importantly survival.

Arguably there are parallels here with modern times, the impact of change, and progress in its name, on ordinary working people, on minorities (and majorities) and attitudes towards them, about giving them a voice and listening to it, about respecting their choices and decisions. It all made for a fruitful read as I made the comparisons with our Hour of Turmoil, and by the time I turned the final page I knew I had read something of a masterpiece. An epic six hundred pages of punctuation-less, sort-of-verse with beguiling rhythms and cadences that left me marvelling at Alice Jolly's skill and imagination and staying power. This is diligent, careful writing with astute attention to details, it has a sustained rhythm and flow which doesn't falter and must have required complete immersion and vision to write, and several years of it too.

In the end the book is written, Mary Ann has used her voice and recounted her life in her own way and knowing that it will soon be over...

'For we are but tenants here
A wind that passeth doth not return'

Except Mary Ann Sate and all those lost voices she represents have returned, in the pages of this book. In the immortal words of Hilary Mantel ' you are not dead if someone still talks about you.'

I wish Mary Ann (and Alice Jolly) much good fortune at the announcement of the prize winner on Monday.

 

 

The English Patient ~ Michael Ondaatje

Twenty-seven years since it won the Booker Prize in 1992 (maybe check my maths as usual) twenty-two years since I read The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje in 1997, a lot happened that year, more or less in this order from January...

I started six years of an OU degree in English Literature...

My mum died...

I had a full-time health visiting caseload of about 400 children...

I was sub-poenaed to give evidence in court in a child protection case concerning a family the multi-agency services had been working to bring back together for two years. It wasn't going to happen. It was awful...

Our own children were sixteen, fourteen and twelve...

We had moved house three years previously and it was a renovation work-in-progress...

I've checked my reading journal. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy won the Booker prize and though I didn't read it, I did read sixteen others in that year.

Just sixteen books, how different my life was then to now. 

Amongst the books I read that year were The Crow Road by Iain Banks, Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks, The Magus by John Fowles, Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood and of course The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje.

Truth be told I really didn't quite follow or understand The English Patient in 1997, though seeing the film helped, and looking back I think this is hardly surprising because, having just read it for a second time, I can see it is a book that demands peace and quiet and above all thinking space. It's a book to put down and carry on sitting and pondering, not grabbing a chapter in my car in my lunch break whilst out on my visits and then rushing back for a baby clinic. 

Four war-damaged people holed up in a villa, once a nunnery, near Florence towards the end of the war. The German retreat has been considered and brutal. The countryside is laced with landmines and booby traps at every turn and whilst Sikh sapper Kip ('the warrior saint')  sets about defusing more of them each day back in the villa Hana cares for 'the English Patient'. The anonymous man so badly burned that he is unrecognisable and clearly dying. Into the mix comes David Caravaggio (thief, drug addict and now thumbless after Nazi torture) a character along with Hana who both first appeared in Michael Ondaatje's 1987 novel In the Skin of a Lion.

What I may have missed first time around I gleaned by the shovel-full this time. 

Hana, the young nurse traumatised by what she has witnessed and grieving for the loss of her father epitomises so much else that has been lost through war...trust, faith, love, home, safety, security and more.

Slowly the story of the English patient emerges, and here I really don't want to spoil the book in case you haven't read it, but whilst I missed the nuances and maybe even the plot last time, this time I was right on it. And thinking too about how cultish elements of this book became...

Wasn't it fashionable to clutch a copy of Herodotus and stick ephemera in amongst its pages...

Maybe Michael Ondaatje, along with Bruce Chatwin and his Moleskine notebooks, were partly responsible for a resurgence in popularity of  the commonplace book, the journal...

'And in his commonplace book, his 1890 edition of Herodotus's Histories are other fragments - maps, diary entries, writings in many languages, paragraphs cut out of other books. All that is missing is his own name.'

This time around The English Patient has stunned me, been welded to my hands for two days. It's a truly timeless classic. Michael Ondaatje creates a living and visible tableau in a place once given to devotion, silence and prayer, and something of its essence hangs in the air. For all its slow revelation of traumas there is a quietness to the book that soaks them up, absorbing the pain.

There were moments of deep peace too. Moments that surprised me...

When the gramophone is brought into the room, the music plays and the four have an impromptu party. I played some of the tracks...Solitude by Duke Ellington and Honeysuckle Rose by Django Reinhardt and Stefan Grappelli, doubling down into the atmosphere of the book and the moment like no other.

And thinking too how the internet has made all this possible. How much enjoyment it can add to a book to be able to play the music, or track down a poetic account of the stars and discover that it is from Paradise Lost...

These then, though unbeheld in deep of night
Shine not in vain, nor think, though men were none
That Heav'n would want spectators, God want praise
Millions of spiritual creatures walk the Earth
Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep.

Fewer people might have known that when the book was published.

And then the war must end with Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Kip, the disposer of bombs, is undone and with it came a sudden and profound awareness of that August day. 

So there you have it. The English Patient a book that has read differently as the cadence of my life has changed, and finally I understand what the rest of the world has been going on about all this time.

I'd love to know your memories, experiences and thoughts about reading this book...

 

 

 

 

Girl ~ Rebecca Goss - Poet

The Certificates

Mothers were not given space to write their occupations on UK
birth certificates until 1984. Source : General Register Office

The registrar takes his pen, tips its freight
of permanent ink to write Poet in the space
that did not exist beside my mother's name.

or my grandmother's name. Those bloody
sweat-drenched women sent back to hearth
and cradle, their skills cancelled, never known...

 

I have been reading Rebecca Goss's new collection Girl, (following on from the post about Her Birth earlier in the week) is from the cover information...

'In Girl, Rebecca Goss considers the emotional and physical connections women make to the world around them. The poems interrogate and celebrate female identity and experience, and the dynamics of family and friendship. From a woman struck by lightning to a baby who understands shadows, Goss navigates the real and the imagined with equal flair. At the heart of the collection is a distinctive, sensual series of poems responding to the work of the artist Alison Watt: the result is a fearless exploration of the female body and female desire. '

The collection is still very new to me and it will be a while before I can absorb it, but I'm sensing that affinity with a poet who has already made an impression. I'm thinking how new collections from the likes of Jean Sprackland and Alice Oswald quickly make their mark. The range and scope of Girl still feels vast and untamed to me at the moment, still unfamiliar as do all new collections, but poems are starting to impress and stay with me just as Her Birth did.

If you have ever had pleurisy then reading the series on pleurisy might resonate. Pleurisy 1 reminded me quite how awful it was...

At its most acute
she pictured an orb

phosphorescent
in a snare of a rib.

It eased to the pressure 
of a handstand,

executed
by someone fully grown

on her chest
and every cough

discharged small bombs
across her back....

I succumbed to pleurisy out of nowhere one fine day in August back in 1986 standing in a friend's kitchen. One breath fine, the next agony. I eventually went to the doctor with my 'pulled muscle' and emerged with antibiotics the size of torpedoes and had to set a timer to make myself cough every thirty minutes because it was so painful. I'd been walking round with three small children and pneumonia and had no idea, because aren't you always a bit tired and under the weather with three of them under school age. The pain, those 'small bombs' across the back, lasted for months. Rebecca Goss describes it all in five exquisite poems spaced throughout the collection.

And then that poem The Certificates I have quoted at the beginning...

My mother had four children in a decade,
each certificate proving nothing but birth.
My lineage? Patriarchal : father/farmer...

I don't want to spoil it because there is a delicious twist in the next few lines, but had I ever noticed that only one of our children's birth certificates has my occupation written in. The one born in 1985...

We keep the full copies here. I dig them all out to check and I am utterly astonished.

Did I think to consider it an injustice at the time.

These are definitely poems to make me think.

 

 

Barn Owl ~ Jim Crumley (and meet ours)

Let's be honest, I was duty-bound to do some pleasurable barn owl homework, and this little beauty, Barn Owl one of the 'Encounters in the Wild' series by Jim Crumley, published by Saraband Books, was a very happy find and a very enjoyable read.

Some time ago I wrote about The Company of Swans by the same author, a book that deservedly sits on my Best Books About Nature shelf and Barn Owl will join it.

Just to update...

Having seen two owls in the pole box we have only been seeing one for a few weeks now. By all accounts this is a 'Good Sign' suggesting that Mr is doing the foraging whilst Mrs sits on a clutch of eggs. Out he pops at about 9pm, and sits and ponders for a while. I walked up the field behind the house and the box just to get an idea of his view ...

Not bad...

Then he takes to the wing. We walk out along the lane and he flies over and around us, and back and forth to the nest box. As the light fades everything everyone writes about barn owls happens. Jim Crumley calls them 'ambassadors for life on the edge...the silent flier...'

They look so small and compact perched on their veranda...

and then she pops back in and he lifts off, and we see these huge wings.

Everything else that flies around us here has an audible flutter or beat to its wings, but not the barn owl, completely silent as it glides. And yes, he does turn his head around 180 degrees.

Watching barn owls on the Isle of Skye, Jim Crumley doesn't quite enjoy the luxury of the warmth of the bathroom vantage point that we do, which makes me realise that it might be quite unusual to sit and watch barn owls in such comfort (the Kayaker did a shift with his camera over Easter). But likewise, on a moonlit night, Jim is transfixed by his 'rarefied barn owl watching' as the owl ...

'flew around two sides of the cottage ...and burst with devastating slowness and silence into that tingling airspace...'

Wondering where ours was one evening last week I nipped across from the bathroom to look from a bedroom window at the front of the house. Acres of beautiful barn-owl friendly fields and I was hoping for a glimpse of him flying.

Nothing...

I opened the bedroom window to lean out a bit and he took off from the roof above my head. I didn't quite fall out with the excitement of the moment, but he'd obviously been perched there and me oblivious.

Jim Crumley recounts many-an astonishing encounter with Tyto alba, summoning up the most vivid impressions of a bird once met never forgotten. Bookhound and I have become complete Barn Owl Bores, except people around us here seem to be pleased and interested and more boxes will be going up I'm sure. We all thought they had long deserted this patch of the Tamar Valley so to see them back is heartening, but the book explains the cycle, the field vole 'crash' and 'plague' population phenomenon and the barn owls dependence on this food source. In a vole 'plague' year the owls will start breeding early and lay big clutches (oh please), maybe even try for several broods, whilst in the 'crash' years they decide not to breed. It will be too much like hard work finding food and they know it. The figures are startling, the barn owl's intelligence and resilience incredible.

So far we have only found one pellet. Barn owls cough up the undigestible left-overs from a meal in pellet form and make their nest from them, Jim calls it 'architectural recycling'. We suspect Mrs Barn Owl might be sitting on a veritable mattress of them up in that there pole box. And yes of course we dissected it...

I was intrigued by Jim Crumley's suggestion that badgers and barn owls are 'kindred spirits of the half-light and the half-dark, we'd call it the dimpsey, but of course they are. Nor did I know that badgers 'insist on the proximity of water' which explains the location of the setts around us here. We often see one lumbering along the lane at night, but Jim's account of the badger cub and the barn owl wins the day...maybe the barn owl is an unearthly sight even for a badger, they know to keep their distance.

But the modern world is fraught with dangers and hazards and Jim Crumley's elaboration of those had me wincing. HS2 the new high speed rail link from London to Birmingham...

'predicts the loss of the entire barn owl breeding population within 1.5km of the entire length of the route'.

The population is further decimated by rat poison, all of which makes doing our best by our pair even more important. In any case we've limited our own use of poisons and pesticide for a while now, and there will be no slug pellets this year either (I'm currently experimenting with coffee grounds), but we can't control what happens beyond our boundaries. Having spoken to the Barn Owl Trust to ask how we could help create optimum barn owl habitat, we then contacted the land agent (who agreed it was a good idea) and the farmer who rents the grassland around us (who hasn't replied) to ask if he would consider leaving a margin around the field behind the pole box when he cuts the grass. If we are here on the day they do it I'll go out and lie down in front of it or something.

Jim Crumley highlights the good conservation work being done by many of the organisations, and how grateful we are to the Barn Owl Trust for their endeavours with the Westmoor project here nine years ago. They are hoping to come and open the inspection hatch and look inside the box in June...if there are owlets apparently they are 'pretty bomb proof' by then. Fingers crossed, and meanwhile for the nearest next best thing to actually watching them, Jim Crumley's book is a winner...oh yes and then there's this (with thanks to Tommy Hatwell)

Her Birth ~ Rebecca Goss

Reading the new collection Girl by Rebecca Goss (my thoughts coming up later this week) has taken me back to the first collection 'Her Birth' which wowed me back in 2013.  I was just going to link to it, then I thought I'd just pull out an extract, but in the end I've almost made myself cry remembering how moved I was by this book, so with no apology, here's the whole lot; here are my thoughts from five years ago..

'In 2007 Rebecca Goss’s newborn daughter Ella was diagnosed with Severe Ebstein’s Anomaly, a rare and incurable heart condition. She lived for sixteen months. Her Birth is a book-length sequence of poems beginning with Ella’s birth, her short life and her death, and ending with the joys and complexities that come with the birth of another child. Goss navigates the difficult territory of grief and loss in poems that are spare, tender and haunting: ‘Going home, back down / the river road, will be a foreign route without her’.

Now when you learn of the subject matter you might think this collection would be far too sad to read and maybe pass it by for those reasons ..

...and I'll admit that reluctance was my first thought, quickly followed by my second thought. After my release from thirty years on the health visiting front line, followed by four years of working across the loss and bereavement forums as on online health visitor for Netmums and having only just emerged from the stresses and demands of all that, well did I really want to read more of the same??

And during my first golden summer of not working might this be a little too much like work...

All this until I opened and started reading what I think maybe one of the most beautiful, tender and lovingly written poetry collections I have read in a very long time.

Though unflinching and courageously honest in her observations, Rebecca Goss never slips into self-pity. As a reader I was alongside her but still watching from afar...somehow she created that distance for me, or maybe I am too well practised at boundaries. This wasn't my grief or my sadness it was Rebecca's, but I was witness to it, every facet and nuance shared and revealed, the unsayable frequently voiced, but often in a very new way.

Who ever gives any thought to the hospital room where the bad news is broken...

'No tabloids, no vending cups, no debris
of the bored and hungry, Instead
carpet, fireplace, neat homely items. 

'This is not the room where you wait for news,
this is the room where you are told it.'

And instantly, after all those years of nursing, I saw something about that room which I had never noticed before either.

There are fresh new interpretations of the familiar, the happy things, but expressed in terms of loss rather than the more customary joy and frivolity. The moment when, during an echocardiogram bubbles are wafted around the room to distract Ella...

'.................Keep clear spheres

coming around her head, wanting them to last,
each pop a small, inexplicable loss.'

...and with those few lines I felt I understood something of the desperation of a parent willing the results to be optimistic, willing their child to live.

Rebecca is no stranger to denial. The bare facts have been explained, spelt out, drawn in diagrams, cannot be avoided, but that won't stop a mother swathing herself in hope, reading meaning into the words in the dictionary, turning to the word 'palliative' and then shaping that meaning into something she would prefer to hear. 

And then the dreams, I defy anyone not to be moved or comforted by Rebecca's A Dream of Heart Babies ( a poem for their mothers)  as gathered on the deck of a ship 'a shoal of heart babies' slip into the sea

'in a search for chambers more complex than coral.'

Hauled back into the ship, the catch, the babies,

'Each one cups a new heart...'

I gasped and blinked back tears and knew that Her Birth is a poetry collection freighted with riches; insight and understanding to those of us who may not have been through this experience, congruence and comfort to those who have, but ultimately I suspect every reader will also emerge uplifted, lighter of step and filled with bright hope for tomorrow. This is not a book that weighs you down.

Rebecca Goss makes sure of that with her final section entitled Welcome. It begins with a poem that explains why she and her husband decide to try for another baby, before going on to catalogue the realities of the next pregnancy with all its memories of the past...

'The midwife holds a file, the sad biography
of my procreative life. My ability to bear 
the unhealthy means the doctor must locate
a lump of thumping muscle...' 

Along with the fears that I remember so many mothers expressing so often after the loss of a baby, there is another one, of how to love the next baby as much..

'I am hoping I will love you
each time I find you, usurping another's cot.'

The clothes, the birth, the shadows of Ella as Rebecca cradles Molly, how to eventually tell Molly about her sister. the true pleasures and delights of a child who is well, the pilgrimage to the seashore, wading into the sea where Ella's ashes were scattered, but ultimately how time, though it's considered the worst thing to say to anyone, does do its work, and heals..

'Come and hold my hand, little one,
stand beside me in your small shoes,

let's head for your undiscovered life,
your mother's ready now, let's run.'

 

Milton Place ~ Elisabeth de Waal

Of Persephone's 132 books, I counted over 100 that take as their foundation England and English-ness. It has been a fruitful source for Persephone over the last twenty years. Reclaiming forgotten writing by women and bringing it back into print; reminders of fascinating periods in our country's history when women's lives and voices were frequently subsumed by the clamour, whilst at the same time exposing the struggles and challenges in the light of our twenty-first century English sensibilities. There's plenty of harmless nostalgia for those that seek it too and me, I do love a book about a country house.

So when the latest Biannually arrived, and I saw that the two new books were a second volume of short stories and Milton Place by Elisabeth de Waal, a previously unpublished novel about a large house in the country in the 1950s.  I ordered a copy of each immediately because I had read and loved The Exiles Return and will bring that post back up into the light soon whilst I have Elisabeth de Waal in mind. More about the book of short stories soon too.

Critiques quoted in the magazine included this from Elisabeth de Waal's friend the philosopher Eric Voegelin, to whom she had sent the unnamed manuscript for Milton Place and in whose archive it was discovered...

'In brief, you are in love with England - the England that is dying. In sum, this novel is a fine piece of work.'

Milton Place with its themes of...

'the decaying country house with rooms shut up and faithful retainers, the newcomer, the two terrible daughters, the echoes of The Go-Between ...

and a novel that has lain unnoticed in that archive in California since 1967.

My introduction to Elisabeth de Waal first came whilst reading The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal (Elisabeth's grandson) and I have returned to that memorable book to reacquaint myself with her early life.

Born in 1900 and the eldest of four children of Viktor and Emmi  von Ephrussi and one of Vienna's foremost Jewish banking families, the descriptions of Elisabeth's privileged childhood in the Palais Ephrussi in Vienna are fascinating.

'The children are driven in the carriage for a daily walk with the English nannies in the Prater, where the air is less dusty than the Ringstrasse. A footman comes too, walking behind in a fawn greatcoat and wearing a top hat with an Ephrussi badge stuck on it...'

The prettier sister (Gisela) always preferred as a sitter for a portrait or a photograph, Elisabeth's prescribed time with her mother, being read to, being allowed to play with the netsuke. At fourteen Elisabeth is described as 'a serious young girl who is allowed to sit at dinner with the grown-ups.' She listens to politicians and bankers, she builds up her own library, she desperately wants to go to university and works hard to achieve an education thanks to the help of a private tutor. With the family's wealth decimated by the First World War there is, in the words of Edmund de Waal, a 'huge falling away' and he senses 'intimations of nostalgia' that surround the keeping of things...

'You keep this silver snuff box...you keep the bracelet given by a lover. Viktor and Emmy kept everything - all these possessions...but they lost their sense of a future of manifold possibilities. This is how they were diminished.'

Elisabeth, in 1919 now studying philosophy, law and economics at Vienna University, strikes up a correspondence with one her poetic heroes, Rainer Maria Rilke, sending him some of her own poetry and receiving constructive ideas in response. Eventually graduating and moving to America and meeting and marrying a young dutchman Hendrik de Waal, the new family will settle in Paris between the wars and later in Switzerland, from where Elisabeth has to watch traumatic events unfold at home. At the end of the war the family will move to England and settle in Tunbridge Wells. These chapters in The Hare With Amber Eyes still bring tears to my eyes along with memories of the tears we all shed when Edmund de Wall read from them (at my request) when I interviewed him at Port Eliot Festival.

I'm re-reading them now to get a fuller picture of the author of Milton Place and with it comes a deeper understanding of her life, and quite how she might have been able to tune herself so harmoniously into the nuances of an English country house.

I'm hoping I've brought us back to where we started 600 hundred or so words ago because Milton Place, among the best of Persephone's books that I have read, held me in its thrall over a weekend of uninterrupted reading.

Mr Barlow, lives a quiet and undemanding life in this big old house with the support of staff...the butler, the housekeeper, the gardener and chauffeur, and two married daughters hovering like helicopters stage left ready to step in and organise his life for him whenever the opportunity arises. Milton Place is a house with a personality, a character in the book..

'The great house hung like a vast garment many times too big for the shrunken stature of its diminished inhabitants...'

When a letter arrives from Vienna, from the daughter of an old flame, and memories of unrequited love are rekindled, Mr Barlow has no hesitation in granting Anita Seiler's request to come and stay for while in order to recover from the traumas of her war experiences. 

Elisabeth de Waal creates such astute and observant portrayals of character that I can't help but feel those skills had their origins at the dining table of Palais Ephrussi; so much so that she made it possible for this reader to slip into the shoes of each of them in turn...

Mr Barlow, who resists all interference from his daughters responding to any attempts at change with a firm and quiet resolve...

Anita who equally quietly invests her time and love into bringing Milton Place back to life....

Daughters Emily and Cecilia, both threatened in different ways by this interloper...

Cecilia's eighteen-year-old son Tony who has spent much of his life at Milton Place in the school holidays and with the arrival of Anita...

Anita, grateful for a place of quiet refuge and keen to offer something in return, sets about opening up each room in the house. Dusting off and reinstating the many possessions, displaying them to their best, and I couldn't help but think about Viktor and Emmy and the moment when the Gestapo take over and ransack Palais Ephrussi...

'This is the strange undoing of a collection, of a house and of a family. It is the moment of fissure when grand things are taken and when family objects, known and handled and loved, become stuff.'

It is Mr Barlow's 'stuff' that Anita reinstates...is it too far-fetched to invest Elisabeth de Waal's imagined restoration of that beloved house in Vienna into her fictional account of the restoration to life of a house in the English countryside?

Released from the dust sheets and a state of benign neglect, the house breathes and the heart of Milton Place starts to beat again, becoming a gentle and therapeutic restorative, a place of renewal and rejuvenation for both Anita and Mr Barlow, and a period of intense calm and happiness will follow. And not forgetting young Tony who completes this triangle of affection, though a truly tangled web of emotions will ensue. When outspoken and controlling daughter Emily decides its time for things to change, and puts her plan into action (no spoilers but a truly 1950's 'English' method and solution) it is clear that there will some unravelling for all concerned. When her sister Cecilia, abused cowed and coerced by her  domineering GP husband, comes to stay, well, expect fireworks.

For all Elisabeth de Waal's European origins Milton Place is quintessentially and quirkily English and I loved it all the more for that. Many of our country houses have been demolished, and those that remain in family ownership often require good stewardship and lateral thinking in order to survive. Peter Stansky, writing in the afterword to the book suggests this...

'What also means a lot is the sense of position, responsibility and moral values that are often embodied in an English estate - if it is well run. Mr Barlow is a good man and his house is part of that equation.'

And at one point this from Elisabeth de Waal, about the weather, seemed to sum our nation up quite well...

'Its vagaries may possibly have some part in fostering the innate love of a gamble so characteristic of these islanders, making them a nation of happy winners and philosophical losers...'

Persephone Books suggest of Milton Place, that just as it was turned down by three publishers in the 1960s, so they will 'struggle to get its excellence recognised' in 2019.  I honestly can't think why because to my mind it's up there with the best they have published in twenty years, and I doubt I'll be the only one to think that.

Thoughts from Team Underland...

I thought we'd stay with Underland for a while longer, especially as Robert Macfarlane is reading it for Book of the Week on Radio 4 at the moment.

I made contact with Team Underland, the small group who helped me through those years of doing Port Eliot Festival, and who have all been reading the book. We keep in touch and meet up several times a year and many of you might remember the Knit Angel. Liz made all those wonderful 'knitsuke' that we gave to all the authors who came to the dovegreyreader tent...who can ever forget Edmund de Waal and the very first one, a knitted hare with amber eyes..

 

or William Fiennes and his knitted snow geese.

Photographer Martin Parr took home a knitted camera, Brian Selznick a knitted 'Brian', a version of himself and there were countless other wonderful things. Robert Macfarlane actually took home a 'quiltsuke' after we had talked about The Old Ways in 2012...

I had made him a little quilted map of Lewes and the Shiants (quilted with glow-in-the-dark thread).

Though I think my favourite picture might be of Robert's well-worn boots..

I had asked Robert, during our conversation, about his next book and now here we are, seven years later, reading it

Liz can't be with us when Team Underland meet in Hay in May, but sent us her thoughts on the book. Like me she had done a slow reading and kept notes, allowing her mind to wander off wherever the book may lead, and it has been fascinating to read the impact of the book on another reader who is also a good friend. I will catch up with her in Exeter very soon for a proper conversation about it, but meanwhile (with her permission) I thought I would share Liz's thoughts here...

Thank you for the blog Lynne, what a wonderful book, I had been expecting a dark , dour looking volume, that somehow reflected the lack of light, dampness, cold and claustrophobia.

However, to my delight I received this bright, joyous, inferno coloured book, skeletal branches through which the bright blue sky is tantalisingly visible. I am now aware of the meaning of the picture and it does colour my first impressions but I still love it!!!

The "first chamber" echoed Dylan Thomas, the Summer Bright "Bees browsing, drowsy over meadow grass" was the antithesis  to "Coal Black".

I have loved Dylan Thomas since childhood so I knew I would be in safe hands here - I just had to trust!!!!

I suffer terribly from claustrophobia and worried that I might find the book too hard to bear. There were many times during the reading that I was breathless, but any struggles to read on were put aside because for me this was a fantastic page turner, I wanted to find out and to know what happened. The beauty and the horror, the awe, the thrill of the adventure,

Amongst the horror though he described such gut wrenching beauty too - the red ochre hands and the burial of the young woman and her child, doubly cradled by mother and swan feathers!!!!!!!

I had absolutely no idea the extent of what we have been shoving into the ground, or the ongoing space science - any of it, so for a dark world it's certainly opened my eyes to the clandestine activities and the carelessness that we have shown our planet and the mess we are leaving for the future - I am so happy that we are now thinking there is a future and we can influence that - trying to devise signage to warn future peoples of potential hazards is so tricky though.

I wrote notes during my reading though, so I can refer back to things and like Lynne I did follow up some things - for instance, the music mentioned in various chapters - generally not my taste but probably when you are terrified and submerged they take on a whole new meaning.

It has been such a gorgeous privilege that I wanted to say something as I won't be with you all at Hay.

Please thank Robert for letting us have this opportunity and opening my eyes in such a lyrical manner.

As I was reading words beginning with the letter 'T' kept popping into my head and so I wrote them down and feel I want to share them with you....

Tingling, Tight, Taut, Terrifying, Thrill, Tick-Tock-Time, Twist, Turn, Tempt, Thoughts, Trust, Tension, Tied, Tides, Tether, Tremble, Tremor, Trip, Tilt, Tunnels, Turquoise, Tumbling, Terrorism, Tolerance.

From these words I can just about relate them back to the chapters.

Oh well sorry if it's all a messy ramble that doesn't make sense - in essence I thought it was a b****y good read.

Lots of love to you all...

 

And Fran, another Team Underland-er (who always organised our flower show entry at Port Eliot Festival with much laughter and vast amounts of imaginative flair), left this wonderful comment on Monday's post so I'm cut and pasting her thoughts here too, and my thanks to Fran as always for her support and perceptive insights...

When my copy of Underland arrived I too set it aside until the New Year was well over, yet winter still had some way to go. The orange cover glowed like a beacon as it sat atop a bookstack drawing me in, asking to be opened. Anything by Robert Macfarlane was going to be a joy, [although I did have some initial doubts about going underground, not a place which in all honesty appeals to me] but it was something to anticipate, and also to savour the first read of, not gulp it down as I am want to do when I enjoy a writer. I was determined to take this one slowly, one chapter at a sitting. So I worked my way through each extraordinary journey RM takes, going into places I am sure most of us were not even aware of...until now, and this book.

"The underland keeps it's secrets well." We so often look up; trees, stars, birds, clouds. We rarely look down, then only as far as our feet and the ground, do we ever consider what lies beneath?

This is a genre of book I love, as it sends me off in so many different directions. Linking up with things I have already read, reading on and around. Writing lists of new-to me -words, looking up photos of the places mentioned. This was so much more; the descriptions of places RM walked, climbed, slithered and slid into was beyond all expectations. With each chapter whole new worlds and ideas were opened up to me with the vivid and descriptive prose. It is well known that RM is a wonderful wordsmith; his ability to describe a place totally foreign to the reader yet they can 'see' it as they read is something I try not to take for granted. What a gift it is. Yet this is far, far more than another book of landscape writing. It has it all; daring do and adventure, profound thought and reflection on what we as a human race have created, what we need to do to preserve and protect, resilience, memory, the past, the present and the future. It's all there and more.

I had an instance of synchronicity whilst reading. Just the day before starting chapter 4, The Understory I had listened to a radio programme about the 'wood wide web'. And there I find him discussing the very same thing with Merlin Sheldrake, a phrase used by his old friend Roger Deakin as well. Reading on about trees which fused together I recalled a passage relating to intertwined tree roots from Captain Correlli's Mandolin sometimes used in marriage ceremonies. A few pages on and there is RM using the very same quote.

Just trying to distil my thoughts into this comment has taken awhile. It will take a lot longer to fully comprehend all the facets of taking a journey into deep time. But it is one I am profoundly grateful to have been taken on, and hopefully will be returning to further explore along with others very soon.

 

Underland - A Deep Time Journey ~ Robert Macfarlane

'The way into the underland is through the riven trunk of an old ash tree...'

I have long held with something akin to veneration the huge ash tree that sits so proudly at the top of Higher Hill. We walk along the parish boundary stream and up along  the steep sides of Combe Park Meadow, now woodland and today a mass of bluebells. We pass the deep holes of badger setts wondering whether they are sleeping immediately beneath our feet, before crossing the bank into Great Field and Lower Hill at which point the ash tree becomes visible. I've even taken (this might be a little excessive) to calling it Yggdrasil, the eternal green ash tree of Norse mythology, whose branches stretch out over all of the nine worlds, because sometimes. when you stand underneath it you get a very powerful sense of a single tree's import, and to that end it is stitched into my Textithe map of the fields around us here.

If I ever need to really think about what lies beneath, I stand and watch our spring water supply flowing at the corner of the woods.

So when I read the first line of Underland - A Deep Time Journey, the new book from Robert Macfarlane, I was immediately there and I make no apology for a longer than usual post today. Maybe put the kettle on and share one of the best books I will read this year

In truth, Robert Macfarlane is about to head down, between the roots of the ash tree, into a system of chambers in the Mendip Hills with poet and writer Sean Borodale...

'Time moves differently here in the underland. It thickens, pools, flows, rushes, slows.

The passage turns, turns again, narrows - and leads into surprising space...'

And I soon discovered that this would also be the route that Underland took in those short grey midwinter days and long nights by the fire. I had received a proof copy in November but decided to to save it as a treat for my January reading, once we had waved Offpsringette back to New Zealand, and time did move differently for the next few weeks as I disappeared into its depths, and through narrow passages into surprising space.

'The same three tasks recur across cultures and epochs : the shelter what is precious, to yield what is valuable, and to dispose of what is harmful.' 

and as Robert Macfarlane elaborated on those three tasks in his introduction I could feel myself rising to the challenge of Underland's journey into deep time. Enough to unwrap the new Leuchtturm 1917 notebook with dotted pages which would become my 'Travel Journal' for the year ahead, and this would be my first excursion.

Shelter (memories, precious matter, messages, fragile lives),
Yield (information, wealth, metaphors, minerals, visions),
Dispose (waste, trauma, poison, secrets),

This is only page eight and already I am thinking differently. I am thinking beneath, and what we place there and why.

'Into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save.'

There will be plenty of time and space ahead to ponder this, and thankfully Robert Macfarlane kindly guides his reader to places that many of us might not want to go so that we don't actually have to, whilst weaving in engaging and fascinating trails that led me in all manner of new directions...

The caves underneath the Mendip Hills... and claustrophobia laced with astonishment breathes from the pages, my own sense of rising panic kept in check, though this journey already feels so profound and real that it's little wonder I have to keep coming up from its pages for air.

I immediately ordered a copy of Asylum, Sean Borodale's series of poems written in the caves, mines and quarries of Somerset. You need to be of a particular physical and mental strength to cope with caving; Sean and Robert have both, I have neither,

But then I wrought a trail of destruction through the loft looking for (and sadly not finding) my full-colour guide book to the caves of Postojna in the former Yugoslavia, possibly my only real trip underground back in 1973. The £48 student nurse package holiday to Lake Bohinj, the four trainee Catholic priests on pre-ordination retreat (less said about that the better. May the Lord forgive us, we were only nineteen) and the excursion deep into the caves on the little train and wearing the floor-length woollen cape supplied against the cold.

I digress because meanwhile Robert is waiting for me to head miles out under the North Sea, to the potash mines that also hold a research station seeking dark matter, and all the while my notebook is filling with questions...

Quoting Jonas Salk, Robert Macfarlane asks 'Are we being good ancestors?' What will they make of us in 1000 years time, and I wonder...

Is ours the first generation to have worried about what we leave for future generations to the extent that we do...

Is this about increased knowledge and awareness...

Greater wealth...

Better technology...

Did those who came before us worry as much as we do and apply themselves to finding solutions to ameliorating the damage, or are we guilty of the greatest harm...

I probably know the answers but it's good to focus on it for a while.

From caves to woodland, and a sojourn in Epping Forest with Merlin Sheldrake, born on the night of the Great Storm of 15th October 1987, and plant scientist and fungi expert extraordinaire. Merlin elaborates on the wood wide web, an interlinking underground mycorrhizal fungi support system for trees.

I walk to the woods for some fresh air and look at the ground with very new eyes.

It didn't last long because the next excursion is to the catacombs under the streets of Paris about which I knew next to nothing ; the 200 miles of tunnels, galleries, rooms and chambers that lie beneath the city. I felt the fear but also the finite nature of my mind as Robert descended ...will the latter-day graffiti  be found in a 1000 years time, when all else above may have collapsed, and be a mystery to those who find it....

Much of the stone used to build Paris came from here, beneath, and I found myself readily imagining a city in reverse, every building upside down, a mirror image of itself and from there just a hop of the imagination to Neil Gaiman's superb novel Neverwhere. In Paris in 1786 the cemeteries had been overflowing, six million corpses were evacuated into this 'quarry'. The extent of the operation is astonishing, bodies exhumed, bones stacked underground.

Time to go for another walk.

No peace for the wicked...there will be more caving, this time actually not far from my one and only underground excursion, in the karst landscapes on the Italian border with Slovenia, and with it some excellent myth-related stories which do nothing to slow my galloping pulse. Really, I'm delighted that Robert descended into the Abyss of Trebiciano so that I don't have to, but it is fraught with danger and again I kept thinking 'Does his mother/ family worry?' 

There is a dissonance in this landscape too, one 'that enchants in the present but has been a site of violence in the past', can a person be allowed to be happy here knowing that the many sink holes in the landscape were used for mass murder in 1943 following the Italian surrender.

Much more pondering about all this followed.

If my anxieties have been contained until this point they are about to go off on a frolic of their own, off the scale as Robert heads North, to the Lofotens in Norway in search of  2,500 year-old cave paintings. Think Game of Thrones (if you watch, or have read it) and the sense of menace and fear that  accompanies The Wall in winter, as Robert tackles the Lofoten Wall solo in his quest to reach Kollhellaren...

'The gully is much steeper, but will probably hold less snow. The shoulder is a less severe slope, but looks more avalanche prone. I decide on the gully. I like gullies. They hold you. You feel you're likely to fall less far.'

The dangers of a solo attempt are rife. I think about his mother again...I'm the mother of a son who does dangerous things like kayaking the Zambezi,  and the truth is I don't worry as much as people might think. He is trained to risk assess and I trust and have absolute confidence in his ability to do that.

As we were, I'm sure Mrs Macfarlane Sr. is fine.

Meanwhile Robert is up against it...

'This is probably the most intimidating above-ground landscape in which I have been, It is a place for whatever self-reliance and composure I can muster...'

Throughout the book Robert hasn't been afraid to share his fears, moments of terror and with any rising sense of panic well-controlled . He freely admits to them, there is nothing gung-ho about this and I find that awareness of fallibility reassuring and heartwarming.  This particular journey becomes pure adventure, makes superb reading and a sense of real achievement awaits; honestly I felt as if I'd done it myself by the end. My was I glad to see those Red Dancers on the cave walls.

Further excursions to the Knud Rasmussen glacier in Greenland and Olkiluoto in Finland follow, both salutary and sobering accounts of 'things' of which I, and I suspect many others, know very little. In my mind, from that day to this, the thought of a quarter of a million tons of nuclear waste in need of storage underground, and how on earth do we let future generations know that we have buried it and where. How do we warn those who may not necessarily speak our language, or be able to interpret our signs, of the dangers that we have buried beneath them,

Had I ever given this a thought...no.

I was fascinated by Robert's interpretation of the haunting Finnish folk epic The Kalevala...

'The Kalevala is a long poem of many voices and many stories which - like the Iliad and Odyssey - grows out of diverse and deep-rooted traditions... '

I ordered a copy immediately and I confess I was rocked by Robert's interpretations as if hit by an earthquake. They made complete sense; premonitions and embedded warnings, the dangers of disinterring, was this part of an ancient messaging system...

'the warnings of which we have not heeded or even heard...'

I am chilled to the bone and the entire premise of so much that underpins Underland fell into place. We need to be paying attention and now.

It's time for another walk.

I've already used far too many words to get us this far, but by now it is January 24th, I had been reading the book for eleven days and spent as much time out walking and thinking as reading, and as I approached the final pages I took some time to write these thoughts (in my beautiful skyblue Leuchtturm 1917 and with heavy reliance on my new-found love of washi tape) which you can read (click to enlarge) or leave as you wish....

I emerged blinking into the light, well-read and well-exercised, grateful for the reorientation offered in Surfacing, the final (and very moving) chapter in the book. What a journey this was and what a precious and prescient book this is for the now. My parting words, doubtless joining the chorus of much-deserved paeans of praise for Underland which is published this week, are predictably that you definitely don't want to miss this one.

Further reading :  An essay by Robert Macfarlane about Underland in The Guardian Sat 20th April

Further travels :   Horatio Clare will be interviewing Robert at Hay Festival on Sunday May 26th

Further looking : Robert's much-loved Word of the Day on Twitter (you don't have to be signed up to                            read it) and  and also his Instagram feed

                            John Macfarlane (Robert's father)has recently started posting his images on                                     Instagram too

Further scribbles : Team Underland have been reading the book too, and some of us plan to meet                                  at Hay Festival to have a good talk about the book an hear Robert talk about it. There will be much more about   Underland to come I am sure.

 

 

 

Forty Autumns ~ Nina Willner

Well, how lucky was I when a book group in Berkshire sent me a copy of Forty Autumns by Nina Willner. The group had read and discussed this 'family's story of courage and survival on both sides of the Berlin Wall', were recommending it far and wide and thought I might like to read it too. One of their number had met the author at the school gates whilst living in Prague, and Nina Willner had done a Facetime session with the reading group during their meeting.

It was a Saturday morning, and a leisurely breakfast when the arrival of a new book always demands an immediate peruse. I read solidly until Sunday evening, hard pushed to put the book down for any but the most essential tasks. The clincher in the book for me was that this was written by a woman who knew first hand, and from several very different perspectives, what life was really like behind the Berlin Wall. Not only had her mother Hanna fled the divide as a young adult, succeeding after several attempts, but Nina Willner had worked for US Intelligence in Germany during the years of the Cold War. 

Hanna's decision and eventual escape from East Germany in 1949 is real edge-of-the-seat reading...

'She was young and deserving of a future. Hadn't Opa always inspired her to have big dreams and seek adventure?...and so she had made up her mind. With no way of knowing what impact her escape would have on her family and believing that somehow their separation would only be temporary...she was choosing to escape...'

What follows is an intimate and gripping account of a grey and colourless country, because Hanna left behind a large family who would have to surrender to the demands of the communist regime. It would be forty years before she would see her family again, but Nina Willner paints a vivid picture of life in post-war Germany for her own grandparents and myriad aunts, uncles and cousins and the impact on ordinary lives. It is sobering to read of the indoctrination, the need to 'embed orthodox communist doctrine' in a nation who had previously been trained to despise it. The manipulation of the people through oppression, brutality and disproportionate punishment via the Stasi makes for chilling but compelling reading, as does the indoctrination of the children via compulsory membership of youth organisations, simultaneously creating a climate of fear, suspicion and spying, often on your own family.

Except...

'Informing on your parents and one another simply will not happen in this family.' says Opa Karl, Hanna's father, to her remaining eight siblings. Nevertheless there will be constant anxiety and deep mistrust of the wider community  along with a heightened awareness of potential traps...even something as simple as being offered extra eggs in a shop could be a trap that would result in arrest and persecution. Hanna's parents, Oma and Opa (Erna and Karl) will eventually be exiled after Opa, a teacher, finally cracks and challenges the authorities, but in a strange way they are suited to remote isolation and make the best of it whilst the support from their children is unwavering.

Nina meanwhile, trained by U.S. Intelligence services, has been deployed to West Berlin in 1983, at that time 'the spy capital of the world',  and her account of the work is both fascinating and at times terrifying. It was fraught with danger as the death of colleagues revealed and, unable to make contact with her extended family, at times must have been incredibly frustrating.

Despite the hardships, powerless and oppressed, and with rebellion futile, the family stick together, weathering the onslaughts and finding ways to support each other, giving the reader of Forty Autumns a poignant and moving insight into the human aspects of these years, and the wider social and cultural impacts of the repression. An entire population silenced and submissive and being fed a distorted world view... hard to believe such places still exist today. The loss and separation are profound for a family who 'lose' forty years of togetherness and freedom until the day, that most memorable day, when the wall, built in 1961, falls in November 1989.

The end, when it came, was like toppling dominoes. A combination of people in power (Reagan and Gorbachov) determined to breach this divide, and a people starting to rebel and defy the authorities in subtle ways (listening to radio broadcasts from the West) and in increasing numbers. I defy anyone not to well up at that moment in the book. It is intensely emotional and beautifully portrayed and I certainly had a tear in my eye, and at the prospect of subsequent family reunions. 

Given that all this happened in my lifetime and its existence spans the first thirty-five years of my life, my recollections of it are typically 'western'. Perhaps most vivid are those memories of the athletes, a sphere covered in some detail in the book because Nina's cousin Cordula would become a world class cyclist for East Germany. It is the Olympics I remember, though with little awareness of Erich Honecher's mission to achieve sporting superiority for his small nation.

Forty Autumns all makes for fascinating reading and again, how grateful I am to Judith and her book group for sending this to me. So much I didn't know and if you are looking for an excellent book group selection you couldn't go wrong with this one. Plenty to discuss that will keep you going long after the biscuits have run out.

Meanwhile there's this, perhaps one of the most moving moments of that time. Russian musician Mstislav Rostropóvich, one of the best cellists of the 20th century, performing as people were destroying the Berlin Wall on November 11, 1989....

The Poetry Haul

After all that talk of poetry a few days ago I had an astonishing stroke of luck this weekend.

You know, the one where the planets align and you happen to wander into a charity shop just as they have put out a shelf holding someone’s complete and mostly new and unread collection of poetry books.

Can I say that this charity shop luck thing NEVER happens to me.

My Walking Friend ALWAYS walks into a charity shop at the exact moment the Laura Ashley curtains (full length £12) are about to be hung up (but obviously get no further than her waving hands), or the brand new  Berghaus gilet (£3) is about to go on the rail. I meanwhile have had no such luck, until last Saturday.

The book that caught my eye was  Selected Poems of W.S. Merwin. No copies available anywhere, not even second- hand on You Know Where, yet there it was standing on the top of the shelf for £1. That would have been bounty enough but as it was I put my glasses on and didn’t stop there...

Black Cat Bone - John Burnside

As Though We Were Flying - Andrew Greig

Fire Songs - David Harsent

A Hundred Doors - Michael Longley

Walking Papers - Thomas Lynch

New and Selected Poems Vol 1 - Mary Oliver

Letters to a Young Poet - Rainer Maria Rilke

The Wrecking Light - Robin Robertson

Hill of Doors - Robin Robertson

On Mutability - Jo Shapcott

Drysalter - Michael Simmons Roberts

Poems - Edith Södergram

Collected Later Poems - R.S. Thomas

The Remedies - Katharine Towers

 

And the sum total...

£14.

It might have felt like robbery had I not, in the past, donated a lot of new books to this very same charity shop, doubtless giving someone else the thrill of the surprise find. So many charity shops across the town have increased their prices and I suspect might sell less as a conseqeunce, whilst I know this one works on a different principle. Price it low and move it on quickly. 

Some of the books are duplicates and they will head onto the shelves in Tinker’s Cott...Mary Oliver, Jo Shapcott, Michael Simmons Roberts...

I’ve been working very hard on these shelves for several months now and they are starting to ‘feel’ nicely balanced...

An eclectic mix is developing, fiction and non-fiction and another section (not shown) of books I have written about here so they all come recommended. I’ll do you a proper guided tour soon, but our first guests arrive in May and we’ll be ready.

I’m thinking that I will pick up and read one of these new poetry collections a month for the foreseeable and get to know some poets I have been meaning to read...John Burnside, Rilke, Robin Robertson (since I read The Long Take) Andrew Greig (since I read At the Loch of the Green Corrie) R.S. Thomas,  and others who will be completely new to me. And then of course Bill Merwin is already on my radar. I've made a very promising start with The Remedies by Katharine Towers.

Meanwhile if you know any of these poets please do share your thoughts...

And how about your charity shop moments...any Ming vases, or Lalique glass, Dior dresses or Mulberry bags, or maybe just finding the very thing you have been looking for for ages...

Reading Gallimaufry

Firstly a huge thank you to those of you who reminded me (on the scribbles about Time Song by Julia Blackburn) that Seamus Heaney had written several 'bog body' poems. I had completely forgotten about them, but there he was, Tollund Man..

Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap.

In the flat country near by
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds
Caked in his stomach...

And quite by chance someone had recommended Meet me at the Museum by Anne Youngson, whose debut novel at the age of seventy is getting good reviews. A quick glance reveals the museum in question is Silkeborg in Denmark, home of Tollund Man

'When Tina Hopgood writes a letter of regret to a man she has never met, she doesn’t expect a reply.
When Anders Larsen, a lonely museum curator, answers it, nor does he.
They’re both searching for something, they just don’t know it yet. 
Anders has lost his wife, along with his hopes and dreams for the future. Tina is trapped in a marriage she doesn’t remember choosing.
Slowly their correspondence blossoms as they bare their souls to each other with stories of joy, anguish and discovery. But then Tina’s letters suddenly cease, and Anders is thrown into despair.
Can their unexpected friendship survive?'

I love it when reading trails connect in this way.

In other poetry news several good collections have found favour in recent weeks including No Map Could Show Them by Helen Mort. 

"The poems of Helen Mort's second collection offer an unforgettable perspective on the heights we scale and the distances we run, the routes we follow and the paths we make for ourselves.

Here are odes to the women who dared to break new ground – from Miss Jemima Morrell, a young Victorian woman from Yorkshire who hiked the Swiss Peaks in her skirts and petticoats, to the modern British mountaineer Alison Hargreaves, who died descending from the summit of K2.

Distinctive and courageous, these are poems of passion and precipices, of edges and extremes...'

A climber herself Helen Mort's voice is distinct and immediate. There is no obscurity here and as it happens I've been thinking about Alison Hargreaves again recently. The climber who, in 1988, scaled the North Wall of the Eiger whilst pregnant and who eventually would lose her life on K2 in 1995. Back then the world was torn about it...young mother selfishly taking risks v brave and courageous woman conquering new summits etc. because here was a young woman who had conquered Everest unaided by either Sherpas or oxygen. Anyone who watched Ben Fogle's recent summit attempt will know that this is no mean feat for anyone, yet I wondered whether the focus of the debate might have shifted in 2019...or not. Sadly Alison's son Tom Ballard died recently whilst also climbing in the Himalayas. Tom had been born in 1988 so I'm assuming he had been the unborn baby wonderfully thirled to the mountain by his mum during that ascent of the Norwand. Helen Mort's poem Norwand now holds something very special in the light of recent events, as does the entire sequence of poems about Alison...

'Below The White Spider
you clench yourself into a ball
your unborn child held deep inside.

You wish that you could reach
beneath your skin
and hold the baby's fist in yours...

And then I was reminded of Climbing Days by Dan Richards, the story of his great-great-aunt, Dorothea Pilley ' a prominent and pioneering mountaineer of the early twentieth century and which I wrote about back in 2016.

"What emerges is a beautiful portrait of a trailblazing woman, up to now lost to history - but also a book about that eternal question : why do people climb mountains?"

I waxed lyrical about Climbing Days in my usual fashion and am really looking forward to travelling with Dan and his latest book Outpost - a Journey to the Wild Ends of the Earth.

'There are still wild places out there on our crowded planet. Through a series of personal journeys, Dan Richards explores the appeal of far-flung outposts in mountains, tundra, forests, oceans and deserts. These are landscapes that speak of deep time, whose scale can knock us down to size. Their untamed nature is part of their beauty and such places have long drawn the adventurous, the spiritual and the artistic.

For those who go in search of the silence, isolation and adventure of wilderness it is - perhaps ironically - to man-made shelters that they often need to head; to bothies, bivouacs, camps and sheds. Part of the allure of such refuges is their simplicity: enough architecture to keep the weather at bay but not so much as to distract from the natural world.

Following a route from the Cairngorms of Scotland to the fire-watch lookouts of Washington State, from Iceland's 'Houses of Joy' to the Utah desert; frozen ghost towns in Svalbard to shrines in Japan; Roald Dahl's Metro-land writing hut to a lighthouse in the North Atlantic, Richards explores landscapes which have inspired writers, artists and musicians, and asks: why are we drawn to wilderness? What can we do to protect them? And what does the future hold for outposts on the edge?'

I have a few more impressive poetry collections to share with you dreckly including Girl by Rebecca Goss and The Rain in the Trees by the late W.S.Merwin but I'll save those for the next gallimaufry.

Meanwhile how about you...any poets warming your heart at the moment...

Any good travels from the armchair...

 

The Artificial Silk Girl ~ Irmgard Keun

At last someone (Penguin) is bringing The Artificial Silk Girl (Das kunstseiden Mädchen) by Irmgard Keun back into print, and I for one couldn't be more delighted. I'm sure I have suggested it hither and yon, especially to publishers of 'forgotten women's fiction', all to no avail down the years.

I first read the book in 2006 having acquired this exquisite hardback edition and wrote this about it...

.'...but here at last is Irmgard Keun's The Artificial Silk Girl, she who lived for some time in exile with Joseph Roth.

Born in Berlin in 1905, Irmgard Keun's second novel was published in 1932 and became an instant best seller. Her writing was banned in 1933 and all remaining copies of this book were destroyed.'

I had decided to track down and read some of the authors who had been banned or exiled and this was how I stumbled across Irmgard Keun's writing and this astonishing book.

Fleeing Germany in 1936 and joining a circle of exiles that included Joseph Roth with whom she had an affair, 'who is writing the great book about now?' asks Irmgard Keun of her peers. Michael Hofmann argues that whilst in many ways she was right perhaps the 'now' was just too much for the readership to stomach, perhaps they 'craved respite and escape.' Irmgard Keun would eventually return to Germany illegally under the name of Charlotte Tralow thanks to false reports about her death. Who can know the trauma and fear of those years in a writer's life. 

Irmgard Keun gives us material girl Doris's view of life in Berlin in the 1920's as Doris attempts to script her life along the lines of a glamorous movie star. Believing that respect comes from glamour not knowledge, and stupidity and dumbness are seen as cute, Doris sets out in the protective pelt of her stolen fur coat to find fame and fortune in the city. It all goes hopelessly wrong in both funny/sad ways as reality hits the beguiling and amazingly perceptive but ultimately dizzy Doris. 

'I constantly find myself in situations where I don't know something and I have to pretend that I do...'

Poor Doris. Whilst her innate sense of goodness and innocence shine through, it is unlikely to get her far.

There is plenty of foreshadowing of what was to come and of course none of it could be known by Irmgard Keun in 1931, yet, as with so many writers of the time, she sensed it and noted it. Doris is the original non-political girl caught up in it all and like many others only realising when it was far too late to do anything about it.  It could be argued that The Artificial Silk Girl is one of the last accounts of everyday life in Germany before the Nazis came to power, as Kathy von Ankum elaborates in my edition of the book,

'Doris becomes a camera, recording the sights and sounds of city life....but Doris's power of vision, despite its relentless focus on surfaces, ends by penetrating to what lies beneath the surface entertainments.'

My perfectly presented little hardback book, binding, paper quality, dusky power-pink cover, all gorgeous. An American translation, and inevitably a few colloquialisms creep into what is essentially a beautiful mid-European text. A minor detail though, I'm just grateful that Kathie von Ankum has translated a book that had not been available in English since 1933, and that Penguin have republished that translation.

Other books on my shelves by Irmgard Keun include Child of All Nations and After Midnight and as Michael Hofmann suggests...

'Keun has few rivals - I can think of none - as a chronicler of the ambience (in After Midnight, which is set in Frankfurt on the day Hitler comes to town) or the consequences (in Child of All Nations) of the rise of Nazism.'

Whilst Child of All Nations is readily available After Midnight is not, so let's hope Penguin have plans for more by Irmgard Keun,  and I have plans for a redux here of my thoughts about both books dreckly.

Meanwhile, welcome back into print Irmgard Keun and if you decide to read The Artificial Silk Girl and meet Doris and her fur coat, please do come back and share your thoughts. I can't wait for you to make her acquaintance. I have craved people to talk to about this book for years...

The Gentle Art of Tramping ~ Stephen Graham

'The adventure is not the getting there, it is the on-the-way. It is not the expected; it is the surprise; not the fulfilment of prophecy but the providence of something better than prophesied.'

Sometimes a book arrives and I can barely contain the excitement, and even though I had read The Gentle Art of Tramping by Stephen Graham in a proof copy I was still delighted when this arrived...

A brown paper package tied up with string á la Sound of Music, to reveal...

The book and some Kendal Mint Cake. Sustenance of the gods when out walking, and a bar carried in my emergency kit at all times.

This is little gem of a pocket-sized book, originally published in 1926 and now republished by Bloomsbury, in a beautiful hardback edition that slots neatly into a rucksack and warrants reading whilst out on the hill. I came back from New Zealand full of the joys of 'tramping', (because they don't hike, or walk, they 'tramp') only to find that it sounded strange to say it here in the UK, so  I  was soon back to walking, plodding, or bimbling as usual. But 'tramping' I like.

Born in Edinburgh in 1884, a son of the editor of Country Life, journalist and writer Stephen Graham's long-standing love affair with Russia saw him walking through the country in the years before 1914 in the belief that life viewed through the eyes of a wanderer might give him a truer account of the people....

'He was from his arrival fascinated by the Russian Orthodox church, but he was even more struck by the spirituality of the people, which he believed was an instrumental force in shaping Russian society.'

They all have that 'look' from this era don't they...

As his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography attests of course events in Russia would all go slightly pear-shaped for Stephen Graham, who having been the government's preferred expert would eventually become something of an embarrassment, but he would continue his career as a travel writer and clearly it was these wanderings and observations that underpinned The Gentle Art of Tramping.

With its original artwork cover from a wood engraving by Norman James,  and written, as it was, in those years after the First World War, I am thinking too about the numbers of homeless, wandering soldiers who tramped the countryside in search of healing and solace ( think A Month in the Country by J.L.Carr). Those men who had fought for their country, many of them outcasts from a society they no longer recognised and arguably classed as vagrants. Class an issue addressed in the early pages of the book and with it maybe a concealed warning in the tramp's defence not to judge them by appearances...

'Class is the most disgusting institution of civilisation, because it puts barriers between man and man...but in the tramp's motley you can say what you like, ask what you like, free from the taint of class. It also puts you right with regard to yourself...'

Suggesting that it also offers freedom of speech action and judgement and then this...

'All that highfalutin advice which Kipling wrote in 'If' may be left in its glum, red lettering pasted on your bedroom wall, if you will only put on your tramp's motley.'

'Tramps' were still much in evidence when working in casualty at the London Hospital in the East End in the 1970s. The men (for they were mostly men) would do anything to get a bed for the night, often throwing themselves down the front steps of the hospital, and many's the head wound we were allowed to stitch as students because the men didn't mind, declining local anaesthetic on the basis they had drunk enough to be beyond feeling. One in particular, known to us as Henry Sunshine, was rumoured to have been a professor at Cambridge, and talking to him I had no reason to disbelieve it.

With its chapters on Boots, The Knapsack, Clothes, Carrying Money, The Companion, The Fire, The Bed, Drying After Rain, Books, Notebooks and so much more, there is plenty to find here. Though the reading suggestions to take on the road with you might be a little outdated, the idea that the 'tramper' should 'take a book that you do not quite understand, one that you have nibbled at but have found difficult' is an interesting one...

'I do not mean an abstruse work, but one you are on the verge of understanding and making your own...'

And maybe some of us would concur with this...

'It is better, therefore to take one a whole-time book. It is good to have a book that is full of meat, one with broad margins for scribbling and extra pages for thoughts, poems, thumbnail sketches. After a long tramp it is nice to see a book which has been clothed with pencillings.'

For our 25th wedding anniversary, and long before the Kindle solved the problem by allowing me to carry 300 books with me at all times, what terrible choices I made for our three weeks wandering around Europe with rail passes and our lives in rucksacks. The journey all seems a bit daring and adventurous looking back, and was largely determined by the fact that on the date of our actual anniversary September 11th 2001, horrible things had happened so in 2002 we decided on an adventure. But Volume One of Lord of the Rings (abandoned in Bilbao) The Secret History (deserted in Barcelona) and two more long gone from memory but similarly discarded around the continent proved to be poor choices . In desperation I bought The Awakening by Kate Chopin (from a very limited selection) just as we were about to board the ferry across the Mediterranean to Genoa and there followed one of the most memorable reading experiences of my life. 

The Gentle Art of Tramping is replete with moments that had me nodding my head in agreement, crystallising thoughts that frequently occur to me...

'Beware of going to Jerusalem in order that you may come back and tell the world you have been. It spoils all you found on the way...'

How relevant this is in these days of social media and Instagram, and something I had been unwittingly aware of as I write the scribbles. It's very easy to set off on a day's adventure thinking to myself, 'What can I write about this...' 'Which pictures would be best', whilst missing being in the moment and the pleasure of it. Please be assured that I do go to a lot of places that don't get written about or photographed, because as Stephen Graham would agree it's a question of balance.

'The less you carry the more you will see, the less you spend the more you will experience...'

An added delight are the book's endpapers...

Facsimiles of walking notes from 1932; the book itself and these notes especially, bringing Edward Thomas to mind. 

Someone has planned their journeys carefully...

Route III - Lake District and the 1932 walker plans to stay at  Fell Foot Farm, Brothers Waters Inn (both still in existence) whilst another, recommended by the guide, The Dun Bell Inn which I discover was subsequently flooded in the creation of Haweswater Reservoir in 1940 to provide water for Manchester. 

Route IV - Round the World. This an even more ambitious journey with "Beaucoup Zigzag'' estimates 113,900 miles on foot across Europe to Romania and the Carpathians to Constantinople, through Persia to Afghanistan, N. India, Burma, Siam, Saigon and onwards taking a boat to Vancouver walking to St Johns, Newfoundland (say 3500 m 12mths) and thence sailing back to Liverpool.

I think you can probably tell that The Gentle Art of Tramping has found its niche in a corner of my rucksack and Offspringette's too, a spare copy travelling back to New Zealand with her. Mine is already covered in pencillings and doubtless more to follow.

Meanwhile how about you...walk...hike...tramp...plod...bimble ?

And about the one book to take with you...which would it be...

Oh yes, and please do scroll down for gifts, Magnus awaits...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Unseen ~ Roy Jacobsen

Nobody can leave an island. An island is a cosmos in a nutshell, where the stars slumber in the grass beneath the snow. But occasionally someone tries...

From now on I'm keeping a record of who recommends books to me and when, because how grateful I am however and by whomsoever The Unseen by Roy Jacobsen, published by MacLehose Press, was sent onto my radar. If it was you, thank you. I bought a copy immediately.

Published as De Usynlige in Norway in 2013, the book was a huge best-seller and we are fortunate to now have an English translation by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw. 

From the MacLehose website  this...

'Ingrid Barrøy is born on an island that bears her name - a holdfast for a single family, their livestock, their crops, their hopes and dreams.

Her father dreams of building a quay that will connect them to the mainland, but closer ties to the wider world come at a price. Her mother has her own dreams - more children, a smaller island, a different life - and there is one question Ingrid must never ask her.

Island life is hard, a living scratched from the dirt or trawled from the sea, so when Ingrid comes of age, she is sent to the mainland to work for one of the wealthy families on the coast.

But Norway too is waking up to a wider world, a modern world that is capricious and can be cruel. Tragedy strikes, and Ingrid must fight to protect the home she thought she had left behind.'

The late Eileen Battersby, the Irish literary critic who died so tragically in a car accident just two days before Christmas, rated The Unseen as 

'Easily among the best books I have ever read'

And I'm certainly moving it onto the Best Reads of 2019 shelf, and from thence to the Best Books Ever shelf.

Just a single family live on the Norwegian island of  Barrøy. Hans and Maria with their daughter Ingrid, Hans's sister Barbro and his father Martin along with three sundry others who eventually find themselves living as part of the family for reasons various. Life is harsh, the weather is brutal, hardships abound, and merely eking out an existence in such an extreme environment takes every ounce of courage, energy and kroner that the family have. It's not immediately clear when the narrative is set, and indeed the outside world is remote, the news a million miles away, but a couple of clues suggested the late 1920s, early 1930s to me

I rapidly became an islander as I read, greatly helped by my other read, Adam Nicolson's Sea Room, giving much thought to island life and the qualities required to stay the course. In the case of Family Barrøy (they bear the name of the island, it is truly theirs). They will need and display resilience, resourcefulness, pragmatism and great fortitude  as they deal with unforeseen threats and many-a disaster. Hans rebuilding of an outhouse over and over again, salvaging the remains after a storm, often from neighbouring islands, is a lesson in perseverance that makes our whinge about losing the greenhouse twice (and joking that we'd find it at Lands End) seem a bit lame in comparison. 

And the precious commodities on the island too... wood, chairs, fresh water and the eiderdown. How many times did that high-quality eiderdown comfort and warm, and provide refuge in times of sadness or crisis. There will be danger and setbacks, illness and grief; eiderdown to the rescue.

Watching young Ingrid grow and mature in this secluded and limited environment is both fascinating and revealing. Sent to work as a nursemaid to the children of a supposedly wealthy family on a neighbouring island it becomes clear that, intelligent, capable and practical though she is, she finds other people and reading their behaviours confusing. Her limited experience with and exposure to others offering no immediate solutions to an intractable situation that will have far-reaching consequences, effectively she must start from scratch. Fortunately Ingrid is a quick learner.

Slowly the 'unseen' of the title becomes visible and in many guises.

And the significance of the flotsam and jetsam that washes up on the shores after a storm, especially the messages in bottles...

'mythical vehicles of yearning, hope and unfulfilled lives...'

Like time capsules, tiny investments of hope and expectation with uncertain and unpredictable consequences. Had Maria and Ingrid been able to send their own messages I wondered what they would have said.

It was all enough to make me read The Unseen slowly and in instalments, considering and pondering its depths whilst wondering what didn't I know about Roy Jacobsen, and had he written more books.

Yes he has, and I have The Burnt-out Town of Miracles lined up and was also delighted to read the The Unseen is the first in a series of novels so there will be more Family Barrøy to come.

As always, if you have read this please do share your thoughts in comments...

And having been to the Arctic recently with Michael Palin's superb reading of his book Erebus, do you have any more atmospheric Norwegian or Scandinavian reading suggestions...

 

 

 

Time Song - Searching for Doggerland ~ Julia Blackburn

Really first things first, just in case this thing happens before you get to the end of this episode of the scribbles...

Should Julia Blackburn knock at your door and suggest that you go for walk together, just stop whatever you are doing....switch the iron off, plug the Dyson back in to recharge, put your book down, get your boots on and go.

That's all I'm saying because I've been for a 'real' walk with Julia and you wouldn't want to miss it. We met in France ten years ago. Julia was there accompanied by her husband Herman Makkink, facilitating a memoir writing course along with Penelope Lively, and I had been asked along to 'help' around the house and write a few blog posts. It proved to be quite an eventful week what with one thing and another, but we did go on a few walks. Fairly startling when we arrived was to find that Julia and I were both wearing the same footwear, and we were both clutching  red Lamy Safari fountain pens. But that's all just a distraction from the fact that we all went on several walks and Julia was a revelation because she picks things up and finds beauty in them whilst I might not...would perhaps rather be squashing them underfoot...

I have read two terrific books about deep time this year. The first is Underland - a Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane, under strict embargo until publication in May (all I can say is I have Team Underland out there reading it as well, we plan to meet in a cave somewhere to discuss it, and you might want to get it on pre-order at the library pronto) and the second is by Julia Blackburn, Time Song - Searching for Doggerland. 

And reading Julia's latest book has been like going on a very long walk back through time with a very kindly, unassuming, modest yet highly inquisitive friend. The tone is warm, the search is deep and woven into the fabric of the book I sensed a coming to terms with the loss of Herman who died in 2013. There is a seeking after knowledge and understanding in an unpretentious and utterly human way; chains of thought doubling back one on the other, wondering and wonder combined, to create something very special and all grafted onto eighteen Time Songs. Prose poems that lead into meanders, tracking back 2.5 million years and retracing the footsteps of human presence and habitation ...

'Footprints need soft sediment
If they are to hold the memory
Of who passed by.'

Deep time for me is probably going to Lydford Castle, as we did last week, and casting my mind back as far as say 1100 when it was built. To think about Pioneer Man arriving on the British peninsula 900,000 years ago is all a bit of a stretch and if we get onto the subject of the Ice Age then really I am in a complete state of confusion as to dates.

The Ice Age and its desolation 450,000 years ago...

The return of the Neanderthal to the Steppes of Northern Europe 60,000 years ago (where did they go in the meantime)

The Laacher See, a massive volcano that erupted in Germany 13,000 years ago covering 700,000 sq. kms...

Well it's all too much for a finite mind to grasp, so I was very pleased to be in Julia's equally incredulous company as she investigated this deep time of Doggerland in her own inimitable style.

The search for Doggerland (the land that once joined the British Isles to Europe) creates a soft sediment of its own, retaining and containing not only the presence of those who originally lived there, but Herman's footprint on Julia's life too; the impression of his life, an outline of his presence, and maybe because I had met him that impression took on a greater significance.

Nevertheless Julia's awe and wonder is infectious and tangible as she handles an axe-head carved by a Neanderthal 400,000 years ago...

'The answer lies in the pleasure of the doing, the pleasure of diving into one's own uncertainty and finding a way back to the shore...'

And goodness did we walk a long way out.

I might have Julia to thank for the fact that I now, possibly for the first time in my life, have a better, even a working sense of the chronology of deep time...

But how personable and intimate are the seemingly extraneous details. Julia, en route to meet  Klaas, a collector of bones with her friend Sandra who has broken her own bones in her arm...

'...so I drove her geriatric Alfa Romeo.'If you start braking before you need to brake it will be fine,' said Sandra vaguely...'

So many moments like this that grounded me in the present, the seemingly trivial yet profoundly human details of life (whilst not wishing to minimise the inconvenience for Sandra etc ) and wondering what exactly might have been the trivialities of Neanderthal life, if there were any, whilst acknowledging how much of the present is disappearing too...

'but every year there is less to see and my memory tries its best to forget what it has known, for fear of being made too sad by the reality of the loss. We learn to grow accustomed to absences, because it seems we have no choice.'

Herman's absence too perhaps.

How often do I go charging into a book only to find that I am slowed to snail's (or slug's) pace by the writing, and so it has been with each of Julia Blackburn's books, The Three of Us, Thin Paths,Threads- the delicate life of John Craske and now Time Song. In a way I feel some sympathy for those tasked with reviewing books like these for mainstream media, because to have to dash it off as 'read and reviewed' might be to miss the point of a book that demands slow mindful reading with 'thinking' pauses to really get to grips with the nuances and depths. I read a Time Song every day or so and thought of little else in between. There were moments when the writing stopped me in my tracks and all I could do was sit and ponder and digest.

This...

'If you are part of the natural world, absorbed into it as a tree is absorbed into the earth that holds its roots, as a bird is absorbed into the migratory pattern of the year, then it follows that death is not a final ending, it is just one of the many staged of your belonging.'

The book ends with a visit to see Tollund Man...

'He appeared to be lost in sleep, his eyes closed so softly you might expect to see the eyelids flickering from the workings of the dream and just like a dreamer, his lips were set in a private smile....'

And also Graubelle Man, a bog body preserved in the Moesgard Museum in Jutland.

Did you know that traces of sixty-five plant species were found in Graubelle Man's stomach and intestine?

Spelt and rye, barley, oat, a seed of shepherd's purse, field pennycress, thyme-speedwell, persicaria and redshank, sheep's sorrel, dock, bindweed, chickweed, wallflower and tormentil...it's all enough to make me want to sow a Graubelle Garden.

In fact thinking about it I may unwittingly already have one.

It is my best hope that Julia Blackburn and Time Song will be at a literary festival somewhere in the South West this year. Many years ago I heard her talk about With Billie, her portrayal of the life of singer Billie Holiday. It was the post-lunch slumber-slot when everyone treats themselves to a long blink which eventually becomes something much longer and people are falling off their elbows all over the place, No chance with Julia's talk. Reading from her book to a background of Billie Holiday singing I think we were all, as of one, in tears, knowing we had just been part of one of those rare lit-fest moments that stay with you forever. 

Likewise I think Time Song will stay with me 'forever'.

If you have read this, or any  of Julia Blackburn's books please do add your thoughts in comments...

And do you know your Neanderthal from your Homo Sapiens, your Neolithic from your Mesolithic...

Are you a bit confused about the Ice Age too...

And more accessible reading suggestions on this whole Deep Time thing most welcome...

 

 

 

 

Skybound - a Journey in Flight ~ Rebecca Loncraine

'The loveliest places of all
are those that look as if
there's nothing there
to those still learning to look'

'Deserts for Instance' - Brian Turner (Elemental - Central Otago Poems)

Choosing another book from the shelf of Journeys that I plan to do from my armchair this year, and 'learning to look' at new places is becoming a real treat. I'd no sooner travelled back in deep time searching for Doggerland with Julia Blackburn and Time Song than I decided I was ready for a bit of vast open sky and my hand settled on a proof copy of Skybound A Journey in Flight by Rebecca Loncraine, published by Picador and sent to me aeons ago.

I knew a little about Rebecca ...that she had taken up gliding when she was at a crossroads in her life...the end of a relationship combined with  surgery and treatment for breast cancer and finding herself living back with her parents on the family farm in Wales. It is here, where the love of her family holds her secure through all the gruelling treatment, that Rebecca decides to replace the narrative of battle, fight and conquest and all its associations of violence, with one of surrender, gentleness and vulnerability. 'A quiet attentiveness to the present moment and an intense intimacy with the world' gave Rebecca what she needed, a toughness and the strength to endure.

There are no rights of wrongs about this and one of the things I learned, when I managed the Cancer and Serious Illness forum for an online parenting website, was that finding the way that works for any individual is what matters.

In recovery and  finding a connection with a nearby gliding club Rebecca decides to give it a go and learn to fly...

'Where the ground has a tendency to close me down, to fence off my emotions, the space up here gives me room to breathe. The sky is big enough to hold any amount of grief...'

Assuaging the grief of her diagnosis, and with it perhaps all those thoughts that her life could still be cut short, and seeing her home territory with new eyes, offers Rebecca new perspectives. There is a sense of freedom and achievement, a fillip to self-esteem and confidence, plus distractions and diversions from the travails, along with opportunities for travel and adventure that will eventually see her set off for four months in New Zealand gliding over the Southern Alps.

I think you probably know what's coming don't you, because I don't think I have ever forgotten the emotion of my first visit to Offspringette in New Zealand in 2016, and my first view of the Southern Alps with tears streaming down my face and more uncontained excitement than was good for me (or the person sitting next to me).

My attention was first snagged by Rebecca's single quote from the poetry of Brian Turner (above and I have added more of my own choosing to this post) which could only intensify my enjoyment of Skybound,  because, whilst in New Zealand in 2016 and cycling the Otago Rail Trail (yes me, really) we had stopped at a remote village store in Oterehua. Happy to dismount for a while we were having a browse when I spotted Elemental - Central Otago Poems by Brian Turner. The book weighed a ton (or so it seemed) but persuaded to buy it by Offspringette it went into my bike pannier and did the rest of the trail with me. I'd read it each night as we moved along the trail and think about the place, the actual very same place where I was, and know that whenever I picked the book up again in years to come it would remind me of that amazing visit. 

'Once in a while
you may come across a place
where everything
is as close to perfection
as you will ever need.'

'Place' - Brian Turner  (Elemental - Central Otago Poems)

I'd like to think that Rebecca also read Elemental and felt some of this joy and peace too. I found much perfection during this my first visit, not least the full moon over Kaikoura...



Based at Omarama (we went through there too) Rebecca slowly gains confidence in her flying ability in an upper atmosphere made unique by the mountains and proximity of the sea. I can't pretend to understand the technicalities of gliding beyond being awestruck at how it is even possible to get up there and stay up there, but I really enjoyed reading about it with its moments of elation and some of acute fear verging on terror..

'Learning to fly is like asking the universe a question: asking it to let me go into the world to live and soar with joy and the possibility of death. It is to ask to be graced with grace, filled with emptiness, to arrive and never arrive...'

And as Rebecca flew so I (at a different time I think) had walked or driven or cycled, because she mentions so many of the places that we passed or wandered through, her seeing them from above, me from below...

Aoraki (Mt Cook)

'On the slow wing beat
of a curious falcon
my wishes belonged
I rose and spiralled
on thermals
and the mountains smiled all afternoon.'

'Flight' - Brian Turner ((Elemental - Central Otago Poems)

Lake Hawea...

Lake Tekapo...

The Franz Josef Glacier...

...where I left this tiny cairn for my Mum, my Dad and my brother...

It is whilst talking to a flying colleague in New Zealand, who has lost his daughter to breast cancer, that Rebecca (despite having been given the all clear from her last scans) senses and is confronted with the potential impact of her own death on those nearest to her..

'There was no escaping the soul-wrenching loss; all he could do was learn to live inside it...'you line it with flowers so you can visit there...'

And all I can hope and pray is that her parents Trisha and Tony have been able to line that place with flowers too, because sadly on her return to the UK Rebecca's cancer metastasised and, following more gruelling rounds of treatment, she died peacefully on September 17th 2016. It is to her parent's credit that they fulfilled their daughter's final wishes and brought Skybound to publication...

'She leaves all those who knew her run through with legacies of grief, but her legacy is such that she would be pleased...'

And how pleased I am to have read this book. It brings with it, as books like this, read at this time of year, are bound to, a deeper understanding of my own parents' grief at the death of my brother and also perhaps some insights into his thinking throughout his eighteen months of treatment for leukaemia. He would die on March 15th 1975 and yes, his place is now 'lined with flowers' and I will be thinking of him today as every day.

Perhaps the final word should rest with Brian Turner, whose book Elemental I have revisited alongside Skybound with the balance of some very happy South Island memories. I'm so pleased that I decided to buy it and carry that extra 1lb 4ozs along with me, and also that I have read Rebecca Loncraine's beautiful and lasting paean to the skies and a life fulfilled ...

'Maybe heaven is a place
in the hearts of those
who respected and honestly
liked you a lot,
an earthly place
with brightness behind you,
surreal skies above
lighting the best way home.'

'Heaven' Brian Turner (Elemental - Central Otago Poems)

 

 

A Reading Gallimaufry

I've had some reading disappointments in recent weeks, books that have started well and lost my interest after about seventy pages, but plenty more that have keep me going to the last page and given me much to think about beyond. Here are three of them.

Travelling in a Strange Land ~ David Park (Bloomsbury 165 pages)

David Park has been on the edge of my reading radar for years, though never quite made it into the mix until now and this book. 

Tom and Lorna's son Luke is studying at Sunderland University when he is taken ill a few days before Christmas and the weather takes a turn for the worse too. Heavy snow shuts down airports and Tom makes the decision to drive from the family home in Dublin to pick him up. As always the snow does its job, muffling, disrupting and cloaking secrets.

Something awful has happened in the past but the question is what.

Plagued by the past and by his undisclosed actions Tom sets off on the drive to the ferry and then across the north of England with his guilt, worry and anxiety swirling around in the car to the backdrop of his chosen music...Neil Young, Van Morrison et al. The reveal is slow and gradual. To the fore is the helplessness of the parent in the face of the child who won't be helped, Tom desperate to please, clutching at any straw, knowing he could blow any chance he might have with his over-enthusiasm. 

...and I won't breath another word for fear of spoiling, but a book that has levered me nicely into David Park's writing and I shall be reading more.

A Perfect Explanation ~ Eleanor Anstruther (Salt Publishing 300 pages)

There’s nothing quite so delicious as a book that delves into the foibles of the aristocracy, especially when it is by a member of the family and I revelled heartily in this one. In her debut novel Eleanor Anstruther addresses what might best be described as the skeleton in the family closet as she explores the life of Enid Campbell, granddaughter of the 8th Duke of Argyll. As primogeniture shifts Enid's family ever further from the family seat it is a very tangled web that will lead Enid to sell her son to her sister for £500.

The book is both a revelation but also deeply poignant as mental illness estranges Enid and her options narrow, 

'She tried to mother, she really did, but it always felt like she was stabbing at something she couldn't fully see...'

Using letters and archival evidence, and acknowledging her debt to her father 'for giving me this story in the first place', Eleanor Anstruther has explored her subject with objectivity laced with compassion. It's hard not to feel desperate sorrow for Enid, and for a family floundering in the face of something they couldn't bring themselves to accept nor understand. 

Cove ~ Cynan Jones (Granta 95 pages)

I like Cynan Jones, he writes excellent, concise, to-the-point books that punch well above their weight. No chance of putting this one down once I had started it. I read it in one breathless go...breathless because it was so tense I don't think I breathed throughout the ninety-five pages.

A pregnant woman walks on a beach and finds a doll...

A boat pulls up on the shore looking for a missing child...

A man sets off in a kayak with his father's ashes on board to scatter at sea. He has not told his pregnant wife he is going, and when he is struck by lightning far out to see and loses both his memory and his paddle it's clear he's in trouble. 

Short paragraphs of intense economic prose. Not a wasted word, events like saline, distilled to its essence, moments arcing across to each other, glimmers of connections and always within tantalising sight of land.

And then there's the ending..

Not a word more but I am still thinking about it. Some books, for all their brevity, leave a very deep footprint in the imagination and this is absolutely one of them.

So that's me, how about you...

What are you reading now...

Any good reads to report since the last time...

We all have notebooks at the ready...

Lanny ~ Max Porter

I seem to recall I made some pronouncement (an observation rather than a criticism) somewhere back in 2016 about how much I struggled with this...

Not with the book, though I was so slow to realise that Grief is the Thing With Feathers was a novel and not a memoir, that it took hearing Max Porter talk about the book at Port Eliot Festival for the penny to drop. I had an odd few days afterwards trying to square it all in my head...no it was the paperback cover that I had a bit of an issue with.

Whilst fully understanding the need to make a book leap off the sales table and into someone's hands, and to make the most of the accolades it has received makes perfect commercial sense, but the cover in this case turned Max Porter's first novel, Grief is the Thing With Feathers, into a mountain of insurmountable unattainable brilliance in my mind giving it a very high fence to jump. I can only apologise because 'hoisted by my own petard'  I realise I'm not exactly backward in coming forward about the odd book or two that I love on here either, and brace because I'm about to do it again. 

Lanny has a cover so simple and unadorned and yet so complex once I had finished the book, that I have invested more time interpreting its meaning than can be good for me, none of which I can share without spoiling the book for anyone who might read it. Add in the lichen encrusted end papers enclosing the whole and my imagination was off on a frolic of its own with the significance. Maybe this is all just a blank canvas for the paperback and the paeons of praise that I suspect are about to be heaped on Lanny published this week by Faber.

On the surface Lanny is the story of a young, middle-class couple and their son who move to a village about an hour's commute from London; she a crime thriller writer, he something in finance and their young and unusual child Lanny...

'You seem to me a child of the old times, a proper human child...'

One of those villages that transport has made accessible for the city worker, and with it comes the merging of the old and the new, the past and the present in a rural setting  What quickly becomes apparent is that other forces are at work, subverting any notions of the rural idyll, because Dead Papa Toothwort 'has woken from his slumber in the woods' and he is listening to them all, but especially to Lanny, the child in tune with the natural world.

Think Green Man...here's the last one we saw a few years ago at Buckland Abbey...

The Green Man much in evidence here in the South West with carved heads in churches various; heads and mouths surrounded by leaves and connections made with death, rebirth and life, and I am very grateful to Douglas of  DevonChurchLand (Instagram) who willingly shared some of his green man church roof bosses from around the Shire to post here...

I think you might agree not altogether benevolent or comforting. Throw in some May Day relevance and fertility rites, along with themes of  spring and resurrection, and I think that's just about every base covered for an enigmatic and uncertain spirit being emanating from the woodland. By way of further explanation, Charles Causley wrote Green Man in The Garden, a quietly powerful poem on the subject, and with a presence that segues well with events in Lanny...

Green man in the garden
Staring from the tree,
Why do you look so long and hard
Through the pane at me?


Your eyes are dark as holly,
Of sycamore your horns,
Your bones are made of elder-branch,
Your teeth are made of thorns.


Your hat is made of ivy-leaf,
Of bark your dancing shoes,
And evergreen and green and green
Your jacket and shirt and trews.


"Leave your house and leave your land
And throw away the key, 

And never look behind," he creaked,
"And come and live with me." 


I bolted up the window,
I bolted up the door,
I drew the blind that I should find
The green man never more. 


But when I softly turned the stair
As I went up to bed,
I saw the green man standing there.
"Sleep well, my friend," he said.

The all-seeing, all-knowing Dead Papa Toothwort doesn't miss a trick, and this is where Max Porter's book goes strangely yet brilliantly off-piste as the disconnected overheard words of the villagers float across the page.

Now I'll own up that I often sigh at this sort of thing...

A bit of an attention-seeking conceit perhaps as the eye wanders away from the lines and has to catch these airborne drifts of words. But in Lanny's case it works like a dream because it's up to the canny reader (who definitely doesn't want to miss the gossip) to pin the words down, work out who might have said what and about who. It's eavesdropping par excellence, and once I had gone with the flow these, along with a series of untethered, unattributed conversations (about a serious incident), became one of my favourite aspects of the book. I was reminded, in the best possible way, of Alice Oswald's poem The Village (Falling Awake) where the poet hears those voices too.

Themes of the loosening grip of rural life, tradition and folk-lore versus the newbies predominate, and if the book started out very Alice Oswald in my mind it soon morphed into Ted Hughes's Wodwo... the half-man half animal creature, woken from its hibernation and on the prowl.

Moving to the village has not been as straightforward as Lanny's parents imagined and I really don't want to say anymore because the cover info gives very little away and with good reason. Lanny needs to be left to spring its own surprises, which it most certainly does. The writing is unique, the rhythm often poetic (read it aloud) the plot compelling, driving on towards a denouement that left me with a seriously pounding heart and requiring the occasional reminder to breath.

In the end I took Lanny up to the woods with me because it seemed like a book that needed to be thirled, as in 'bound with ties of affection and sentiment', to its most right and best place. This in the same way that I often have Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain in my rucksack when I'm walking on Dartmoor, or Alice Oswald's Dart when I walk out to East Dart Head,

Whenever he is collecting logs with the Gamekeeper, Bookhound, will always leave in place the branches rooted to the ground by ivy, the ones that resist, this I'm told is out of respect. "For the Green Man," they both chime, before moving on to the wood that is more willingly given. Strange it may all seem, but read Lanny (and please do because I would love to know your thoughts) and maybe such sentiments are not quite so out of place after all, it doesn't do to disturb the Green Man.

 

 

 

Last Train to Hilversum - A journey in search of the magic of radio ~ Charlie Connelly

The minute I heard about this book I knew I had to read it, and I am very grateful to Bloomsbury for sending along a copy of Last Train to Hilversum - A journey in search of the magic of radio by  Charlie Connelly pronto to assuage the need.

It was the word 'Hilversum' that did it, twanging a chord that echoed back into the deepest early memories of my childhood. We were definitely a radio family, the image of the enormous brown box so ingrained in my mind that I had no trouble locating it online.

Some of my clearest childhood memories are of that radio, it's tactile beige-gold fabric and the dials with the red back-lit line crossing the mysterious names, Luxembourg, Vienna, Prague (Prag-yew to me) and of course Hilversum. My mum and I would sing along to the Light Programme, Catch a Falling Star and Que Sera while she did the chores and I probably played with my Fuzzy Felt or something. My mum, I now realise, had grown up with the radio too. I still have her Ovaltiney's bookmark found in the Knitting Nancy box of all things...

Not mentioned in the book so I'll add a note here. The Ovaltineys broadcast on a Sunday from 5.30pm to 6pm on Radio Luxembourg in 1935 and spawning a club which had five million members by 1939, one of which was my mum. 

I was deeply envious (I now realise) of my comic-swapping friend Ann (me Judy, she Bunty) because Ann and her sister Christine shared a bedroom and had a radio like ours between their beds. Imagine the joy of lying in bed and drifting off to sleep with a radio on. We didn't stretch to bedroom radios in our house, it was a luxury I didn't have until my thirteenth birthday when my brother bought me a transistor, and that was me sorted and forever spending my pocket money on new batteries. 

One of the earliest surprises on reading Charlie Connelly's book was the fact that despite changing habits in every walk of life, plus the allure of social media, listening to the radio remains as popular as ever: 90% of the adult population listen to the radio at some time every week. The history of the early development of radio broadcasting was hazy to me, as were the roles of several women who forged a path as announcers for the BBC at its inception in the 1920s. It was a generally held belief that women didn't posses the gravitas with which to be radio announcers, but Sheila Borret was allowed to have a go and quickly dispelled that myth. Surprising then that the majority of complaints came from women, and though Sheila's career with the BBC was curtailed in the face of that opposition she was an indomitable character who forged a career in entertainment for many years afterwards.

But this book is full of lovely surprises, too many to mention but here's a few...

I still haven't read Attention all Shipping, Charlie Connelly's trip around the shipping forecast locations but to hear the names is always enough...Fair Isle, Rockall, Malin,, Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire. Broadcast daily at 00.48 and 05.20 on Radio 4 Long Wave and FM an again at 12.01 and 17.54 on Long Wave only.

And then I am reminded of Carol Ann Duffy's poem  Prayer...

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child’s name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer –
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.  

The reading of the football results brought back particular memories. Now read by Charlotte Green, for many years James Alexander Gordon was the 'voice' on a Saturday afternoon and I'll bet we weren't the only ones to play Win/Lose/Draw which involved declaring the result from the clearly defined intonation and voice inflection during the briefest of pauses before the actual score was announced. And of course who ever forgets the days when we were blessed with a classic. Forfar 5 ...East Fife 4

I knew nothing of the radio SOS messages either....

'Would Miss Joyce Wilsher, currently on holiday in Carlisle, please go to 2 Wicklow Street, Old Basford, Nottingham, where her fiance Raymond Holmes is dangerously ill (15 November 1952)

Broadcast regularly until they 'slipped gradually away into radio history' Charlie Connolly explores the people and the stories behind some of the messages often with quite unexpected results..

I mean I was definitely intrigued to discover more about this ...

'Will anyone in London or the south Midland area who on Saturday 19th December supplied a man with sandwiches containing sausage meat...communicate immediately with the chief constable of Oxford...the man was probably riding a bicycle. (20 December 1931)

I wonder if any of you have ever sent a request into a radio station...

My mum's sister and her son both had a 'thing' about the singer Malcolm Roberts and would be forever sending in requests for each other to the Jimmy Young programme.

'Oh not again!' my mum would exclaim, faintly embarrassed at their adulation.

Mind you I can't talk. I once emailed Simon Bates on Classic FM because, as he was playing  'Venus' from Holst's Planets, I watched a barn owl swoop and circle and rise and fall, cresting and diving in exact time to the music. He then read it out and I cringed ever so slightly.

So it's alright, you can own up here.

Bookhound and I have had a lovely nostalge (my word) about Last Train to Hilversum, and spent a happy ten minutes remembering and singing our favourite songs from Children's Favourites on a Saturday morning with Uncle Mac. Uncle Mac heralded the freedoms of Saturday over breakfast, and before I went out to 'play' with instructions to be back when the Mitcham Town Hall clock said 1pm. We are embarrassingly word perfect on Tubby the Tuba, Sparky's Magic Piano, Nelly the Elephant, Little White Bull and The Ugly Duckling.

And in the same way Sing Something Simple on a Sunday evening meant the weekend was over and it was back to school. I was thrilled to read that Corrie Corfield also recorded the Top 40 afterwards, trying not to include the voice-overs. Everyone in our house had to be silent too.

And there you have it. So much more to this treasure of a book than I have had space to include so don't miss it if you're in the mood for an escape and some magic, and please do share your radio memories in comments on this post.

Meanwhile I don't know about you but maybe a little bit of oompah-pah wouldn't go amiss this week either, and then scroll down for gifts

Sea Room ~ Adam Nicolson

'I have stolen 
some of the light which drenches you this midnight  
to wish you all the islands in the world 
and every one a different kind of peace."

These lines from Northern Lights by Jo Shapcott have been among my most treasured poetry quotes since the day I first read them and which I'd written on the flyleaf of Sea Room by Adam Nicolson. I've used the words so many times in so many books about islands, jotted them in notebooks, sent them as a sort of blessing to friends. I'm not sure when I first embarked on the Sea Room journey to the Shiants all those years ago either, before realising I didn't actually want to go there at that precise reading moment. Maybe because we were doing island visiting of our own to Orkney for several years, but scouring my shelves for some armchair journeys for 2019 I had added this one to the pile.

No problems this time, I was up for the voyage, this story of one man, three islands and half a million puffins.

Once 'owned' by Compton Mackenzie, Adam Nicolson soon makes it clear that 'owning' islands' is not as straightforward as it might seem. Yes, his father Nigel Nicolson, son of Vita Sackville-West, bought the Shiants, five miles off shore from Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, for £1400 inherited from his grandmother. Nigel was an undergraduate at the time, it was 1937 and £1400 would have bought a great deal more for his money, investments that would have been worth far more than the islands are today, but really that wasn't the point. 

'Islands feed an appetite for the absolute. They are removed from the human world, from its business and noise.'

...and as Adam Nicolson explains, young Nigel felt 'enlarged and excited' by the ownership, happy to find a place of solitude and the wherewithal to see nature in close-up and the sea so huge. But 'ownership' of an island is a tricky cultural business to square in a place where attitudes towards absent English landlords are less than friendly or understanding. History does them no favours, but then it would seem the local Clan Stewart were equally to be feared in terms of dominance and brutality. The islands, traditionally for two generations of Nicolsons now, are handed over to the eldest son at the age of twenty-one; Nigel to Adam, and Adam now to his son Tom. The question of 'ownership' is one that Adam Nicolson sensibly addresses in the first chapter before going on to explain the family's policy of allowing open access to the Shiants, thus denouncing any charge of exclusive rights.

'Land - particularly land that is out on the edge of things, and particularly land that is a rich concentration of the marvels of the natural world - is to be shared.'

If you can get there you are allowed stay there.

And meanwhile Sea Room, first published in 2001, 'is an attempt to share the Shiants.'

Consider it done, because I've had the most wonderful journey and sojourn over the first few weeks of the year alongside virtual puffins, gannets, shags. I've explored the three islands, Garbh Eilean, Eilean an Targhe and Eilean Mhuire for days on end, navigated my way around the rocky shores, investigated caves and beaches, found relics and delved into the history of this amazing place, wished I'd had Magnus along to deal with the rats and understand more about islands than I ever thought.

Why had it never occurred to me that in the 1600s these islands might  have been relatively safe places to live, perhaps much safer from marauders than on the mainland. That's not to deny how tough it must have been because when the weather hits it takes no prisoners to say nothing of being self-sufficient.

And culturally how the concept of the 'island' has shifted from a place of imprisonment (think Robinson Crusoe) to the magical places espoused by Gaugin and Rousseau.

On the subject of Rattus rattus and an island overrun with them in their tens of thousands, a four year project to eradicate them has been declared a success, which must be a relief to all who land there. They were very familiar creatures not averse to sharing a pillow.

And there is much investigation of who may have lived on the islands in centuries past. I sensed Adam Nicolson's infectious joy at re-imagining the various pasts. When the evidence may be as extensive but as limited as a midden containing more than a hundred thousand limpet shells who can know the reasons for their consumption, but let's imagine, and I did.

'The Shiants are a place where the deepest past seems more nakedly present than any other I know.'

On the way I've had some fun with the Leuchtterm1917 (dotted) and the washi tape, alongside maps and pictures and a glue stick, because I'm using it as a Travel Journal for the year (that mostly stays at home) and writing about and around each journey-book I read. 

Look stranger, as this island now...
Stand stable here
And silent be
That through the channels of the ear
May wander like a river
The swaying sound of the sea.

W.H.Auden

Meanwhile, if you have read Sea Room please do share your thoughts in comments...

And while we’re abiut it any other ‘island’ reading suggestions.

And I'll bet someone somewhere out there has been to The Shiants...

 

Munich ~ Robert Harris

When the Gamekeeper broke his leg back-along, and was eventually whisked off to the operating theatre for some running repairs requiring the contents of the Screwfix catalogue, I nipped into Plymouth for a book browse...as you do whilst under duress. I chose a couple of what I would call Easy Readers, which is not to demean the quality, but I reckoned I needed page turners, and one of them was Munich, the other was Force of Nature by Jane Harper. As it happens, what followed, in terms of support, keeping company (we did a lot of summer bird watching, happy days) and six x dog walking x twice a day, didn't leave much time for reading, so I have only just read Robert Harris's book.

I was an early adopter of Robert Harris, reading Fatherland on publication back in 1992 (how long ago?? Only twenty-seven years) and swooping on Enigma and Archangel in 1995 and 1998. I was back on full time case-load health visiting, work and family meant limited reading time, but I remember all three as being excellent reads that did the rounds of the community nursing office, so can recommend them if Robert Harris is new to you.

Then everything went Roman in Harris-World and I lapsed... and you are all now going to tell me to read them I just know it.. Pompeii, Imperium, Lustrum, Dictator anyone...

I caught up last year with the audio version of Conclave a terrific listen, about the choosing of a new Pope, and which I see is the Number One Best Seller in the 'Catholic Popes' category on You Know Where...

'They are holy men. But they have ambition. And they have rivals.'

and goodness me did they,

But, though I still have a few gaps, I'm now up to the minute with Robert Harris and Munich.

I relish a fiction read that takes a known historical event and giving an imaginative but entirely plausible outing for what might have been happening behind the scenes. I enjoyed Every Man for Himself recently, Beryl Bainbridge's fictional insights on the sinking of the Titanic, and in the case of Munich, Neville Chamberlain's negotiations with Hitler in September 1938. Two former friends, old university acquaintances, Legat and Hartmann are supposedly batting for opposite teams in their respective diplomatic entourages, except one of them knows much more than he should, and the consequences of sharing that information could change the course of history. 

Meanwhile Neville Chamberlain is portrayed in a certain sympathetic light too, which I don't think has generally been the case (certainly not in the recent film Darkest Hour), though historians out there please correct me if I'm wrong. It's at moments like this (among many) when I miss being able to nip into the Tinker and ask my primary source for his considered opinion.

A Prime Minister stuck between a rock and a hard place...

Neville Chamberlain doing his level best to avoid the carnage of another conflagration, though sadly it seems he misread Hitler's appetite for exactly that, whilst failing to see that the Fuhrer wasn't a man of his word either.

There is much tension and intrigue until a quietly triumphant and trusting Chamberlain returns, waving what proved to be a meaningless piece of paper with the famous words...

"Peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time.”

 Czechoslovakia has been sold down the river and Hitler has plans for Europe, so we all know what the next sentence might be if there was another chapter in the book,

Churchill's legendary riposte...

"You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war.”

It seems harsh now that I have a different perspective on Chamberlain, but that's politics for you, little room for sympathy.

Along the way plenty of intrigue and tension and I particularly liked the insights (fictional or otherwise) into Mrs Chamberlain, clearly a source of great support to her husband. So a book that started its life here on the scribbles as part of the regular Reading Gallimaufry round-up of recent good reads, and ended up demanding a post of its own.

If you have read Munich, or Conclave or any of the others mentioned I would love to know your thoughts...

And there's the Roman trilogy...should I go there when I am currently holed up in Greece with The Iliad . Lordy lordy, you did warn me, the killing and many ways of... entrails all over the place...

 

Before Wallis - Edward VIII's Other Women ~ Rachel Trethewey

First things first, I must now confess to a complete blank on the lineage of the House of Windsor.

What a disgrace.

Well, the early days of the House of Windsor that is, created in 1917 to break with any prior associations with Germany... but who exactly were the brothers and sisters, the children of King George V and Queen Mary?

I've sorted it out now but I can't believe I had never really paid attention and understood the place of Dukes of Gloucester and Kent in the grand Windsor scheme of things. To save anyone else the embarrassment, though I feel sure you all know this, here it is ...

The Major Players...

Prince Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David (known as David) born in 1894, the eldest son and heir to the throne. Edward VIII and the one who would abdicate.

Prince Albert Frederick Arthur George born in 1895, known as Bertie, second in line. The man who would be King George VI after the abdication.

The Minor Players...

Mary, the Princess Royal, born in 1897 

Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester born in 1900.

Prince George, (how confusing) Duke of Kent born in 1902.

Prince John, born in 1905 and died in 1919. The 'afflicted' prince and the subject of that brilliant 2003 TV drama, The Lost Prince, by Stephen Poliakoff

Right, so having sorted that out, we can now proceed to Rachel Trethewey's latest and excellent book, Before Wallis - Edward VIII's Other Women. 

From knowing so little beyond Wallis Simpson - divorcee - abdication - bad news, I now know it all thanks to Rachel Trethewey's meticulous but accessible research presented in this completely absorbing read. 

 At just 5ft 7ins tall and weighing nine stone the Prince must have cut an almost diminutive figure but the women of the land fell over themselves to be in the same room as him and he was never short of a mistress or three it would seem. Freda Dudley-Ward and Thelma Furness, along with the lovely Rosemary Leveson-Gower, are the three women whose lives Rachel Trethewey examines in detail and I was fascinated by each one.

But what a sad sort of jack-