The theme for November's gathering of the Village Book group this week was 'Colour' and vowing, as always, to try and read something new rather than recycling something from the past, I settled on The Land of Green Ginger by Winifred Holtby.
It fitted in with my current reading for several reasons, not least that it was set in the 1920s where I seem to be residing right now in an effort to escape the issue-led fiction of the present day. In fact it's proving to be quite a revelation to read the issue-led fiction of the 1920s instead, because the post-war pre-occupations of the authors offer unusual and often unexpected comparisons with the now.
That sense of a nation unsettled...hoping to find its feet again after a period of turmoil...you know the sort of thing.
The Land of Green Ginger had been beckoning for a while on two fronts...the title and the cover. Books that use the British Railways posters, or a likeness of them, are a shoo in for my consciousness, everyone's doing it and everyone's winning my adoration.
Those British Library murder mystery books...
A Month in the Country by J.L.Carr. I already had a copy but bought another one solely for the cover. Well. that and the fact that I have a well-thumbed much annotated copy and I wanted a crisp new unsullied one to read over and again without being influenced or drawn to earlier thoughts and impressions, thus allowing new ones to creep in (it works).
And there it is again on Winifred Holtby's South Riding. Ubiquitous maybe, but still endearing...
And then there's the title, The Land of Green Ginger, what warm, sweet-smelling magic it conjures up. I think of Yorkshire parkin cake and sugar plum fairies and Christmas. That might just be me though.
Born in South Africa Joanna Burton's mother dies a few days after her birth and, realising that he won't be able to cope or continue his work, Joanna's missionary father dispatches baby Joanna back to the care of her maiden aunts living in the town of Kingsport. Kingsport is based on the city of Hull and it is here that the growing child Joanna, skipping along one day, sees the street name The Land of Green Ginger (an actual street in Hull). The magical name plants seeds of wonder in her imagination and, though it won't feature again the book until a brief reference in the final chapter, it establishes a pathway of escape for Joanna throughout her life, a means when times are tough (and my goodness they are) for her to disappear off on flights of fancy as an antidote to drudgery and hardship.
Married to Teddy Leigh before he sets off to war, Joanna has to cope with the return of a changed, damaged and very difficult man as they try to establish a life for themselves and their two young girls on an isolated hilltop farm in Yorkshire. Having failed to tell Joanna of his childhood brush with TB it comes as something of a shock when Teddy is struck down by the disease again, eventually becoming the carping and controlling invalid of the family. But Joanna is the queen at countering the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune, the ultimate soaker-up of verbal abuse and maltreatment, and I spent a lot of time railing against her lot as I read. Comparing it to the present day leaves a great deal wanting in Joanna's existence whilst providing real insights into a woman's lot in the 1920s.
Maybe too, it could be argued that The Land of Green Ginger reads as a bit of self-congratulatory apologia on the part of the unmarried Winifred, a justification of her 'spinster' position. By all accounts an absolute angel of a woman, with ne'er an ill thought about anyone, Winifred was nevertheless reportedly distraught when her closest friend Vera Brittain was married. Perhaps this fiction was a vehicle for her to convey the unsayable, a means of saying 'Just look what I have been spared...look how dreadful it would have been...' .
Joanna's hardship is relentless, her flights of fancy to a new life a constant necessity if she is to stay the course. There will be a distracting love interest in the form of a Hungarian refugee whose account of his war around Europe was both gripping and informative. It's easy to forget the vulnerability of neighbouring countries with land borders when you live on an island, and the fast-paced instability and turmoil, the changing allegiances and enmities and the unpredictability of the war were an education.
There will be an ultimate 'insult' which I can't possibly mention for fear of spoiling (but let's say I was shocked) and the outcomes will be tragic and life-changing, yet even then Joanna takes the blame and the consequences upon herself (again) loves and forgives (again) and I ended up feeling quite a wretched person for not feeling quite so loving and forgiving as I read.
So a right old gamut of emotions but, apart from one rather overwrought and melodramatic section on religion, I emerged realising that I had read a really good book. Winifred Holtby excels at creating that sense of place and situating her characters in the midst. It's not hard to feel the chill and the discomfort as Joanna goes about her farm and household chores in her ragged and worn-out clothes, or to feel some relief as she starts to see the light.
Now I'm wondering, after a suitable length of time to recover my equilibrium, which of Winifred Holtby's books to tackle next...
Any more fans of Winifred out there...
Anyone else lured in by the railway poster book covers...
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