We’re well into November and I am deep into The Mirror & the Light but am going to be very honest and say it still hasn’t quite grabbed me as much as I’d hoped. I suspect this is all my fault, I’ve read or listened in dribs and drabs and perhaps that makes for a lesser impact and a disjointed atmosphere, but I’ve just passed P300 330 so progress is being made. I’ll be staying the course along with anyone else out there still with me in 1536. And I have just read that astonishing chapter where Cromwell cries when he realises that Wolsey may not have trusted him as much as he thought, and perhaps I am now feeling it.
Through all this I’m wondering if you are a silent reader or a listening reader...
l have been a silent reader for years but lately, thanks to slightly more noticeable tinnitus, I’ve taken to having some quiet music on in the background. Tinnitus is apparently one of the scourges of lockdown as people find themselves with time on their hands to hear it, though living in such a quiet place all the time this is not quite the case for me.
And it’s all about the right music for the right book.
I’m not sure how often I’ve listened to Pablo Casals and the Bach Cello Suites, but they’re perfect background music and always but always remind of that crime series, name escapes me, but wasn't it set in Warwick? Someone will know...
For The Mirror & the Light I have The Spy’s Choirbook trilling along and I doubt I could create a better atmosphere with cornetts and sackbuts and shawms and a choir of mixed voices.
The recording I have took place in Arundel Castle and is a beautiful rendition of the motets collected by Petrus Alamire and presented to Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon in 1516. The original choirbook is held by the British Library and with its illuminated pages must be an absolute treasure.
Back with the cello, my other listening has been an old favourite. Years ago I invested in the seventeen disc set of The Complete EMI Recordings of Jacqueline du Pre.
Her life cut tragically short by multiple sclerosis, these are a wonderful archive of her talent and something I’m really pleased I bought when I could afford it, because I’m not sure I would prioritise it now. Writing in the CD notes, Christopher Nupen says...
’ An artist like Du Pre seems not only to play the notes but to be the messenger of something between the notes or behind the notes, something very elevated that is both personal and universal at the same time, and seems to be forever.’
and whilst those nuances might pass me by when I’m reading, I’ve certainly spent time just listening to Jacqueline play down the years.
Please do share your thoughts if you are still reading The Mirror & the Light.
Meanwhile, are you a silent reader or a listening reader...
Can you read with music playing in the background...
If so I'd love to know which music works for you, and I'd love some more suggestions. I have a vast stash of CDs here, there must be more in there that would be perfect.
My chapter-a-day-of-a-thought-filled book endeavour is still going reasonably well, and no one is more surprised about this than me. I often start these things with great enthusiasm only for it to slowly wane into forgetfulness, missed days and before you know it not a lot.
My book for October was Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald which was, sadly for me, the right book at the wrong time, so I substituted J.B.Priestley’s Grumbling at Large from Notting Hill Editions and have warmed to a man I’ve barely read and knew even less about, more to come on that. The grounding of Vesper Flights might have been more about occasionally feeling sated with nature reading so I will come back to it, probably after the winter hibernation.
Meanwhile I also seem to be making a few wrong book purchases and I’m grateful to Waterstones who take them back. We agreed it’s because there are no chairs in the store now...that’s what it is. Nothing to do with my fickleness of reading mood at all; this is all because I can’t sit down with a pile of books and get a feel for them before I commit to buy. Anyway I returned a book on recycling through history which had looked interesting but proved dense (to me) and another which was a follow up to a highly successful first book on walking around the coast (it will have its moment) and I came away with The Fire of Joy by Clive James and some money on a gift card ( towards future mistakes and returns) instead.
'In the last months of his life, his vision impaired by surgery and unable to read, Clive James explored the treasure-house of his mind: the poems he knew best, so good that he didn’t just remember them, he found them impossible to forget. The Fire of Joy is the record of this final journey of recollection and celebration. Enthralled by poetry all his life, James knew hundreds of poems by heart. In offering this selection of his favourites, a succession of poems from the sixteenth century to the present, his aim is to inspire you to discover and to learn, and perhaps even to speak poetry aloud.
In his highly personal anthology, James offers a commentary on each of the eighty or so poems: sometimes a historical or critical note on the poem or its author, sometimes a technical point about the poem’s construction from someone who was himself a poet, sometimes a personal anecdote about the role the poem played in his own life.
Whether you’re familiar with a poem or not ― whether you’re familiar with poetry in general or not ― these chatty, unpretentious, often tender mini-essays convey the joy of James’s enthusiasm and the benefit of his knowledge. His urgent wish was to share with a new generation what he himself had loved. This is a book to be read cover to cover or dipped into: either way it generously opens up a world for our delight.'
I discovered Clive James many years ago after an event at a local literary festival. His wry and laconic TV persona was enhanced by a deep and serious intelligence which had never struck me before. He signed a copy of his essays for me and that was me confirmed as a dedicated follower. His latter years prior to his death in 2019 were not wasted. He faced down a terminal diagnosis, that really took its time to play out, with humour, fortitude and intelligence and often with some embarrassment that having declared his time was up, it clearly wasn’t. He really did give credence to that Keats poem about dying before the teeming brain has time to
When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain, Before high-pilèd books, in charactery, Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;
The harvest, to continue Keats’s metaphor, was a steady stream of books that contained so much wisdom and humility that it’s hard to know where to begin. I bought each one as it emerged and see them as incredibly powerful manuals for life, for understanding it, for an awareness of what is possible and so much more. Follow the links for my thoughts on Injury Time and The River in the Sky
It was an article on The Fire of Joy that alerted me to its existence and also something that always awakens my interest about learning poetry by heart. Ted Hughes edited a volume, By Heart, years ago and I keep an old damp-wrinkled copy in the car in case we ever break down, or get stuck in a blizzard, and at least I have something useful to do. I had the cassette of it somewhere, Ted Hughes reading, and if you’ve never heard Ted reading seek him out, stop whatever you’re doing and have a listen.
Clive James had a rich store of poetry known by heart thanks to a school that didn’t allow its pupils to go home each day until they’d recited a learnt poem. It really makes my own store look very meagre and how I wish I’d learned more when my brain was so capable of stashing it. I’m pretty good on a few Shakespeare soliloquies; 'To Be' and 'Tomorrow and Tomorrow' will come tumbling out at the slightest provocation.
An Example :
A while back, parking in the multi-story to head to Waterstones, and taking note of where we were...because the day we forgot and somehow found ourselves trapped by a one way door on the emergency access only staircase of the Drake Shopping Centre is never to be repeated. Anyway we’d parked in Bay 2B and that was all it took for me to launch the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. I can also summon up Archimedes Principle whenever the need arises for a body totally or partially immersed in a fluid.
In his last days Clive James derived huge pleasure and comfort from his store of poetry. His daughter would read aloud to him and it is suggested that readers do likewise with The Fire of Joy. Even better there are helpful hints on how to read a poem aloud and they make complete sense. I’ve listened to some absolute shockers in my time ...the poets that assume the ethereal drone monotone (not Ted, oh no not Ted). Clive is all about pauses and intonation, keeping the voice up towards the end of the line, try to figure out the poem before you start etc. Each poem in this eclectic and sometimes surprising collection comes with a brief commentary, usually laced with Clive’s humour and an anecdote giving it some context, rather than any pseudo-intellectual analysis, which all makes for added enjoyment. I read the poem, read it again, read it aloud create my own context and then read Clive’s. This is a book to get a person through the winter, no question.
Meanwhile, I’m sure I’m not the only one with lines learned by heart still ready to tumble forth, so off you go in comments go on...
And talking of poems being read...did anyone else catch our Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, reading The Bed, at the Remembrance Day service at Westminster Abbey. It is a tribute to the Unknown Warrior and it was all and everything a poem (and a Poet Laureate reading it aloud) needs to be right now...
Privy Seal is all I could desire. The ambassador takes a sliver of veal.’
An exchange between Thomas Cromwell and Eustace Chapuys, and though I’ve now read it for the fourth time of asking it still leaps off the page at me as a wonderful play on words. Privy Seal - Sliver of Veal. And I mistakenly read ‘silver’ in there too. Magical.
I’m up to page 214 and have a nice notebook on the go too,
But I now have to confess I’ve hit a bit of a confused phase with The Mirror & the Light and I’m hoping you can help out to save me having to turn back. The trouble is I’m mixing listening with reading and I have a feeling I might have dozed off because suddenly someone else is pregnant and I’m not sure who, or the significance, but there’s more trouble for Thomas to sort out. And someone who thought they were pregnant but turns out not to be...I’m thinking that one might be connected to Wyatt languishing in the Tower.
Poor beleaguered Crumuell never seems to get any peace, but am I seeing the cracks appearing. I think I am. Veiled threats alongside increasing signs that the King’s bidding is becoming a greater burden than Cromwell envisaged.
I knew if I could feel like part of the furniture and just watch, as I discovered when I read both Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, then I’d be in. And though I’m not feeling that sense of belonging quite so intensely yet, I am basking in Hilary Mantel’s unique ability to create atmosphere through her rich descriptions of fabric of its texture and feel, even the sound it makes ...and the colours, aren’t the colours sumptuous.
And I’m feeling for the poor women too. Utterly empty lives, pointless unless they can reproduce and their entire lives seem to be spent trying to do so, or trying not to do so. And alongside is the gossip and rumour, the Tudor equivalent of Twitter no doubt. Fake news probably just as rife then as now.
Unless anyone can help me out with a quick resume of my muddled bit I’ll have to retrace my steps, but this little hiccup apart I’m feeling in fine fettle for proceeding having now read beyond my previous three attempts. Thirty or so pages a day and I look forward to them.
Meanwhile how are you all doing...
Hasn’t it been a treat to escape back to 1536...
And then when you get there, and have a wander around, you realise human nature has changed very little in all that time..
So many I hardly know where to start but I'll start with looking forward...
I've been thinking ahead to next spring as a real antidote to the winter I knew we'd be having, and so I have planted up lots of bulbs in pots. Tulips, this year Angelique and Victoria's Secret (Belle Epoque sold out very early) and a huge half barrel (a present from the Gamekeeper) planted up with several varieties of narcissus for spring cheer and colour. I keep thinking how hearts will lift en masse when we get through to the other side and see those first green shoots. Never will it all be so welcome.
These the Belle Epoque and Black Parrot from 2018...
I've also chitted, soaked and sowed my sweet peas ready for next year. I plan to major in sweet peas because I love them so much and the slugs seem to hate them, so I'm currently eyeing up a sunny spot in the garden which I can dig (or persuade Someone Else to) and have a row of twigwams just for sweet peas, as well as my usual places. I ordered a variety of seeds from Nicky's Nursery, including Wuthering Heights, Just Jenny, Matucana (my dad's favourite) Old Spice and various mixed selections. A high percentage sprouted and they are now pushing their way up in the greenhouse. I'll keep pinching them out until it gets really cold which should slow them down nicely. I use old knitting needles as supports and tie them in as they get taller and I will cover them over if we have frost, just in case.
Down to more mundane things...
I've cleaned the oven...
Two days and two boxes of Oven Pride nuclear liquid later and the thing is sparkling. There are no 'before' pictures because it was too disgraceful to be seen in public but look at it now...
Honestly, you need sun glasses to cope with the dazzle, far too lovely to be used. We're just going to look at it and admire it, and eat cold food and raw cake mix.
I've also defrosted the freezer...
The annual removal of the Titanic iceberg has happened. Actually I waded in before it had reached Titanic proportions and it didn't take long at all. More Brownie points, it's the just a shame the door stays properly shut now and I can't admire the lack of polar ice cap.
There's nothing like a gift is there, and I'm back rather swiftly to the Joni theme because I had really special present from a lovely friend this week. We are both huge Joni fans, so imagine my delight when the new Joni Mitchell 5 CD box set arrived. Joni is releasing early recordings from her archives and Volume One The Early Years (1963-1967) sees a young Joni finding her feet in the world of folk music whilst developing her own inimitable style, and exploring exactly what her voice could do. Once a sweet soprano she discovered a range in a lower register and you can definitely hear those experiments in these sublime early recordings.
Joni was also stunningly beautiful, and looking at the pictures reminds me how much I wanted to be her, with the glowing complexion and the long blond mane, when I was about fourteen with spots and frizzy hair. I did manage the guitar bit, though Joni's tunings were always a mystery.
Let's hear about all your Pleasings in comments. Lots of good things must have happened in amongst the less good...we definitely need to know about them.
The last time I settled down to read The Mirror & the Light Lockdown the First happened and the book proved to be entirely the wrong sort of confinement reading for me.
And now what happens...
We plan to read it through November together and what happens, here in England at least, Lockdown the Second.
It's almost as if Anne Boleyn is sending messages, warning me off, because if I read that opening chapter once more about the narrow shoulders fitting in the arrow box, and the dripping clothes, and the ladies-in-waiting not quite sure where to wipe their hands, and the head nestling by the feet...well what's a reader to do.
Anyway, we planned it so I'm going to have another go, thirty pages a day minimum will keep me on track (I often find this approach helps) and if I get past page 133 then I've surpassed previous attempts and that will feel like a win. I will of course quite understand if anyone who thought they'd join in now feels right book wrong time again, don't feel in the least bit defeated because I won't. I will beg forgiveness in advance if the same thing happens again here, but I do have book, Kindle and audio versions so I'm hopeful.
I’ve upgraded and splashed out on a Kindle Oasis when they were hugely discounted recently, plus I had a gift voucher awaiting its moment, and I have to say I love it a bit too much all helped by a gorgeous cover that reminds me of New Zealand every time I see it..
While I was about it I revamped the Ikea £1ish bright and rather distracting turquoise bookstand (breakfast reading) with a piece of quilted shibori that had lain unused for about two years. It's a lovely reminder of swimming in Lake Hawea...
These images in my mind seem to matter a lot at the moment.
The added bonus of the Oasis is the effortless synchronised swap between reading and listening. I have a little Sony blue tooth speaker ( SRS XB-01 waterproof for bath listening) that does the job nicely...
And not propping the heavy book is a win-win too. The new improved, and slightly bigger, warm-light screen is a joy for my eyes at the 4am awakening, as well as being able to adjust the font and spacing. I've decided this might be the way ahead for fiction reading at least. Too many books with tiny print these days.
Uncertain, unpredictable times with us all in the same storm, but different boats. Let's see how our reading of The Mirror & the Light copes with any turbulence ahead. I think the little reading guides have all arrived (thank you for your emails letting me know) but nor should those people feel obliged to read if the time doesn't feel right either. If not now, the book will have its day dreckly.
Let me know if you think you'll be joining in, it will help keep me going to know you're out there and I'm not reading alone...
Or if you'll be cheering us from the side-lines, with words of encouragement and advice, as we head back to 1536 for some peace and quiet...
And do share any other time-filling projects planned; reading or otherwise...
Incidentally, has anyone else had their circadian rhythms completely scuppered by the clocks going back?
'How does a nation pull itself together again after a disaster? How do we move on from overwhelming experiences?...'
...asks Frank Cottrell-Boyce in his introduction to the Notting Hill edition of Happy Half Hours - Selected Writings of A.A.Milne (published October 20th) and I had to wonder whether this little volume was a product of recent events or a happy coincidence. Whatever its recent provenance there can be no doubt it is the perfect book for our times.
Writing in the aftermath of the First World War Alan Alexander Milne, so well known by me and mine for Christopher Robin, Winnie the Pooh and When We Were Very Young must have been struggling with profound demons. Alan was a pacifist at heart and yet signing up for active service, as a signalling officer in France, witnessed first hand the devastation he had been so keen to avoid, and in the years to come, as Frank Cottrell Boyce suggests...
'Luck carries with it a sense of responsibility. Lucky survivors often feel they have been saved for some great purpose, or at least they should make the most of their opportunity.'
And who can argue with the fact that A.A. Milne did that and more.
Each piece in this beautiful linen-bound edition is a gem. Four or five pages of engrossing reading whether it be ...
Sorting out a library...
'So then your library is is not just for reference. You know as well as I do that it furnishes your room; that it furnishes it more effectively than does paint or mahogany or china.'
Sorting out the bath...
'While the water was running out this morning... I got Paradise Lost off by heart..'
Trying to put on weight because your wife says you look like a herring...
'Every now and then doctors slap me about and ask me if I was always as thin as this
Discovering a spring...
'I forget who discovered the source of the Nile, but probably he felt much as I did...'
I meant to ration these to one a day but in the end I was a fully paid up member of the Just One More club because these are essays to lift the spirits if they need lifting, or to keep them uplifted if you were happy enough in the first place.
There is a wonderful essay about Midsummer Day that makes perfect sense.
'Why should the days begin to get shorter at the moment when summer is fully arrived?'
Honestly, the times I've thought that. Just as the fun is starting this little cloud of despond hovers with the thought that the nights are drawing in and some bright spark always announces it with glee online somewhere (not me I hope)
'Sometimes I think that if June were called August and April June these things would be easier to bear.'
In fact I'm doing something similar with Offspringette in New Zealand.
'Right, so it's really February for you isn't it?' I said a few months ago.
It was odd but just as I'd noticed the August day when the light seemed to be changing, Offspringette had noticed the light returning to the South Island skies. I was warned about the light when I visited but nothing could have prepared me for that dazzle of blue as I stepped off the plane in Christchurch and we headed up into the Port Hills for my first glimpse.
And of course all you Southern Hemisphere readers know this anyway. August is still winter, summer is coming in November.
And talking of travel perhaps one of my favourite essays 'Geographical Research'. I have A Level Geography to thank for my love of maps but likewise A.A.Milne loves them too...
'I always enjoy those periodic excursions to my atlas...'
And I wonder has the atlas gone out of fashion thanks to Google Maps and satnav.
Will the next generation have lost the art of map-reading...
I mentioned that reading Rose Macaulay's The Towers of Trebizond recently had me scurrying for the Bartholomew's Handy Atlas. Published in 1923 I love it for the faded colours and the names. I don't want an updated version, I want to believe that the old countries still exist, the old boundaries and names like Mesopotamia and Persia, Prussia and Galicia. And there was Trebizond, on the Black Sea.
The last thing that remained was to find my copy of When We Were Very Young but I'll save that for another day, along with the story of the day Bookhound and I met the real Christopher Robin.
I have a few novels by A.A.Milne on the shelf but have to admit this really is my first encounter with his adult writing and it certainly makes me want to read more. His humour is funny and self-deprecating, his writing conveys no sense of his own importance. Whether this is true to the man I have yet to find out, I hope so, but as Frank Cottrell Boyce suggests..
'Milne's gift to write amusingly about the most trivial things is far from trivial. It's a kind of blessing. The kind that can put you back together again when all else fails.'
Meanwhile, have you read any A.A.Milne for grown-ups. I have just two on my shelves, Chloe Marr and A Table Near the Band.
And are we losing the skill of map-reading...
And essays in general...do they appeal to you or not and if so do you have any other collections to recommend.
Bookhound and I were having one of our conversations the other day, it went a bit like this...
Me : 'Clocks go back this weekend.'
Him : 'That means it's only five weeks to Advent and the C*******s bough coming into the kitchen.'
Me : 'But surely it was only last week we packed the deccies away and put them in the loft...'
And we suddenly realised that this year had somehow vanished, and we have no real markers for it other than those we'd prefer to forget. No month in New Zealand obviously, but that apart no umpteen trips out hither and yon to places new or loved to look back on at this stage in the year. They do say that a set routine is the quickest way for time to feel as if its passing too quickly, which is why we often do spur of the moment trips out.
Falmouth for the day...
Penzance and Lamorna...
Lanhydrock to look at Tommy Robartes' room...
The house and orchards at Cotehele...and who can forget the Monday morning we walked around alone but for two other people...Hilary Mantel and her husband, and I had to suppress all notions of fan-girl adoration and let them walk in peace...
'Bookhound might have been whispering 'Don't you dare.' in my ear as well.
A jaunt along the North Cornwall coast...
A jolly along the highways and byways of Devon to find some obscure but beautiful little church that I've read about...
And all the country and village shows, the rows of golden honey at Okehampton Show...
Morwenstow for that view across to the sea from the church, and the best tearoom ever.
Say we went out two or three times a week somewhere, that would be 120 or more excursions between January and now, and this year we can probably count them on one hand. I won't go on or we'll all end up maudlin and miserable, but if nothing else their absence has done something very strange to the passage of time this year.
It's not a complaint because it’s the same for most of us and there have been unexpected upsides too, but it suddenly, in a strange instant, felt as if time had telescoped in on itself, it really had stood still, and I wonder if anyone else had noticed this.
Is it just five minutes since you packed away last C*******s and maybe you're wondering what this year's season will hold?
All I can say is if you hold anything, hold the faith that this will pass, and of course our bough will be coming in as usual, and in the meantime some of us have The Mirror and the Light to contend with. before then.
Talking of which...
I accumulated quite a few of these little reading guides The World of Wolf Hall, by picking one up every time I was in Waterstones...would anyone who is joining our slow November read like one? There's a very handy list of key dates and characters, an elaboration of themes and some historical context.
You can also order the guide free on Kindle here, but for those non-Kindlers I have seven copies, which will be on their way to the first seven people, based in the UK, to email their address to me dovegreyreader at gmail dot com
UPDATE: The seven copies have now all found their forever homes. Thank you for your emails, in the post on Monday.
Well of course I was going to love a book that occasionally references the music and lyrics of Joni Mitchell as a reminder of life’s foibles. Court and Spark makes an appearance in Troubled Blood , as do several of the later albums. If you are a fan of Joni then you might only need to read 'Love came to my door, with a sleeping roll and madman's soul...'
the tune will swiftly follow and you'll be singing the next few lines...
He thought for sure I'd seen him Dancing up a river in the dark Looking for a woman To court and spark
Robin finds it unsettling. It doesn't sooth or cheer her and it is unlike anything she has listened to before...strange melodies, absent hooks, everything feeling unfinished and left open, according to J.K.Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith. Robin feels defensive, confused and sad, but there is acknowledgement of the beautiful soprano voice which 'tumbles and swoops over piano and guitar chords' and a recognition that Joni songs are really hard to sing along to (unless they've been a part of your life, and you've been listening to and loving them for fifty years, as so many of us have).
And I'm thinking stick with it Robin, all will become clear, Joni will work her magic eventually.
Having bought Troubled Blood by Robert Galbraith in solidarity with JKR the question was would I ever read it. At 900 pages this was going to take some commitment so I opened the first page with trepidation and not a lot of optimism. Except we have really enjoyed the Cormoran Strike series on TV. and in part due to the casting. Tom Burke as the imperfect hero is perfect; rugged and gruff, the Afghanistan war veteran turned private detective, the amputee with issues and the rock star father who he refuses to recognise, while Holliday Grainger as his side-kick Robin Ellacott is the best foil. Arriving at the agency as a temp, Robin has proved her worth and now works as a private detective alongside Strike. She is gutsy and intuitive and much-appreciated by her boss, though he often has strange ways of showing it. There’s an underlying theme of unrequited love, of the will-they-won’t-they variety which JKR seeds in the imagination of the viewer and reader more than she gives voice to on the page, and all added to with the Joni Mitchell references for an aficionado like me.
Troubled Blood is the first of the series I have read and I still haven’t seen Lethal White so I’m leap-frogging the action a bit, but JKR is excellent at filling in the details and reading this book is, much to my surprise, ensuring I will go back and read Lethal White along with The Cuckoo’s Calling, The Silkworm, and Career of Evil.
Having had my very public meltdown about The Casual Vacancy and it’s slightly dubious plot (for me) surrounding social workers and safeguarding, I have to confirm that this was not the path to a lifelong refusenik state about everything else J.K.Rowling writes. One book doth not a prejudice make, it doesn’t work like that and thank goodness. Anyway, I picked up Troubled Blood and set too. There was Cormoran in his flailing coat living his slightly chaotic day to day life, and the lovely Robin bringing stability and masses of instinct to the office, along with a new secretary Pat who stands no nonsense from any of them and I was straight in.
GP Margot Bamborough has gone missing years previously and her daughter, who was very young at the time, decides to employ Cormoran Strike and his agency to try and solve the mystery of her disappearance. The Joni connection soon reveals itself...
'That was Margot's religion. Joni Mitchell, she raved about that album...'
It's absolutely no good me trying to run through the plot because there's so much of it. So many twists and turns but I'm pleased to say, apart from getting slightly bogged down in the astrology sections, I kept up with the pace whilst marvelling at what a brilliant storyteller can achieve. And a storyteller who doesn't simplify, one who credits her reader with the ability to keep up with all the dangling threads that will eventually be caught up into a tidy ending.
Maybe...
Like so many of these detective series we're going to be kept dangling about the love interests. Yes Susan Hill I'm looking at you and poor Simon Seraillier, and perhaps Peter James and the Roy Grace series, though I'm way behind on those and whether the missing wife ever turns up ...DON'T TELL ME.
Anyway I’ve lugged this huge book around with me for three weeks. Upstairs, downstairs, read it at the breakfast table, in the garden, in front of the fire, sitting in the car, because I actually loved the world of Cormoran and Robin so much, and their rapport, that I really didn’t want to leave it.
Last Chance Lost from Turbulent Indigo tells the story of the end of a love affair and, as Robin is listenin, I'm thinking noooooo, don't do it to me JKR, just don't because she has her readers in thrall to the possibilities of a Cormoran-Robin relationship...
Last chance lost-- The hero cannot make the change Last chance lost-- The shrew will not be tamed Last chance lost-- They bicker on the rifle range Blame takes aim Last chance-- Last chance lost.
Of course I couldn’t possibly say what happens but I can say that I loved the book, loved the fictional world, had to set everything else aside while I read it, and immediately started The Cuckoo’s Calling when I’d turned the final page in order to stay put. I’ll admit to a bit of a cheer too, 900 pages will be good practice for The Mirror & the Light when we start in November.
Hands up any Cormoran and Robin fans...
And the Joni fans too. We haven’t had a Joni adoration session for a while now.
In the same way that I had no idea I wanted to go to Trebizond with Rose Macaulay, I really had no intention of reading my way to Brazil until a copy of Brazil That Never Was by Dr Andrew Lees, Professor of Neurology at The National Hospital in London, arrived from Notting Hill Editions.
If you don’t know them these little books are really worth checking out, and with The Season of Gifts on the distant horizon (way too soon to give voice to the word) they would make excellent presents for those difficult to buy for people. I’ve got a little shelf full so I’m going to pick one every so often to read and write thoughts on here. I love a good essay and Notting Hill Editions, in their beautiful linen-bound livery, are just the right length to engage the grey matter and give it a work out. The company was founded by Tom Kremer, the man responsible for bringing us the Rubik’s Cube, who had a vision to revive the art of the essay 'and to create exceptionally beautiful books that would be lingered over and cherished' and that and more has certainly been achieved.
If I can make a personal connection with a book or a writer, the book nags for my attention even more than usual, and there were three lovely connections with Brazil That Never Was...
Firstly, I walked past Andrew Lees' place of work, the National Hospital in Queen’s Square, every day to go on duty at Great Ormond Street in the 1970s. I’ve never been inside but along with the Homeopathic Hospital next door and what was then the Ospidale Italiano across the way, those three places were markers on my way to work.
Secondly the book is set partly in the docklands of Liverpool where a young Andrew is taken by his father on their regular trips from nearby St Helens to watch the ships come and go.
‘Liverpool was an impermanent place of passage, full of silos and stores, simultaneously a space of entrapment and liberation. We felt the pull, but we’re too afraid to put out to sea...’
My mum was born and raised in the dockland area of Liverpool 8, The Dingle. She was born at No 4 Elswick Street (where the TV series Bread was filmed) which ran downhill towards the River Mersey and my grandfather worked on the docks for most of his life. I have fleeting yet vivid childhood memories of this view...
I never knew my grandfather because it was a tragic accident on the docks that would end his life before I was born.
My aunt (my mum’s sister) married a merchant seaman who would eventually become a captain for the Elder Dempster shipping line, and so when the yellow funnels of Elder Dempster got an early mention from Andrew Lees I was nicely in tune with Brazil That Never Was. One of Uncle Frank’s ships, the Apapa, was bombed and sunk during the war and he spent three days in a lifeboat awaiting rescue, none of which dimmed his love of the sea (and I suspect time away from my aunt who was what we called ‘Very High Maintenance’ & led him a fairly miserable life). He was a Yorkshire man, short and stocky and very jolly, with the characteristic seaman’s gait and we adored him. He’d come home from the Africa run bearing palm nuts and melons, and little tables inlaid with ebony and ivory, and stories of his travels, and we would marvel at it all and to think we actually knew someone who’d been to Africa.
And it is Andrew Lees’ childhood imagination that is first fired up about Brazil when his father gives him a copy of Exploration Fawcett, the story of one intrepid explorer’s search for a lost civilisation in the depths of the Brazilian rain forest in the 1920s. Percy Fawcett is an unusual character. Born in 1867 and seen as one of the last great Victorian explorers, Fawcett's belief in the supernatural was powerful enough to to propel him into a search for 'beings of great mystical power' who he was convinced were to be found in the depths of the Mato Grosso of Brazil.
Bartholomews Handy Atlas 1924 comes to the rescue again...
Percy Fawcett's adventures inspire belief and trust in a young Andrew Lees and the question is, as an adult, do you cling to the childhood story or do you dissect and explore it for yourself. Eventually the pull is too great and Andrew Lees sets off for Brazil in pursuit of the truth.
‘following the ancient Atlantic path laid down by the whales. The unbounded horizon had now become a promise....’
Incidentally, did anyone else hear on the radio recently that in recent months, since the world and the seas went quiet, whales have heard each other clearly for the first time in two hundred years. I was astonished and surprisingly moved by that.
There were two more personal connections which resonated with me, the first being A Level Geography, where, for our sins, we would suffer a triple lesson on a Friday afternoon, our region for study was South America and, as if this were to get any more tortuous, the teacher couldn’t pronounce her ‘rs’ other than as a ‘w’. It wasn’t her fault, none of it was, but what else were we supposed to do every time she said ‘Wio de Janeiwo’ but quietly mimic.
I’m not pwoud of it now, weally I’m not.
The other unexpected connection with Andrew Lees was this...
‘My maroon Kent stamp album, with its heavy leaves imprinted with delicate quadrille, has more stamps from Brazil than any other country...’
Do children still collect stamps? I'm thinking fewer and fewer letters arrive with a stamp these days, it must be a dying hobby, but ours did and, having been given my mum’s stamp album, I was a fanatical child philatelist for a few years. Always on the look out for the Cape of Good Hope blue triangle turning up unexpectedly in one of those packs I’d send away for on approval with my pocket money. Not a lot of them were genuine I’m sure, especially the Polska ones, and we could never afford to buy them so had to send them all back, but we all doted on our stamp albums, and now I’m thinking how much world geography we learned as a result.
My Brazil page looked (and still looks) like this...
Andrew's has slightly more to commend it...
‘Their drab correios mostly depicted national heroes, but there were two of the capital, one depicting two lines of Imperial palms at the Jardim Botanico, and another labelled ‘Saudade’ showing an angel and a small church on a hill.
I knew my stamps off by heart too and reaching for the album off the shelf this week and flicking through was a very familiar revisiting.
Andrew Lees will eventually make the journey to the Mato Grosso in search of his childhood hero and whether or not he lives up to the imagination is something I couldn't possibly reveal because it is one of this little book's best secrets, creating a compelling and fascinating story even for me, who had no intention of heading for Brazil on the page or otherwise.
I’m thinking I’m probably not the only one travelling in my imagination right now. I seem to be popping to New Zealand almost daily, so I’m wondering where you are heading off to in your imagination...please do share your current most coveted destination in comments. I reckon we’d probably cover the world if we tried.
And meanwhile enjoy a little round of the tune that Andrew's father would croon as they travelled home from their Liverpool days. 'That tune sends me' he would say to his son, and I have to agree...
The melon story incidentally was legend in our family....
We were staying with the Liverpool family and Uncle Frank had just sailed into port. He walked in the door with a melon under his arm and we had never seen one before. ‘Don’t pick it up in case you drop it, because it will split in half and then we’ll have to eat it straight away,’ was the instruction we were given. And there it sat, day after day, goading and tormenting me, until eventually I did pick it up, I did drop it, it did split in half and we did have to eat it. Mission accomplished though I was in terrible trouble. Worth it though, never say ‘don’t’ to a seven year old like me.
I've admired Catherine Hyde's artwork for years, but without realising it via the cards that come from lovely friends on birthdays, high days and holidays with the beautiful pictures. I do usually look for the artist's name but it takes a while for their style to become familiar enough to be recognised.
And I have my favourites...
Anyone who drives into Cornwall will know the Nearly Home Trees...
Cookworthy Knapp on the A30 near Lifton. A small copse of beech trees and a proper landmark that we all know and love.
But this could just as easily be us with the woods behind..
I had enough of a back-catalogue of memory for Catherine Hyde to recognise her work when I saw this book on a visit to the Elementum Gallery in Sherborne last autumn.
The Hare and the Moon, and as I saw it on the table my first thought was hares, because of that Paul Durcan poem about his father's spirit returning unexpectedly as a hare...
'I saw that his soul was a hare which was poised In the long grass of his body, ears pricked. It sprang toward me and halted and I wondered if it Could hear me breathing...
I stood up to walk around his bed Only to catch sight again of the hare of his soul Springing out of the wood into the beach cove of sunlight And I thought : Yes, that's how it is going to be from now on. The hare of his soul always there, when I least expect it; Popping up out of nowhere, sitting still.
The poem is included in the Candlestick Press pamphlet In Memoriam . They sent a copy to me after my dad died and I now try and send a copy to anyone I know who has been bereaved.
So with my resolve already weakening at the sight of a hare, as I opened The Hare and the Moon my next thought was ' If I see a barn owl I'm buying this'.
Well of course I saw a barn owl, they are one of Catherine Hyde's specialities...
But then I have the book and will it just sit on the coffee table for the occasional glance or does it have a greater purpose. The clue is in the title because this is a calendar, so I sat it on a bookstand on January 1st and decided to open the pages through the month, and each successive month through the year, because the book works like an almanac.
The names of the moons, a flower, tree and bird for every month, and a hare leaping across the page throughout the year...
"Waking from the winter solstice a hare begins her journey. Through the landscape and its changing seasons, moving in harmony with the moon. Atmospheric and gorgeous paintings show the hare running in January, watching in February, leaping in March until it comes full circle, sleeping in December. Twelve textless double-page paintings of the hare’s journey are accompanied by three full pages of art showing a tree, a flower and a bird for each month. This rich celebration of flora and fauna includes hawthorn and cowslips, swallows, blackbirds, buzzards and owls, harebells, holly, olive, Rowan, poppies and much more. Titbits of text – folklore, fairytale, myth and legend complimenting the art."
Who could know that 2020 would be the year it has...
When we saw in the new decade last New year's Eve did any of us imagine this...
We still step back occasionally and look at 2020 and ourselves with some incredulity...
At how we've adapted and accepted, and what a turning point this is, a first in our lifetime.
And then we all just get on with it...masks, being careful, following the rules, not putting anyone at risk, lending a helping hand where needed, being there for each other, and looking with such pleasure on The Hare and the Moon every time I walk in the room, and thinking could there have been a better year for such a book. Few words, but meaningful; enough to give me a thought for the day and ground me in the immutable, the things that won't change.
For October, The Hunters Moon, The Wild Moon, The Frosty Moon, The Thunder Moon, the Magpie, the Pomegranate and the myth of Demeter and Persephone. We’ve travelled through snowdrops and primroses, swallows and barn owls, a touchstone for all the things of permanence and year-on-year constancy. I’m looking forward to starting all over again in January.
I'm thinking there must be more books that would work in this way so all suggestions very welcome, but meanwhile this would be a fine addition to any wish-list for a forthcoming season of gifts (which I couldn't possibly name). But you know what we always say... give them a long enough lead-in time or you only have yourself to blame if you end up with the celebratory biography of the year.
‘Take my camel dear,” said my Aunt Dot as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.’
A priceless pearl among that string of wonderful first lines from novels and on a par with the fame of The Go-Between perhaps...
'The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there...'
or Anna Karenina for
'All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,”
But my less odorous companion than a camel, as I started reading Rose Macaulay’s final novel, The Towers of Trebizond, has been my trusty little 1923 Bartholomew’s Handy Reference Atlas. Bookhound found it on his shelves when I was reading, cycling and walking the Silk Road and the Hindu Kush from my armchair a while back. and it has been invaluable ever since.
Recent plague reading had necessitated locating Caffea, also on the Black Sea. The Mongolian horseman had famously laid siege to Caffea in 1346 but were dropping like flies from a rather unusual illness. It quickly became clear that with rapidly diminishing troops they were going to be defeated until they embarked on the first known use of biological warfare. Catapulting the corpses over the city wall and into the besieged city soon had the Black Death rampaging in Caffea and from there it would make its stately progress into Europe and beyond.
It’s where it all began apparently, except many now suggesting that's all the stuff of medieval myth, but you have to agree its a good myth if so, and I'll bet George Martin used it in Game of Thrones somehow.
Barthy's thankfully sorted me out.
With its beautiful and delicate pastel shades of blush rose pink, gentle lilac, primrose yellow, the lightest hint of green and nice downy peach denoting countries various, and all belying the fact that bloodshed and war and heaven knows what had been involved in this springtime paint chart of constantly shifting boundaries. And so to The Towers of Trebizond, but where on earth was Trebizond.
There it was on the Black Sea...
...and I was immediately transported with Laurie, Aunt Dot (Dorothea Ffoulkes-Corbett) Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg and Dr Halide as they make their way by land and sea to the Black Sea shores (taking the camel with them ) for a bit of missionary work.
'The Asia shore heaved down to Troy plain, and between them the Hellespont ran green and widened out presently into the Sea of Marmara...'
'We voyaged all day, and before dark Istanbul could be seen ahead, and it is true that it must look more splendid than any other city one comes to by sea...'
Unfortunately the mission is not without its rivals...
'I wonder who else is rambling about Turkey this spring. Seventh Day Adventists, Billy Grahamites, Writers, diggers, photographers, spies us, and now the BBC. We shall all be tumbling over each other. Abroad isn't what it was.'
Aunt Dot proceeds on her missionary work making a beeline for the woman as the easiest targets, no obstacle too great that it can't be surmounted, whether that involved the wrath of the menfolk who object strongly to any upending of the status quo and banished the women behind locked doors..
'They had now become to her shackled, gagged and oppressed slaves, who must be liberated at once.'
...or the impossibility of the terrain. That's the camel's problem not Auntie Dot's, and it certainly does have some unpredictable mental health issues.
The humour is dry; whip smart observations that pin down the funny side of the serious (I'm afraid I share this sense of humour too) yet is not acerbic or sarcastic and certainly not cruel, arrogant or demeaning. In other words it's pitch perfect and laugh-out-loud funny.
And this is all set against a backdrop of breath-taking scenery. Rose Macaulay had certainly travelled these shores and knew it well doing justice to her sense of place. It's intrepid and laced with a powerful sense of history and change...
'The ghost would be brooding on the woody cliffs and ravines, haunting the citadel and palace, scornfully taking no notice of the town that Trebizond now was.'
Is any book's highest accolade that it makes you want to go there. I certainly felt that way about my journey with Rose Macaulay.
And another thing... Aleppo, Palmyra, Amman, Jericho, Cana, Nazareth Tyre, Damascus. Place names we now sadly only associate with war and destruction, but still Biblical in my lexicon and as Laurie makes her way alone on board the camel through the Holy Land towards the end of the book I was in tune with her sense of timelessness overlaid by the troubles and changes of the 1920s.
'Twas ever this and doubtless shall be.
So there you have it. The Towers of Trebizond, I've been there at last. A book I have been meaning to read for years and a wonderful introduction to the writing of Rose Macaulay.
And now I'm wondering has anyone been to Trebizond...
Is it still a destination or a terrible disappointment...
If you have read the book please do share your thoughts...did you laugh or was that just me and mild Covid derangement syndrome, where everything needed to be funny or else...
PS I reckon it was the camel that did it...comments are sorted and back to normal...and breathe...
Firstly a few housekeeping details... an update on the Comments, or lack of, situation
Thank you to those who let me know there were gremlins and my apologies to Handheld Press that it happened on the very day I had posted about Potterism by Rose Macaulay and their very kind offer of a discount. Fear not the discount code EMILIE can be used with any of their books by Rose until October 25th and if anyone wanted to leave a comment on that post now please do. More Rose Macaulay to come.
Sadly it looks as if comments will have to stay unthreaded for a while, and I’m really sorry about that because it makes replying to each other that bit more stilted and convoluted. Apparently there is a glitch with certain browsers and Typepad have no plans for a fix just yet. The other option is to import something new to manage comments, third party and complicated (to me...say the letters HTML and I'm away off across the horizon) and it involved adverts and subscriptions and exporting every existing comment (70,000 of them) which then can't be brought back, and giving them access to every last detail about whether I have sugar in my tea etc and oh dear, it's all too terrifying.
My best suggestion is perhaps to put the original commenters name clearly at the beginning of your comment if it is a specific reply and let’s hope we can soldier on and keep in touch and keep the conversation flowing here as we have been. Please whatever you do don't stop leaving comments, I know from the emails I had last week that many of you value the contact and interaction as do I.
Some of you were also getting a security warning which shouldn't happen as the scribbles is fully compliant. That was due to a few old rogue links on the sidebar that weren't, so I've been through and deleted or altered the troublemakers and hopefully all should be well now. Please do let me know if you have a problem as I pay a monthly fee for all this to work and be secure and advert free etc. so Typepad are very quick to respond when I ask for help.
Meanwhile, we are all doubtless plodding along through the World Situation with patience and forbearance and I had a thought as we hit the winter months here in the Northern Hemisphere...and you are all toasty warm in the Southern Hemisphere....
Own up...who else has a copy of The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel which they bought on publication day or soon after and with every intention of reading that instant..
And then lockdown came along and we all thought ‘Perfect, I’ll read it now’.
But somehow it just didn’t/ couldn’t / wouldn’t happen.
Believe me I tried, started and stopped and started again and stopped. Tried once more but my concentration was off on a frolic of its own and the book just defeated me. I think maybe it wasn’t cheerful enough, or I was just in completely the wrong mood.
I was desperately disappointed not to see the book on the Booker shortlist but delighted to catch Hilary Mantel in conversation with James Naughtie at the digital Budleigh Literary Festival, and to read this lovely Q & A article over the weekend. I had also done a dash into Waterstones last week to pick up a copy of Mantel Pieces, the new collection of Hilary Mantel's essays.
'Fiction redirects us to mystery and chance, and doesn’t assume that people know their own minds or hearts,’ says Hilary Mantel, and it has all spurred me on to try again.
So I was wondering whether anyone fancied a slow, shared meander of a read of The Mirror & the Light, maybe through November and into December? That gives us the rest of October to be getting used to the idea, and do some arm strengthening exercises before we start in earnest.
No set schedule and nothing strenuous in the way of analysis from me, just an occasional ‘welfare’ post to make sure no one has tendinitis or has cut off the blood supply to their lower half. I’ll just be asking how everyone is doing and we have comments to exchange thoughts, but it’s also that nice warm fuzzy feeling that comes from reading the same book at the same time and knowing that we’re in it together.
'It has given place to the age of melodrama, when nothing is too strange to happen, and no one is ever surprised.'
My next foray into the writing of Rose Macaulay was Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract,first published in 1920 and recently republished by Handheld Press, and if ever there was a book for now this is it.
It's somehow reassuring to discover that human nature changes very little...
That reactions to extreme life and world events remain equally unpredictable and perhaps, dare I say, are occasionally bizarre and incomprehensible.
As Sarah Lonsdale suggests in her introduction,
'A slim and superficially light volume, Potterism's trenchant criticism of the popular press in the wake of it widespread failings during the First World War, caught the public mood.
'You can't believe a word you read,' said contemporary commentator Charles Montague, and Rose Macaulay took up the cudgels to tackle the issues head on in Potterism, her tenth novel and her first best-seller.
Twins Johnny and Jane, the children of newspaper magnate Percy Potter benefit from the best education money can buy. Johnny an alumnus of Rugby and Balliol. Jane an alumna of Rodean and Somerville, and both emerge from this rarified atmosphere ready to take on and undermine their father's newspaper empire. Meanwhile their mother writes novels under the pen name of Leila York and this will be equally troublesome to her opinionated offspring
Nothing like biting the hand that feeds you.
Mr Potter meanwhile is well aware that his newspaper fails to meet the intellectual or political requirements of his children, or his wife, who for all her pot-boiler romance novels feels she has perhaps pulled the family up the social echelons just a little
The twins along with a group of like-minded yet disparate friends set about their dismantling with the Anti-Potter League
'Facts are too difficult, too complicated...Potterism has no use for them. It appeals over their heads to prejudice and sentiment...Potterism is all for short and easy cuts and showy results...plays a game of grab all the time - snatches at success in a hurry ....It's greedy.'
Life becomes a complete and unintelligible mix of what is acceptable and what is not and, as is so often the case, the boundaries blur and those who throw stones often find themselves in the most fragile of glass houses.
Jane will become embroiled in marriage and a tangled love affair that proves almost impossible to resolve, and events take a very dramatic turn which I couldn't possibly divulge but expect drama and intrigue.
The First World War interrupts the Anti-Potter League project and Rose Macaulay cleverly writes the same scenarios from differing viewpoints. One hundred years on its easy to imagine who might be the subject of her gimlet eye and wry humour now. No one would be spared.
With its themes of women's lives, and the limitations of marriage and childbirth, along with a fascinating element of anti-semitism (Rose Macaulay was most definitely not anti-semitic but portrays it astutely) I must now confess that I read this cover to cover back in July, couldn't put it down and so took very few notes. Six weeks have passed and I am at the limit of my lucid thoughts, but Potterism and The Towers of Trebizond both so good they awakened my interest in Rose Macaulay, and that thrill of finding an author I knew so little about, that I set to and found as many of her books as I could.
I have been reading Jane Emery's biography Rose Macaulay, A Writer's Life and what a fascinating and complex woman Rose was.
I like her.
Born in 1881 and growing up in the boarding school environment that was Rugby, where her father was a teacher and living alongside Rupert Brooks' family, Rose Macaulay would eventually move on the edges of the literary circles of the time. Virginia Woolf seems to have been an acquaintance rather than a friend and, not surprisingly, less than complimentary about Rose in that waspish way she somehow made her own. Nancy Mitford likewise in a letter to Evelyn Waugh in 1962 is equally scathing in her opinion, I came across it by chance...
'Did you ever know an old spinster called Rose Macaulay? It appears she was no spinster but had a lover (hallucination?) and she wrote a lot of disagreeable letters to a protestant clergyman in America. The publishers said did I mind references to myself in them.... I didn't know her so I said, yes, I minded. I met her at Mrs Fleming's once and thought her sharp but ladylike. Not all the kind of person to gush to a parson.'
Somehow this all made me like Rose Macaulay even more. She was most definitely her own person, knew her own mind, seemed to worry little what others thought of her and functioned at the deepest level spiritually.... and yes I have a volume of her letters to 'the parson.'
At the same time Potterism was written and published Rose was in the midst of an ongoing affair with Gerard O' Donovan, a married man and once a Catholic priest. Jane Emery suggests that Rose's life and conscience seeps into Potterism in various covert ways. Rose the first to admit she is 'part- Potterite' and therefore not exempt from responsibility or culpability for her thoughts and actions, something I'm not so sure Woolf or Mitford would have recognised, let alone acknowledged, in themselves.
Of her love affair Rose Macaulay writes to the 'parson', her confessor and spiritual director Father Johnson...
'Oh why was there so much evil in what was in so many ways so good? Why did it have to be like that. all snarled up and tangled in wrong, when if we had been free it would have been almost the perfect thing?'
I've added in Elizabeth Bowen and Rosamond Lehmann in with Rose Macaulay for a little joined-up reading trail because they seem to have known each other and have so many connections. I know very little about them either. The trail will either flourish or fizzle, but for now it's holding my interest whenever I can manage to put the new Robert Galbraith (aka J.K.Rowling) down.
Well, dear blog, it is my birthday today (I don't often let on, they seem to come round too frequently for this Coronation year baby) and this, by the way, is me at my christening days before my first Christmas, and I like to think I still have that gaze in my subconscious memory somewhere
But I have a birthday gift for you thanks to Handheld Press.
Handheld Press often run a special offer when it is one of their birthdays. or an author's birthday, or an anniversary, and when they knew I was planning a bit of a Rose Macaulay reading spree on here they very kindly offered a discount code for any of you who might like to buy any of their four books by the wonderful Rose. I decided today would be a good day to share it because I have enjoyed quite a few Handheld books in recent months and would like to keep doing my bit to support them.
I was completely new to Rose Macaulay but enjoyed The Towers of Trebizond so much that it led me to Potterism and thence to Crewe Junction and I will be sharing my thoughts on those three in the weeks ahead. I have also been delving into Rose's life via several biographies too and am finding her a unique and very individual writer with a wicked sense of humour as well as an astute and gimlet eye for the foibles of life in the 1920s.
Handheld Press publish four books by Rose Macaulay and with the code they are offering a discount of £2.99 which means the books will be £10 each (inc. postage) here in the UK. The code will be available until October 25th so make a note of EMILIE because that is what you will need to enter in the appropriate box if you order. The books are a joy to hold and read and arrive beautifully wrapped in tissue and brown paper, it's a treat for the postman too I think in these days of far too many plastic jiffy bags.
These links should take you directly to the Handheld ordering page.
I should point out that Personal Pleasures isn't due for publication until September 2021 but Handheld do send out copies about a month before. I think it is the book of Rose Macaulay's that I am most looking forward to. By this time next year I think we'll all be ready to read about things like...
Bed (Getting Into It)
Booksellers Catalogues
Christmas Morning
Driving a Car
Flattery
Heresies
Not Going to Parties
Shopping Abroad
Writing
If you are a Rose Macaulay fan please do declare yourself, and finally I couldn't end without sharing the wonderful Mary Azarian wood cut of that Rose Macaulay quote, and the moment in the day that I suspect we all understand very well...
And meanwhile Bookhound is busy living his best life out here...
I wouldn't be in the least surprised to meet a descendant of the Salmon-Gluckstein- Lyons family empire one day. Coming from a tiny family as I do I always think huge families must be so exciting. All those cousins to grow up with. Plenty of scope for feuds and disagreements too, but mahoosive family gatherings to remember and new additions and departures to deal with. A full time job.
I suspect some of you are going to relieve me of the illusion...
Having enjoyed Hadley Freeman's House of Glass so much, the search was on for more Jewish family history memoirs and, as if by magic, the paperback edition of Legacy by Thomas Harding has just been published.
'A panoramic new history of modern Britain, as told through the story of one extraordinary family, and one groundbreaking company.
This is the story of how a family transformed themselves from penniless immigrants to build a company that revolutionised the way we eat, drink and are entertained. For over a century, Lyons was everywhere. Its restaurants and corner houses were on every high street, its coffee and tea in every cup, its products in every home. But it was a victory that was not easily won.
Told through the lives of five generations, Legacy is at once intimate and sweeping, charting the tragedy and unimaginable success of one of Britain's most famous families. It is also an illuminating new exploration of Britain and its place in the world...'
The book was all of this and more and at 600 pages has kept me busy for several weeks.
Thomas Harding, himself a member of the family (as are Nigella Lawson and George Monbiot) , traces his ancestors back as far as Lehmann and Helena Gluckstein and the turn of the nineteenth century. The Glucksteins will be driven out of one home after another by successive pogroms, their journeys various bringing them closer and closer to the North Sea coast of Europe before their son Samuel eventually arrives in Whitechapel in London in 1843. This will have involved, at one point, his father Lehmann faking his own death as the danger increases.
Samuel quickly identifies tobacco and the manufacture of cigars as a potential source of income, and by sheer determination, good business sense and incredible hard work the family have fifteen shops by 1881. Marriages various increase the size of the family, Samuel's daughter Lena will have thirteen children (six of whom will die) and with it comes the establishment of The Fund.
The Fund is an agreement, a form of family co-operative that will offer security, solidarity and a fair sharing of assets regardless of personal circumstances or input, but above all it offers a safety net for a family only too well aware of the potential precariousness of their lives in the face of any changing political situation.
This is a family with huge entrepreneurial capabilities and, when it becomes clear that tobacco might have its limitations for expansion, it is decided by The Fund that they will move into catering. Monte (son of Lena) has spotted a niche market and finds the family a trusted front man who will become the acceptable face and name of the new business...enter Joseph Lyons. Joseph has the gift of the gab, he's a showman, a raconteur and a humourist in contrast to the more serious members of the family and how impressive that they recognised this lack in themselves and were prepared to find it elsewhere. There is also the matter of the name. The family are constantly aware of their Jewish heritage and how their name may become prejudicial.
The first Lyons enterprise in 1889 is to cater for everyone visiting Barnum & Bailey's Circus at Olympia through the year that the circus performs.
I was reeling at the sheer scale of it all...three million visitors to be fed and watered but it is a triumph or organisation and implementation, paving the way for the first Lyons Teashop in 1894.
The family grows, the empire grows and will embrace the Trocadero in Piccadilly as well as a growing number of teashops and Corner Houses. Hotels will follow including the Tower Hotel which became one of London's swishest venues. I was taken there for dinner once in 1972, by a boyfriend desperate to impress (not Bookhound, he didn’t need to) it was pink napkins and very posh and I think I probably wore my pink gingham hot pants which shows how unposh I was.
The historical context offered by Thomas Harding throughout adds to the interest...the Boer War, Jack the Ripper in the East End, both World Wars and from it emerges a family wholly justified (were it needed) for their sense of family cohesion. They would throw themselves willingly into any national effort including setting up an ammunition factory during the war.
The saddest thing is that I knew what was to come though not the 'how'. There are no Lyons Teashops or Corner Houses anymore, the Troc has been boarded up for years (or was last time I saw it) and gone are the tea, the ice cream and all the famous brands I grew up with. I won't spoil the next bit because it makes for fascinating reading, but suffice to say this is one heck of a good read and I turned the final page knowing I'd met a family I loved and about whom I'd learned so much.
Bookhound has learned a lot as well, more ‘Did you know....’ than you’d ever think possible, so I think he might be quite relieved I have turned the final page too.
If you’ve read Legacy please do share your thoughts as always...
And what about Lyons Tea Shops...does anyone else remember them...
And the Nippys, as the waitresses were called...
As a child I would often come home from a long Saturday shopping expedition and be ill. My mum decided this was because I’d gone too long without food so she instituted the half-way-round-tea-and-cake routine and ever after I was fine thanks to the Lyons Tea Shop and an iced bun.
And hot pants...go on...own up, it definitely wasn’t just me...
Knock me down with a feather, how on earth have I ended up here?
Who knew I would even walk past the wartime shelf, let alone want to read about London in the Blitz of 1940. But one of you (thank you) mentioned Furrowed Middlebrow in comments, and in my quest in recent years to try and keep up with current fiction I had completely forgotten about them and their imprint Dean Street Press. In the blogendipitous way that often happens, I then had an email from them with news of the publication of a new series of crime fiction and that sent me to the war shelf where I found AChelsea Concerto by Frances Faviell, and to the shelves in the holiday cottage where I found A Footman for the Peacock by Rachel Ferguson.
In that other long arm of coincidental reading that often happens, I had also bought House of Glass by Hadley Freeman. I felt sure some aspects of ‘the story and secrets of a twentieth-century Jewish family’ were going to hold sorrow beyond all imagining so I had set the book aside for a moment when I had the emotional energy to bear and contain it, which I eventually (and thankfully) did, and my thoughts about it are here.
Meanwhile I ventured into the streets of Chelsea mid-Blitz with Frances Faviell and discovered one of the best accounts I have read of life in war-ravaged London. This is no sugar-coated, one-sided description of war, this is attrition as experienced on the ground.
Born in 1905, Frances Faviell, the pen name of Olivia Flaviell Lucas, was a painter, and trained at the Slade under the auspicious eye of Henry Tonks who had originally qualified as a surgeon at the London Hospital before studying art. Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer, Augustus John and Rex Whistler et al would also benefit from his infamously withering tutorial eye. The painting on the cover of A Chelsea Concerto is by Frances, and the cat (not a real one) is beautifully significant in the book; something of a talisman, placed in the window, visible to those walking past and watching precariously over the carnage on the streets outside.
These days I often sense the seriousness of the bombing in World War Two, and its consequences, is sometimes lost in the mythology along with the fiction of bravery and fortitude. I'm thinking about Few Eggs and No Oranges, Vere Hodgson's diary, which though wonderful and I love it, certainly seems sanitised alongside this. Bless Vere, but she spares us the nitty gritty details. There is resilience and humour in A Chelsea Concerto, but there is also plenty of exhaustion, fear, stress and anxiety. All so tangible that the book offered a really useful perspective on the now, as well being very engrossing and frequently very moving.
An early account of the King's address to the nation at Christmas 1939 brought a bit of a tear to me eye if I'm honest...
'I always admired the King's determination to overcome his trouble with public speaking...his last words were typical of the man, as distinct from the King, and in the simplicity and sincerity of their delivery left no doubt of their speaker's own faith.
'I would like to say to you :"I said to the man who stood at the Gate of the Year, 'Give me light that I may tread safely into the unknown.' And he replied,'Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be better to you than the light, and safer than a known way.'
I can still hear the voice of King George as he quoted those words. They carried more weight for me than many long sermons from the pulpit.'
I now discover those words had been written by British poet Minnie Louise Haskins and had been given to the King by a young Princess Elizabeth.
I could feel myself trotting alongside Frances as she went on duty to her Red Cross volunteer post. Walking through the unlit, blackout streets reminded me of my dad's assertion that he always felt far safer as a boy bugler on board a battleship than he did when home on leave, and finding his way through the streets of South London during the Blitz. He would walk to Balham from Euston in the pitch dark. It's six miles and would take two hours now with a fair wind and sail, but imagine it during the blackout.
On that note it was a pleasant surprise to read about the boy buglers on board the ships...
'On the 19th the news of the loss of the Courageous was published...only 681 of the 1260 she carried survived, and of these one was a bugler of only fifteen. I found this shocking - few of us had any idea that such young boys - mere children - would be allowed on warships.
And I always love mentions of Anderson shelters too because my granddad famously put his up in the sitting room in front of the open fire on the principle that if he was going to take a direct hit at least he'd die warm.
And mentions of other things conjured up other visions. Say the words 'barrage balloon' and I'm here with Dame Laura Knight helping to deal with this one...
There are interesting and sometimes uncomfortable observations here too...
'In Warsaw they were eating horses. EATING HORSES. Here in England we were still able to ride them.'
The refugees are argumentative and demanding, and less than grateful..
Many foreigners stayed and joined the war effort while plenty of Brits were fleeing to the U.S....
There is palpable anger towards Chamberlain, and equally alarm at Churchill's bluntness..
The scale of accumulated defeats is laid bare and is frankly terrifying in its desperation. As Europe topples, Britain, despite the onslaught, becomes the safest haven...
And then there is the night time bombing and the indescribable destruction visible the morning after. I'm not sure I've read a more graphic account and yet, to my surprise, it was bearable because Frances Faviell made it so. They had to cope, I had to cope, and I felt I was in the safe hands of a reliable primary source narrator
Comparing it with the now, there is a wonderfully poignant moment when everyone crowds into a concert at the National Gallery.
CROWDS IN...
Imagine that.
I've moved on to The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen and if Frances Faviell has written one of the best first-hand accounts of the Blitz that I have read, then surely Elizabeth Bowen (alongside Penelope Fitzgerald for Human Voices) wins the prize for one of the best fictional accounts. ...
'Sleeplessness disembodied the lookers-on...fatigue was the one reality...she had the sensation of being on furlough from her own life...'
More congruence with the now.
'Furlough' a word I've only ever associated with missionaries taking a break from the field (this might just be me). They'd come home and talk to us at Sunday School, and we'd all renew our determination (for about a week) to put a bit more of our pocket money in that little concertina collecting box we'd been given. And now 'furlough' resurfaces as an everyday word. The difference being that times might be tough, and we might not be able to party again for a while, but we are safe and we are sheltered and we will be able to do all those things again dreckly.
It always takes me an age to read anything by Elizabeth Bowen, she demands my supreme concentration so my thoughts on here eventually.
Meanwhile, if you have read this I would love to know your thoughts, and though I can completely understand this might not be everyone's current first choice of reading matter, I'm sure you have some more suggestions up your sleeves...
Women writing about war...
First hand accounts that you would recommend...
And any more good books from Furrowed Middlebrow..
And what about Sunday School...did you go too, and collect the stamps for your album each week.
For the book-buyers amongst us we are entering turbulent times as the backlog of new books suddenly bursts onto the shelves. Six hundred books published this week, and as I walked into Waterstones for my weekly browse I think every single one must have been on display. I'm currently working on the principle that we have had nigh on six months of going nowhere, spending nothing. No petrol money, no coffee and cake, no excursions, and therefore my book account tally should be nicely in credit.
But can anything withstand the onslaught.
I'm only buying non-fiction for now...hardback fiction will be from the library, but even then there were at least six books that jumped right off the shelf at me. I came home with three because I had actually bought 'a few' last week and the table is filling fast.
'Bonding with a hawk seems, in many ways, similar to bonding with a newborn baby (and not in a lot of other ways...don't feed a baby day old chicks and rabbit legs etc and maybe don't expect it to sit on a perch) There are anxieties to be assuaged on both sides; food to be offered; a cycle of sleep to be established; paths of recognition and acceptance to be mapped; responses to cues and moods to be learned, even facial expressions and body language to be interpreted and recognised. To say nothing of the regular weighing, and the caring and the nurturing and the concern....'
That was a fraction of my thoughts about the book and I enjoyed revisiting that post on the scribbles as a reminder of how many different tangents of thought H is For Hawk sent me along.
And this is from You Know Where, on Vesper Flights...
From the bestselling author of H is for Hawk comes Vesper Flights, a transcendent collection of essays about the human relationship to the natural world.
Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best-loved writing along with new pieces covering a thrilling range of subjects. There are essays here on headaches, on catching swans, on hunting mushrooms, on twentieth-century spies, on numinous experiences and high-rise buildings; on nests and wild pigs and the tribulations of farming ostriches.
Vesper Flights is a book about observation, fascination, time, memory, love and loss and how we make the world around us. Moving and frank, personal and political, it confirms Helen Macdonald as one of this century's greatest nature writers.
Featherhood ~ Charlie Gilmour
Now I'm all for forgiveness, and Charlie Gilmour has served his time courtesy of HMP for that ill-placed swing off the cenotaph back in 2011. I doubt I'll ever forget the day I popped in for a cup of tea with my dad and he was watching it on the news. He was utterly crestfallen and deflated, and I'd have given my right arm to sit young Charlie down with my primary source to find out why. There were occasions through my dad's ninety years(not many, and fewer in later life) when he wondered whether anyone really appreciated the sacrifice of his generation. For years it seemed not, but as the big anniversaries came along suddenly with it came a new national consciousness, and I'm forever grateful that he experienced that respect before he died.
So I am intrigued to see how Charlie has dealt with this, and the other traumas in his life...and of course there is a local Port Eliot connection of which I know a little...
This is a story about birds and fathers.
About the young magpie that fell from its nest in a Bermondsey junkyard into Charlie Gilmour's life - and swiftly changed it. Demanding worms around the clock, riffling through his wallet, sharing his baths and roosting in his hair...
About the jackdaw kept at a Cornish stately home by Heathcote Williams, anarchist, poet, magician, stealer of Christmas, and Charlie's biological father who vanished from his life in the dead of night.
It is a story about repetition across generations and birds that run in the blood; about a terror of repeating the sins of the father and a desire to build a nest of one's own.
It is a story about change - from wild to tame; from sanity to madness; from life to death to birth; from freedom to captivity and back again, via an insane asylum, a prison and a magpie's nest.
And ultimately, it is the story of a love affair between a man and a magpie.
Rummage ~ A History of the Things We Have Reused, Recycle and Refused to Let Go
Emily Cockayne
And this was an entirely impulse purchase which involved me putting another book back on the shelf until my next visit. I picked it up thinking absolutely 'not me', only to find, with its potted histories and fascinating stories, that it is exactly me...
Rummage tells the overlooked story of our throwaway past. Emily Cockayne extracts glittering gems from the rubbish pile of centuries past and introduces us to the visionaries, crooks and everyday do-gooders who have shaped the material world we live in today - like the fancy ladies of the First World War who turned dog hair into yarn, or the Victorian gentlemen selling pianofortes made from papier-mâché, or the hapless public servants coaxing people into giving up their railings for the greater good.
In this original and fascinating new history, Cockayne illuminates our relationship to our rubbish: from the simple question of how we reuse and recycle things (and which is better), to all the weird and wonderful ways it's been done in the past. She exposes the hidden work (often done by women) that has gone into shaping the world for each future generation, and she shows what lessons can be drawn from the past to address urgent questions of our waste today.
There's so much 'Did you know...' herein that Bookhound is going to mesmerised by my revelations for months ahead, and this can only be a good thing because this little stockpiling of books for the winter feels akin to getting the logs in this year.
Brain food for the long winter ahead...
Time to action the library reservations , and I'm wondering if there are any more of the Six Hundred that you are looking forward to...
Well I’ve had a wonderful August sabbatical with lots of reading, and I hope you have too, but it’s time we returned to talking about good books and today’s the day.
'If you don't know the past, you can't understand the present and plan properly for the future...'
Chaim Potok ( Davita's Harp)
It is years since I read Chaim Potok, but how well I remember My Name is Asher Lev, so I felt at least a mild connection with this quote from Hadley Freeman in her family memoir House of Glass.
I find anti-Semitism incomprehensible on a personal level...really so.
David, one of my closest friends, and also rivals, at my 1950's-into-the-1960's primary school was Jewish and I feel sure the competition between us was the making of us.
David and I shared a two-seater wooden table. We drew a line down the middle and the other person's elbow wasn't allowed to cross it. On the last day of term we all had to scrub our tables with Ajax ready for the next term. We'd draw the line again on day one and so we'd continue the Battle of the Elbows. David would sit in the classroom on his own while we all trooped in for our ultra-Christian assembly, explaining to me that Jewish people believed in God but just not the Jesus bit. That seemed to me like missing the best bits so I still sent him a Christmas card, yet to define him by even that small sign of difference was incomprehensible to us as children. His father was a GP; we, by comparison, were a very working class family, but there was never any sense of class or religious difference between us as children. We all just played together, learned together and were happy together.
Looking back I'm wondering if that was all about our respective parents forging a new life in post-war suburban Britain, but whatever the reason that lack of prejudice as a child has stayed with me into adulthood. Incidentally, David went on to become a consultant paediatrician, easily contactable online these days. I haven't, but one day maybe I might...it's the fear of the reply that says 'I don't remember you at all' isn't it, when your memories of them are so vivid.
Or perhaps that they remember it differently.
This is all by way of an introduction to my family memoir read of the year so far, because House of Glass is a book that made me willingly examine my own thinking and its origins, for which I think I owe my mum and dad and huge thank you.
The story and secrets of a twentieth century Jewish family was bound to yield some disturbing moments and I'll be honest, I usually find these accounts harder and harder to read the older I get.
Do we get more sensitive as we age...
Protect ourselves a little more from it all...
I know my capacity for reading or hearing about violence or torture is seriously limited these days.
But I had heard such good things about House of Glass that I decided to brave it and maybe long summer days, full of light, are the best time to read books like this. I sometimes think books like this are an absolute privilege to read. To be invited into the life of someone's family.
In any case I needn't have worried. Things do happen but Hadley Freeman doesn't need to describe in detail. She knows we know.
Sala, thin, quiet, melancholic and always immaculately dressed in the French chic style accompanies her five-year-old granddaughter Hadley, and her son and his wife, on a family holiday from their home in America to Deauville in France. The purpose has been to meet Sala’s family. But Hadley Freeman's exploration of her family history begins in earnest many years later on the discovery of a box of disparate objects, papers and photographs found in her grandmother's wardrobe after her death.
Originally from Poland, the Glass family had fled their native country in the aftermath of World War One, when their comfortable life amongst a solid Jewish community in Chrzanow was decimated by rising anti-semitism and the nation’s need for a scapegoat. The family wisely left for Paris in 1920; had they stayed in Poland they would inevitably have been among the 15,000 Jews in the town who were eventually rounded up and sent to Auschwitz. Sala and her brothers Henri and Alex settle into a new life in France, and yet their safety is far from assured with the rise of Nazism and all that followed.
Much here is utterly heart-breaking...
The sense of trust that the Glass family placed in their fellow countrymen, first in Poland and then in France. They belonged, they worked hard, they contributed and yet that trust would be broken, betrayals would be manifold and in the midst of it all there is Sala, Hadley's grandmother. Whilst her brothers forged successful careers, the options for Sala were far more limited. Henri would invent a prototype photocopying machine much sought-after during the war and Alex would found his own haute couture fashion house.
Alex's story is fascinating, and in many ways as central to the book as Sala's, and if you enjoy the world of fashion history then you will certainly enjoy the details that Hadley Freeman has unearthed about her great uncle's work with an upcoming Christian Dior, and his life among the upper echelons of French society. Alex Maguy has an interesting war (to say the least) and when the world of haute couture starts to decline with the arrival of pret-a-porter fashion, he transfers his entrepreneurial skills into the world of art and makes even more of a success of that. Counting Picasso amongst his close friends the man himself would design a poster for one of Alex's select gallery exhibitions.
But weaving her way quietly throughout the book is Sala, and Hadley Freeman's exploration of the grandmother she always saw as someone concealing loss and anguish, but why. And here I don't want to give a single thing away beyond the fact that Sala will make what emerged for me as the single biggest sacrifice in the book. She is a woman, her choices are limited and ultimately barely her own to make...
The analysis of photographs long after the event reminded me of On Chapel Sands by Laura Cummings and another book I read at about the same time The Photographer at Sixteen by George Szirtes.. I didn't share thoughts on it at the time because I was so affected by it I honestly didn't think I could do it justice. That doesn't usually stop me trying but somehow did.
I now have to read it again.
'Photographs are moments of noticing. They are isolated acts, usually of awareness on the part of both photographer and photographed. It is a moment's contract. The space between photographer and photographed is sacred space. Others must not, will not walk across it...'
suggests George Szirtes...
'The time between old photographs shrinks. Soon there is nothing but photograph.'
Thinking now about Rings of Saturn, and its random photographs...W.G.Sebald would have liked that quote.
And it is the old photographs, and her analysis of them, that adds much to Hadley Freeman's book, which in turn made me wonder what people will use in fifty year's time...
Is anyone printing family photographs any more...
Goodness, who knew that a single book would not only keep me welded to the gravity recliner in the garden for three days, or give me so much to think about, but this one is a worthy permanent addition to the family memoir shelf and I most certainly commend it to the house.
I’m now reading Legacy by Thomas Harding, the story of the Lyons family empire, and would welcome any more suggestions of Jewish family memoirs, they really do make for excellent reading.
A request for the Apple & Mint Chutney recipe, and though I have never tried it, I will be very soon.
Having used my rather formal WI recipe book for years (no jars with names on, fill to exact distance from the rim etc) I found Let's Preserve It by Beryl Wood a few years ago and it rekindled my love of the preserving pan and this season especially, but really the book is an all-year-round affair. I love it for the way Beryl reckons if it grows you can preserve it. First published in 1970 (Nigella swears by it) apparently as a 'manifesto for safeguarding our grandmothers' artisan ways'.
In her 2011 introduction to this reprinted edition Rose Prince suggests...
'Her book was a nudge that reminded me not to walk past a hedgerow without collecting a few rosehips or blackberries during their season, nor miss a glut of cheaply abundant fruit and vegetables. She reminds us that making a few pots of pickles, jam, jelly or fruit curd upholds a great and endangered tradition.'
I'm not sure I remembered the detail of this introduction. This being me I would have waded straight into the recipes, but I'm now fascinated to discover that Beryl Wood was secretary to the progressive obstetrician Dr Grantly Dick-Read. When he and his family returned to the UK from South Africa Beryl came with them continuing to pursue what Rose Prince describes as an 'off-beat career', with stints at pest control and running an all-women car hire firm.
The book's 579 recipes are arranged alphabetically by ingredient so finding yourself with ...oh let's say a glut of lemons, and with no other thought than to make gallons of lemonade, Beryl will have you making chutney, curd, jelly, marmalade. pickle and then a whole raft of Lemon & Other Things.
I've used my copy as a bit of a diary too and written in additional ingredients, or variations on quantities, as well as the date I made whatever it was. It would seem on 11th September (our wedding anniversary?) 2015 I made apricot jam. It was the year the Tinker (my dad) had died so we probably didn't feel much like painting the town, but I do know that I planted the kernels and now have three little apricot trees to show for that day.
So for those who asked here it is.
Apple and Mint Chutney.
Chop and chuck in the pan, boil until it thickens and then pot. Beryl's chutney tips include using the best vinegar, tie whole spices in a muslin bag, don't prepare onions until ready to use, don't over-cook, and chutneys always better for keeping...at least a month if you can manage to keep your hands off it, preferably a year. Cover in the same way as jams and enjoy it all.
3 1/2 lb apples
1 dsp (dessert spoon) chopped mint for each lb of apples
1lb onions
1lb each raisins, currants and sultanas
3/4lb brown sugar
2oz ground ginger
1oz salt (this is quite a lot, I sometimes use a bit less in Beryl's recipes. Clearly she wasn't worried about her kidneys or high blood pressure )
I hope this Thursday finds you well and not too windswept if you are here in the U.K. We’ve had to swaddle the greenhouse as usual in order to stop it heading for Wales.
But lo, it’s that time of year again.
Time for the Transformation Challenge which this week is all about turning apples and tomatoes into chutney.
I perused the book, wrote the shopping list and headed out on a mission for gallons of vinegar, brown sugar and all those spices I thought I had until I realised I’d thrown them all out in 2019 because most of them were dated 2015 (or even earlier)...
I doubt I'm the only one who's had a rampage through the food cupboards this last few months and decided that perhaps items from 2009 could go as well. To my shame it was the medicine cabinet that offered up the most shamefully out-of-date specimens.
How can that be when it seems like only yesterday I bought them.
In the end finding mace and mustard seed and pickling spice wasn’t quite so easy as I’d thought and I was grateful to my chauffeur who pulled up outside three different shops before my list was fulfilled.
Wednesday dawned nice and sunny and we were ready for the off. The Kayaker made the mistake of calling in just as the mass chopping was about to start, so he drew the short straw and was allocated the onions, while Bookhound did the tomatoes and I just gathered everything else together.
Chutney is so easy isn’t it.
Chop it all up, chuck everything in the pan and simmer until it’s thick enough to pot,
And so the shelf is now filling up with Green Tomato, Red Tomato and I have Apple and Mint in my sights just because it sounds delicious.
I do of course live with a champion. Bookhound's Apple Chutney won first prize at the Village Show a few years ago, except it was never to be repeated because he couldn't remember what he'd put in it.
But all this has barely made a dent in the apple crop so next it will be blanching and freezing as many as I can before I surrender; except I’m always really grateful to my Late Summer Self when my January Self finds all this fruit for pies.
Then it will be blackberries.
Ours are nowhere near ready yet and we’re getting precariously close to September 1st when the farmers are allowed to cut the hedgerows again (they have to be left alone from March 1st for the nesting birds). I’m sure I’ll find some secret picking places and then it will be all systems go on the spiced bramble jelly and some jam.
Some years I’m a bit lightweight on the preserving front, but this year, even without the Village Show to spur me on, it suddenly seems really essential to have some comfort stores laid up ready for winter. The light is definitely changing, the sun is a little lower in the sky, and we seem to lose another ten minutes of light every evening now. We always go out for a barn owl walk as dusk falls and that has shifted from 9.30pm to 8.30pm very quickly.
And on the subject of barn owls we really have no idea what may have happened this year.
We had a nesting pair, and all seemed on course for owlets, Mrs Ravilious seemed to be ‘sitting’, Mr Ravilious was back and forth, but sadly we heard no owlet noises. We wonder whether the very hot weather in April and May might have done for them. But the good news is there have been owlets very nearby, maybe our female decamped, so the colony lives on and thrives. At the moment we have one owl roosting in the box, a male we think, who pops out every evening at dusk and goes off hunting, and we are seeing several around the fields as we walk. Food has been plentiful and the fields have been nicely quiet, making conditions ideal, so it’s all a mystery yet to be solved.
And another mystery to be solved, I’d better tell you about Magnus...
The naughty boy has been AWOL for five weeks now and I have to admit we are beginning to wonder what he’s up to. His longest previous was three weeks a few years ago and, though we’ve put the word around, no one has seen as much as a whisker. I’m hoping he’s doing a Six Dinner Sid and has found a nice supply of food and maybe a new temporary friend or two....but all the same we’re feeling a bit (make that very) sad without him.
We might have to start thinking about kittens because we have never been cats-less in forty years...which will of course be the cue for him to stroll in the door.
Meanwhile has the preservation descended on you...
Along with this 'thinking ahead to winter' rather than be ambushed by it...
I'm not wishing summer away because we usually have fine weather through September and into October, but I do feel the need to be prepared perhaps more than usual...
I'd love to know if there is anything special that you do in readiness...
Checking in through the August sabbatical from bookish posts to bring you...well a sort of bookish post.
But firstly, how has your week been...
I hope, wherever you are in the world, you are finding some peace and calm in amongst all the ongoing noise.
I am putting my August to good use with plenty of reading (lots of bookish thoughts to come) and doing useful things like Sorting Out the CDs. I mean, however did we accumulate so many, and what to do with them since I got with the times and upgraded myself to iTunes, MP3 downloads and a blue tooth speaker. I spent a happy day going through them all and importing some forgotten gems onto my computer, before putting them all back where I'd found them, so I'm no further forward.
I'm back in the land of Kate Rusby having rediscovered her lurking in the CD repository. There was Little Lights, Sleepless and Awkward Annie, Underneath the Stars and Hourglass and I've added the new album out this week. Hand Me Down is a selection of cover versions recorded during lock-down and you can hear every last emotion of these times in her voice. Kate and her family have been a shining light through lock-down with their cheery weekly Singy Songy sessions on Facebook. Of course ordering the MP3 means I don't have the CD notes explaining the choice of songs, but no matter. As James Taylor also emerged from the CD mountain there I was, back in the sixth form common room circa 1970, listening to Carolina On My Mind as Kate Rusby sang her equally emotional and exquisite version. It's the ultimate homesickness song...
In my mind I'm gone to Carolina Can't you see the sunshine? Can't you just feel the moonshine? And ain't it just like a friend of mine to hit me from behind? Yes I'm gone to Carolina in my mind
...that yearning to be back somewhere special (not the sixth form common room I hasten to add) and who knew that Paul McCartney and George Harrison had contributed to the original version (thank you wikipaedia).
And then there's the chez dovegrey LP cupboard...
No turntable for years, but who knows whether there's a vinyl in there worth a small fortune. We regularly open the dresser cupboard thinking we could use the space for something else, look at them, feel overwhelmed by the task and close the door again.
No such problem with books, and having recently read House of Glass - the story and secrets of a twentieth century Jewish family by Hadley Freeman (I will be commending it to the house with bells on, thoughts coming next month) it set me off on a journey around my shelves again in search of more family memoirs that I have really enjoyed.
In fact I was so enthused I wrote this post.
And I spent ages doing all the links.
Then as I was doing a bit of housekeeping on the scribbles last night, and updating the sidebars, I realised, to my embarrassment that I'd already written about family memoirs at the end of April.
Blame the Strange Times, and if I'd forgotten I'm hoping you may have too, my apologies for repetition, but this time I looked harder and I've found double the number of books...
I had a bit of difficulty deciding when a family memoir became autobiography but decided, in the end, that it needed to be written by a member of the family, and predominantly had to be much more about others than themselves. I want delving and skeletons dragged out of cupboards, I want revelations and surprises.
I came up with quite a good haul in the end and then decided to sit them on their own Shelf of Great Importance so here they are, and this should stop me writing about the same books for a third time.
Links are to scribbles various down the years, and how lucky was I to interview some of these authors in the dovegreyreader tent at Port Eliot Festival
...Edmund de Waal (below), William Fiennes (above), Hannah Rothschild. It seems like several lifetimes ago that I had the nerve to ask ceramicist and potter supreme Edmund de Waal to assess my school pottery dish...
And we presented Edmund with a knitted hare with amber eyes, the very first of many knitsuke given to authors various as a souvenir of their visit to the tent.
But there must be so many more family memoirs (even more than you mentioned last time) and I love reading them so all your suggestions (again) very welcome (even more).
Meanwhile, am I the only one with a slight aversion to autobiography...
And am I right about my distinction between autobiography and memoir...
And has any music in particular cheered you during this last few months...
And now I think about it, what has Kate Rusby done with Hand Me Down but create a sort of musical memoir of her life...
I thought I'd share something that has kept me and my book room very cheery these last few months, though I suspect Moth Orchids might be a bit of a Marmite thing.
Loved or loathed.
Orchids always seemed so exotic back in the day didn't they. A costly investment requiring heated greenhouses and much cossetting, but this version, the Phalaenopsis, now perhaps verging on the ubiquitous, like the Swiss Cheese Plants and the Rubber Plants of the 1970s.
Did anyone else have a prize specimen of Monstera deliciosa or Ficus elastica...
And I bet I wasn't the only one to polish the leaves with Baby Bio Leafshine...
And what were our homes graced with in the 1960s...
Tradescantia...
The Spider Plant in the hanging macrame basket perhaps...
Moth Orchids now easily bought in the supermarket, but I’d never really bothered, having quickly killed one that I was given as leaving present from work, until a few years ago a friend sent me one for my birthday.
‘Just ignore it’’ she said, ‘water it on a sort of when you remember basis,’ and that’s exactly what I did. It would go weeks without attention but the thing flowered deep purple blooms solidly for three years. As one lot faded the next lot were ready in the wings and suddenly I accumulated a few more. Easy to add one to the trolley in Tesco's. They’d flower for months and months and then I’d move them into the Orchid Rest Home (the laundry room) while they regrouped. Some would take a couple of years to flower again but by adding new ones in between I always seemed to have at least one in flower.
Then lockdown happened and to my dismay not a single one even in bud.
Cue Bookhound to the rescue, and home from shopping in those really early days with three all sold past their sell-by-date at a bargain £2 each, because everyone was fighting over toilet rolls and had forgotten about the orchids. I arranged them on the windowsill and there they have sat for the last five months, throwing out more and more, and even more flowers, and showing no sign of fading.
Thinking these must surely be on the wane any day soon, and now having something of an addiction, I added another on to the trolley last week because I couldn't resist the colour and the patterning on the petals...
I re-potted a few older ones a while back but I know plenty of people usually just leave them be.
So is it just me and orchids, or you also susceptible to planting an occasional one in the trolley with the weekly shop...
All tips gratefully received...
What about feeding them...
I do when I remember, but is there an optimum time in the growing/flowering cycle...
And if not orchids do you have another pot plant favourite...
Nipping in from the staycation deckchair, and the August sabbatical from longer bookish posts, with a post each Thursday-ish to make sure you are all alright, and this week to share my remedy if anyone is having a bout of the glums.
I had a mild episode on Tuesday which I think might be about occasionally realising I can’t just hop on a plane to New Zealand and see Offspringette, all compounded by the fact that it’s her birthday today, but it’s not just me. These days you very quickly realise it’s the same for everyone and there’s an odd sort of comfort in that. Anyway my bout of glum was swiftly rectified by an airlift into Waterstones to breath in some books. There was nothing I wanted but it was lovely to browse (again) and my remedy for anyone feeling a little marooned and holiday-less is of course a good book...
The Caravaners by Elizabeth Von Arnim, first published in 1909, and which I had bought as a special offer from Handheld Press.
I’m about a hundred pages in and delighted not only by the story and the writing, but by one of those serendipitous moments when you discover that the date on which you are reading is the exact date something happens in the book. It is August 2nd when the German Baron and his wife set off on what is proving to be an ill-fated but hilarious holiday, travelling by horse-drawn caravan around England, and so I’m feeling like a tag-along and I really can’t stop laughing.
He’s such a pompous snob, and his wife, mediated through his eyes is, to his amazement, having a wonderful time and everything else is an unmitigated disaster.
I skimmed the introduction in the Handheld Press edition and glimpsed ‘feminism’ ‘extreme political right and ‘rhetoric of xenophobia’ and decided that, for now, this might be a book that I want to read for pure pleasure, not to argue for any latter-day relevance (unlike Rose Macaulay whose 1920’s writing is screaming 2020 at me) or worry as I read. All in good time to ponder all that, but for now I want to relax and enjoy. And thence to my shelves where I knew I had collected quite a few vintage books by Elizabeth von Arnim some years ago. The haul was way better than I remembered.
And when I do eventually write about The Caravaners here I must remember to tell you about the 1974 student nurse holiday on board a horse-drawn caravan around County Mayo in Ireland...what on earth possessed us. It might have been fractionally worse than the student nurse holiday in Yugoslavia the previous year, when the very promising group of four handsome young men on the £48 Laker Airways package holiday flight, and travelling to the same hotel, turned out to be trainee Catholic priests...but that’s another story.
If you’ve read any of the Elizabeth Von Arnim books in my stash which do you recommend. They are all beautiful well-thumbed, probably by countless women in the past, and the typeface and font are readable so I could definitely try a few more.
In my quest to explore more (and different) publishers of forgotten fiction from the twentieth century, I stumbled across Handheld Press, and you may recall I recently enjoyed Business as Usual. I am grateful that Kate at Handheld persevered with emails given that my inbox currently totals 625 and I have been known to look at it and look away in a state of mild panic. On that note my sincere apologies to anyone awaiting a reply, I do get there eventually if not dreckly. I think almost 2000 people now subscribe here by email and they often send a reply direct to me which I endeavour to respond to but regularly fail. Please know that I read and appreciate every single one and it's always good to know you are out there and reading the scribbles.
And while I’m on the subject of thank you’s...thank you for ALL your comments here, especially these last few months. I’ve always said they are the oxygen of the scribbles and I love the way conversations develop. From the off back in 2006 this has been about creating a welcoming corner of the internet, and it’s been a joy to drop in and find you all here and contributing through such strange and unsettling times.
Under the banner of 'We Sell Stories', Handheld Press books are beautifully produced and arrive like an old-fashioned book parcel might have done in 1920; a layer of tissue paper around the book and all wrapped in brown paper sealed with paper tape. I'm sure even the postman enjoys this quaint variation on the plastic air-filled jiffy bags of today. Signing up for the Handheld e mail means special offers and discounts and just this week I took advantage of Kate's birthday offer and bought The Caravanners by Elizabeth Von Arnim for £10 inc. postage. But cue much excitement when a good friend ordered me two Handheld books at the beginning of lockdown as a gift. I saved Desire by Una Silberrad, with its gorgeous cover, for a Right Moment
When well connected socialite and girl-about-town Desire Quebell takes a shine to the rather staid but steady novelist Peter Grimstone who could have predicted what would happen next.
'She read books as she made acquaintance with people, enthusiastically almost gluttonously, losing herself completely for the time being, and wringing out the uttermost...'
Desire, the illegitimate daughter of government financial adviser Sir Joseph Quebell and a variety actress, lives her life of privilege and wealth to the full, so when Sir Joseph dies and leaves Desire destitute I could only wonder what life had in store. Except Desire has proved herself to be a bit of a stoic and a stalwart and with a genuine sense of honour and fairness, likewise Peter who must make a choice between his family business and his career as a writer. Both will make sacrifices. Desire trains as a secretary, quite a move for a woman in 1908, and one that ostensibly takes her several (make that many) rungs back down the social ladder, and as for Peter ...well I don't want to spoil it.
Will their paths cross again ...
And will they help each other out...
First published in 1908, Desire has been brought back into print by Handheld Press and a very worthy return it is. I was surprisingly gripped and there are moments of real tension as the challenges mount for both Desire and Peter against a backdrop of family rivalry and sabotage.
Looking through the Handheld list my eye was then taken by Rose Macaulay.
Rose's final novel The Towers of Trebizond has sat unread on my shelf for years and Handheld are bringing more of her books back into print. I knew next to nothing about Rose Macaulay so was delighted to find two biographies (thank you Kate in Cheshire, I think you sent one of them) on my shelf as well. I settled down with The Towers of Trebizond and my trusty 1923 Bartholomew's Atlas (because where on earth is Trebizond) and that famous first line was all it took...
'Take my camel, dear. 'said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.'
I now have to read everything Rose Macaulay has ever written and find out everything there is to know about her. One notable critic has been scathing about her work (maybe that's why I had subliminally avoided...who knows) but I am going to beg to disagree. It feels (to me) as if the Anglican Church is on its beam ends right now and I loved all the wry humour concealing deep insights as Laurie, Aunt Dot and Father Chantry- Pigg make their way to Turkey with missionary zeal to do a bit of converting. And of course the camel goes too and has starring role. More to come about The Towers of Trebizond (which is on the south coast of the Black Sea)
Having also now read another novel Potterism (1920) I am finding so much to admire and much to think about. It could be argued that Rose Macaulay's perceptive post-war observations about the 1920s have great relevance for what we are living through now. Handheld are republishing Potterism in August, and what with 'woke' culture and confidence in the media currently undergoing a bit of a wobble, there couldn't be a more apposite moment to read it, so I am grateful to them for sending me an early copy.
I have a few more lined up too, Crewe Train, The World my Wilderness (with an introduction by Penelope Fitzgerald) and Non- Combatants and Others - Writings Against War 1916-1945. The latter also to be published by Handheld in August. Meanwhile Bookhound, sensing my enthusiasm, found me three volumes of Rose Macaulay's letters on eBay for £7 along with Staying With Relations (in a lovely old bound library edition) and They Were Defeated, and so, through my annual August sabbatical from regular to more occasional posts here, you can be sure it is Rose who will have my full attention, new notebook to hand, and I'll be back with plenty of thoughts about her in September.
I'm hoping you all have some good reading set aside for August too, please do share...
I had a bit of of an ‘I haven’t bought a book in a shop in ages’ moment a few weeks ago, in fact not since I bought The Mirror and the Light on March 5th, publication day, and so, once we were partially released back into the wild at the beginning of July, Bookhound dropped me outside W.H.Smiths and off I went. The same money had been sitting in my purse for almost four months, this couldn’t be right, something had to give.
I tapped on the shop door and they let me in. Only six people allowed in at a time but the shop was empty. I think confidence might be rising slowly now but it wasn’t backalong, anyway I went in and judging by the enthusiasm of the welcome you’d have thought it was my birthday and Christmas rolled into one. I followed the arrows to the paperbacks and now have to own up that I’d picked up and put back at least ten before I saw it, the sign saying ‘DO NOT PICK UP A BOOK UNLESS YOU ARE BUYING IT.’ I felt marginally better for having sanitised my hands but still, and so I proceeded with due caution and selected three.
Who knows what sort of reading mood I was in to pick up a big fat John Grisham novel, The Rainmaker. I haven’t read him in years but I was in the mood for a bit of a legal thrillery page-turner. I’m about half way through and I’ll be honest ...I’m flagging. It all seems a bit padded out and extra-wordy but I’ll probably plod on during those deckchair moments in the coming weeks.
Then even more unusually I opted for a bit of Royal gossip. Lady in Waiting by Anne Glenconner. A candid look at life behind the scenes for the upper echelons in the post-war years, and you can but only feel sorry for them, and the children. The social life of Anne, Maid of Honour at the Queen’s Coronation and former a Lady in Waiting to Princess Margaret, and her husband Colin Tennant, is a mad whirl of nightly engagements and parties. There are houses in London and a stately home in Scotland and this is all compounded by Colin’s purchase of the island of Mustique. Anne is a saint, a martyr and everything else in between as she balances her frenetic life mostly spent placating the irascible Colin, alongside the demands of motherhood.
It has to be said, and I’ll say it...I was bound to be able to spot the future trials and tribulations for children left in the care of nannies and friends various whilst their parents were largely absent. To Anne’s credit she does also address her own shortcomings. These become apparent when nanny Barbara Barnes arrives as a role model and takes the helm. Barbara more famously known for her nurturing of the young Princes William and Harry, but her imposition of some routine and discipline can’t have been easy in the Tennant household given that there were now five children, no make that six if you include Colin. Colin still prone to rolling around on the floor with tantrums well into his later years.
I don’t know about you but my lasting association between Mustique and Princess Margaret (besides Roddy Llewellyn of course) is the accidental burning of her feet in the hot bath water. I was sharing an office with the district nurses at the time and there was much speculation about it all, and the treatment and potential consequences I can tell you
I have to confess that my final choice, probably a salve to the two ‘popular’ reads was a Penguin ModernClassic, The Man in the High Castle by Philip K.Dick. Endsleigh book group have been meeting via Zoom except I just don’t do Zoom so I’ve been absent. But the theme was Science or Science Fiction so I thought I’d at least try. In fact twenty pages in I’d decided that Philip Dick and I were not hitting it off at this particular moment in time and I abandoned. Maybe it will happen one day but I’ve never really ‘got’ sci-fi so I’m not hopeful.
I had a purse full of coinage so opted for the self service checkout and proceeded to feed £22 worth of change into the machine. About fifteen minutes later, and still the only person in the shop, and after a good natter with the staff while I fed the machine with every 1p, 2p, 5p etc in my possession, I was done. And I can’t tell you how good it felt to walk out of a shop with some new books under my arm.
Meanwhile, I’m wondering how you are doing with the venturing out, if allowed...
Are you nervous, getting less nervous, and feeling a bit more normal...
Or does it all feel a bit too hazardous for now...
And what about John Grisham. It’s years since I read The Pelican Brief and The Firm, any other good ones to recommend...
Sci Fi...will it ever happen here...
And Royal gossip...are you in or out. I thought I was ‘out’ until Anne Glenconner persuaded me otherwise.
Having inherited the dahlia bed from the Tinker (my dad, for any that haven’t met him here before) and the wonders he worked on it during his last two years living here with us, we have always felt an affinity with this little corner of the Tinker's Cott garden. I grew up with dahlias, but with no particular love for them until my dad started planting them here, and now it’s safe to say we are addicted.
It's always a bit nerve-wracking because we don't lift the tubers in the winter. They stay put with a thick layer of mulchy straw on top and we hope for the best. We unveil it once we are past our last frost date (about May 19th for us) and then wait and see what emerges. And it's an ongoing mystery as to why the slugs and snails slither past and walk another thirty yards across the lawn to eat things, but leave this bed alone.
But just when our early summer flourish is over, and the daisies have done their thing.. and how I love this picture of the Tinker in the midst of them...
Then along comes the dahlia bed, all singing and dancing until first frosts.
This year I have taken dahlia expert Charlie McCormick's advice and strung around the supports, and it's a minor miracle of scaffolding which is slowly disappearing from sight whilst doing its job. We add six new dahlias each year, start them off in pots in the greenhouse in early March and are martyrs to them every time there's a frost, dashing out to swaddle them. Dahlia corner is getting a bit crowded, and we’re wondering whether to extend it a bit, but in the meantime it’s a riot of mismatched colour and gorgeous flowers which are just starting to sing.
Wine-Eyed Jill now in her third year and more prolific than ever...
This a new one Rebecca's World...
Another new one and quite the star so far this year, Cornel Brons
Arbatax. A village show prizewinner, though sadly no show this year, but I had added in a second one for fear of losing the first.
Another new one, Edge of Joy and its growing on me...
Downham Royal was a fail last year and by the time I'd contacted Peter Nyssen (who always replace or refund if a problem) they had sold out. I was quick off the mark with my ordering in January this year...
And here's Cornel Brons again. I doubt there's a more perfect flower...
Waiting in the wings and laden with buds is Black Jack, and wait 'til you see it. I gave my Walking Friend one for her birthday and was speechless when I saw her flowers last week. She lives up on Dartmoor and her garden is always a few weeks behind ours, but there they were, spiky nine inch dinner plates of deepest purple.
Meanwhile I hope all is well in your gardens, or those nearby that you can enjoy if you don't have one...
And I'd love to know what's doing well in the flower department, and of course any good recommends....
'The fuller the sources become over time, the easier it is to test the accuracy of those sweeping statements of chroniclers about the havoc created by plague, and to see that the reality for everyone involved in an epidemic was personal stress.' Plague ~ Paul Slack ( A Very Short Introduction)
For anyone who is feeling that stress please don't feel obliged to read this, though ultimately I hope it might be reassuring...
When all this started I could hardly believe what I was hearing...that the most popular book was The Plague by Camus and everyone was watching the film Contagion. They’re mad I thought as I walked past my shelf of plague books with my eyes shut.
I couldn’t think of anything worse. We were living it after all, wasn’t that enough torture.
The Plague Shelf had built up through many years working in public health. Health Visitors of old were trained in epidemics and infectious diseases, and in Plymouth especially in disaster management if there was ever a nuclear accident. And so I’d picked up and added all sorts of book down the years, but reading them now seemed like madness.
It's funny how the cards fall though isn't it.
I can only blame the Happy Campers.
We'd all missed face-to-face bookish talk so much that we set up regular garden sessions and had decided on a shared read of The Wheel of Fortune, book by book, and with a session to talk about it in-between. We'd pay special attention to Susan Howatch's retelling of the era of the Plantagenets through the lens of twentieth century lives of the Godwin family. This historical connection had passed me by on first read; 1985, baby overdue and in need of escapist fiction, but this time around I am a fully paid-up member of the fourteenth century with an essential module on The Black Death, which arrived in England in 1438 or so, during the reign of Edward III.
And so I sidled up to the Plague Shelf and found Plague by Paul Slack, one of those Very Short Introduction series from Oxford University Press, and what a revelation these 120 pages have been.
I'm sure someone somewhere regularly says something about 'interrogating' or understanding the present through the lens of the past...or maybe it's shifted to the other way round in the current climate, but honestly my jaw was on the floor.
Quoting J.F.C. Hecker..
'The mental shock sustained by all nations during the prevalence of the Black Plague was without parallel and beyond description.'
Paul Slack suggests this...
'It destroyed confidence in the future, undermined deference and conventional moral norms, produced extremes of religious enthusiasm and social and religious dissidence, turned everything upside down.'
'Psycho-pathological hysteria in critical circumstances' is mentioned too, but also the ability to accommodate the onslaught...
'not as something commonplace or everyday, but as inescapable facts of life.'
Can I tell you I found all that very reassuring; that human nature and our reaction to something life-threatening and in many ways uncontrollable, would seem to have changed very little since 1348. Maybe we've sheltered a bit too long under the cloak of invincibility where disease is concerned. I doubt we'll do that again for a while.
And there were some other fascinating similarities too...
Archbishop Carlo Borromeo, among the infected of Milan in 1576-7 'encouraged people in quarantine to come to their windows to sing the Litany and the Mass.'
Who will ever forget those moving scenes of Italians singing from their windows, and when we all knew this was headed our way too
In so many ways it has been far easier and more encouraging to return to the fourteenth century for an overview, rather than try and understand what is happening now. We are still slap-bang in the middle of history being made, as they were back then, and it may well be a few decades yet before anyone can make sense of all this.
But it also made me realise that for all our advances we are still only just learning what we are dealing with here. The science is young and has a way to go so, just as we might say now, 'Imagine them not knowing that the Black Death was transmitted by fleas on rats,' (or by body lice as the latest research shows), well just imagine them in 3020 saying 'Fancy them not knowing Covid 19 was spread by ....'
There is much about flight, about the origins of quarantine ( Venetian colony of Ragusa, now Dubrovnik in 1377) and isolation, about the conflicts of private and public interests when precautions are taken, about scepticism as public knowledge increased, about challenges to authority and all of it suggesting that the Old Testament adage ( I had to look it up, Ecclesiastes) in many respects still holds true..
...and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.
Feeling emboldened I moved along the plague shelf and read Ralph Taylor's Summer - A Scrivener, His City and the Plague by Keith Wrightson, and then picked up The Scourging Angel by Benedict Gummer. And as quickly as this bout of interest descended, so as suddenly did it abate; enough of buboes and the like because now I'm plagued out and have moved on to thinking about who was writing in the fourteenth century, who could I be reading.
Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales of course. It's almost fifty years since I read Troilus and Criseyde for A Level. How we groaned at translating Middle English, and yet I glance at it now and it seems almost readable. Then there's William Langland and Piers Plowman...
Any other suggestions welcome.
Or books about life in the fourteenth century, fiction or non-fiction...
And I'd be interested to know, have you been fascinated by all this or avoiding delving ...well, like the plague.
It will be twenty-six years next month since we upped sticks and left town for country. Admittedly only six miles further up the road, but we’d found the location of our dreams, the place where we'd like our children to have some outdoor freedom, and the home we thought we’d still like to live in once the nest had emptied.
And we're still here.
I’m sure you’d all agree that the trauma of moving house is unsurpassed by little else on the stress-o-meter and our transit was no exception. I made things far worse by insisting that no house I left would be anything other than cleaned to operating theatre standards, though things started to fall apart when the removal men shifted the freezer and I saw what lay beneath. I had assumed (very wrongly) that the house we were moving into would be just the same, pristine and clean and lovely, ready to welcome us. Honestly, how wrong and naive could I be, it wasn't. I arrived feeling like a wrung out dishcloth and was ambushed by an unexpected grief for the first little home we'd left behind; the one we'd returned to with three new babies but defintely grown out of. Yet despite that this 150 year-old place had a huge heart and warmth and we felt it had probably been waiting for us to find it and make a home of it.
Adding to the stress on the day was trapping and boxing up the cat (Korky) as well as rounding up the chickens, and transporting them in their ark to their new home. We’d kept chickens for years in our little town cottage garden and thought nothing of twelve egg scrambled egg sessions (between five of us). The girls (Warrens for the experts among you) settled in well in their new surroundings. We only had our old collie dog so they could free-range safely, lay twelve eggs in the hedge that we wouldn’t find for weeks and generally cluck around happily. We took in a rogue bantam cockerel too. George the 5am scourge of a Dartmoor village and my HV colleague pleaded with me...if we can catch him please will you take him. He was an absolute gent was George. No trouble, pecked up food for his girls (twice his size) and then left it for them to eat, roosted every night at the top of the fir tree and far enough away from the house not to bother us with the crowing, except we quite liked it. We were living in the country after all.
We would add to the flock as required but gradually, as our own nest emptied and the chickens depleted, George crowed his last and we decided to stop with the whole chicken husbandry lark. Yet, every so often we’d say ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to keep chickens again,’ and Bookhound would pace out the corner of the garden have a bit of a think but that would be it.
Then lockdown happened and we were suddenly overcome with a massive bout of self-sufficiency. Nothing seemed certain in those early scary days did it, and we had to think carefully about how and where we would shop when supermarket delivery slots were like ...well like hen's teeth. The local farm shop was our salvation, quickly setting up online ordering and click-and-collect but maybe we also needed to think a bit more carefully about our own food production
And that aside Bookhound was definitely in need of a project.
Needless to say no project of Bookhound’s is ever knowingly under-constructed, skimped over or out of alignment (spot the spirit level), and, with access to building materials strictly limited, it was a case of using up all those 'things' that had been kept 'in case they came in handy', tucked away behind the shed for just this very moment. What has materialised is a spacious sort of hopefully fox and spaniel-proof triple-enclosure system (with the best views) that will allow for rotation when we hit winter mud. There’s a cosy roost, and nest boxes inside the woodshed accessed by a little door from the run that we can close at night.
We rang the place where we had always bought our hens, at point-of-lay and rescued before they end up in Tesco's. Can you believe there was a waiting list...we weren't the only ones thinking about all this, but eventually home they came in the dog crate, six happy and docile Brown Warrens who will get along fine.
The trouble we always had in the past was trying to mix in some fancy breeds because they looked nice, but they'd end up at war with the 'commoners' and it is only then that you see the true origins of the word 'henpecked.'
As always they hide for a few days and take a little while to settle in. They have to learn to peck the ground, and to find their safe spaces, and we've had some fun 'teaching' them to go into the hen house at night. But Harriet, Audrey, Dorothy, Judy, Bunty and Babs have all got the hang of it now and, as predicted, three weeks in residence and they have come into lay.
The Kayaker came round for lunch so we had the Ceremony of the First Egg and there it was ...a double yolker.
Any more Keepers of Chickens out there... all advice welcome.
Anyone else felt the urge to be a tiny bit more self-sufficient...
Or had a rethink about what really matters day to day...
'Some writers have the gift of simply letting you know you can trust them, Mark Oakley has this gift in abundance...' Rowan Williams
Mark Oakley winged his way onto my radar via Bel Mooney.
Having shared my enthusiasm for Brian Doyle and One Long River of Song - Notes on Wonder, Bel had recommended Mark Oakley. Previously Chancellor of St Paul's Cathedral, Mark Oakley is now the Dean of St John's College Cambridge and has written a series of books. Brian Doyle was a very successful chapter-a-day read through May and I quite surprised myself with how much I was enjoying a bit of ...dare I say...meditative reading and directed thinking.
Having been a devout C of E attendee for many years I'm now a bit lapsed, none of which ever stops me from loving the liturgy and the presence and availability of the buildings (and missing them hugely during recent months) but I proceeded with my usual caution over any religious writing. I downloaded a Kindle sample of My Sour Sweet Days - George Herbert and the Journey of the Soul by Mark Oakley and decided it was all a bit too much for the current state of my soul (which felt reasonably calm and OK ) and maybe I wasn't ready for the depths of George Herbert.
In the meantime I had a complete reorganise of the poetry shelves one day because I had nothing else pressing to do. The diary was an empty void and suddenly I needed to carry books halfway round the house to new homes.
I know for sure it isn't just me that does this...
Own up now all you book movers...
It was so good to see all the poetry books again and get them all into order and sit and browse a few, pull a few old friends and new-to-me poets off the shelf for a closer look, and how thankful I was that I had stocked up backalong in case of a future dearth. A charity shop in town had taken in a huge collection of as new contemporary poetry books and was selling them for 50p each, thus swelling my shelves by a quarter as much again. Doubly pleased too that I'd rescued them because some weeks later the shop and it's entire stock was destroyed in a flood (floor mop jammed down a toilet in the flat above).
And then Bel recommended The Splash of Words -Believing in Poetry also by Mark Oakley,
'This beautiful and wise meditation centred around the soul language of poetry opens new windows in the shared house of both poetry and belief". Carol Ann Duffy
...and this time the Kindle sample was enough to convince me very quickly to splash out on the book (sorry).
'The phrase 'splash of words' is a good description of poetry. When you read a poem there is an initial splash like a pebble thrown into a lake. The words disturb your surface and have their impact...' says Mark Oakley in his introduction.
Yes, I could identify with that, so far so good...
'Then, as the poem begins to do its work, the ripples of meaning head out towards your shore, often slowly but relentlessly, and you realise that these words are shifting your perceptions...'
Yes I could see that too...still so far so good
'...and consequently even transforming who you are and how you understand.'
Whoa, steady on, lets wait and see.
There is a month's worth of a poem-a-day here with a commentary to accompany which, whilst obviously it does have a religious theme, doesn't beat you over the head with it...consequently twelve days in, at the time of writing this, I am coping and really enjoying the selection. Though I might not always segue neatly with Mark Oakley's spiritual stance or interpretation I think that's entirely Normal For Poetry, so we are having a jolly good to and fro about it all.
But there is another huge advantage to a book like this for someone who has just reorganised the poetry shelves. Each poem sends me there to see if I have said poet in a collection and so far I'm doing pretty well.
Jo Shapcott, W.H.Auden, U.A.Fanthorpe, Louis MacNeice, Dylan Thomas, Liz Berry, Mary Oliver, Alice Oswald, Emily Dickinson, Seamus Heaney, Fiona Benson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, R.S. Thomas, Carol Ann Duffy...
It also demanded a new poetry notebook. The last one full to the brim with notes I’ll probably never look at again, but it’s somehow nice to have a record of meandering thoughts and brief quotes...
That picture of the shards we've dug up in our garden over the years feels like a perfect picture for those fragments of thought that occur as I read.
But likewise Mark Oakley is finding new poets for me too, and I was so spellbound by Jen Hadfield's Paternoster that I immediately ordered her collection Nigh-No-Place .
Mark Oakley starts his book with Paternoster and that feels entirely right. It is a poem that cannot be rushed...in other words sets a reader's pace for what is to come, holding the steady rhythm of the plough horse, the swaying of the head, the sounds, the time honoured labour of man and horse. I don't even like horses that much, but I love this one a great deal. It brought to mind that other plough-horse related poem by Edward Thomas, As the Team's Headbrass. I've read Paternoster over and again and feel as I've ploughed the equivalent of Long Acre in front of the house in the process...
'Her poetry is found where the secular and non-secular converge: ‘Paternoster’ is the Lord’s Prayer as uttered by a draft horse, and one can almost smell the mix of grass and mash on its breath as it repeats the words “it is on earth as it is in heaven”.
And here the opening lines...
Paternoster. Paternoster Hallowed be dy mane. Dy kingdom come. Dy draftwork be done. Still plough the day And give out daily bray Thought heart stiffen in the harness.
'The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper,' said Bertrand Russell...
'Good poetry makes the universe reveal a secret' said the Persian poet Hafiz (another of the choices in The Splash of Words) but like many I sometimes struggle to find it, or to sharpen my wits, so I am really enjoying Mark Oakley's light shining a deeper understanding over these gems.
Oh...right...
'...and consequently even transforming.... how you understand.'
Meanwhile, any new poetry discoveries to report...
Any favourite collections jumping off the shelves at you lately...
Moved any books around the home from A to B to C, and those that were at C to A, and those that were are B to C recently...
The one we’ve all been waiting for, at least here in the UK...
Did you trip over on the way to pick up the phone because you couldn’t see where you were going...
’Hi Lynne...it’s Ed...’
’EEEEEEEEDDDDDDDDDD’
Ed is my hairdresser. He’s a good friend of the Kayaker and I had sent a nice message along the lines of ‘tell him to ring your mother.’
I’ve been through the rumpled messy Carol ‘Gardener’s World' Klein look and am now heading for the full 1970’s page boy. it was almost time to get out the flares and the platform clogs.
1975 I think. I'd just won a goldfish at a fair on Hampstead Heath, for which I bought a tank and luxury fixtures and fittings only for it to die a week later. Please note the Felicity Kendall 'The Good Life' dungarees and the 6" turned up hems, but also the page boy haircut. We used to go to the Jingles Hairdresser Training School, where their apprentices would practise on you for £1. I'd had the ignominious honour of being 'evicted' from the seat because a page boy was 'too ordinary and boring' for the up and coming student stylist.
Anyway, nothing fancy ever required for my hair these days. No colour, no foils, no highlights (age seems to be providing those without help) Just chop it to above my ears, sweep it sideways, don’t layer it to much or I look like a hedgehog, no thank you to the hairspray, quick ruffle with the dryer and off I go.
As luck would have it I’d had my hair cut shorter than usual in early March thinking I would be going to New Zealand, and which was sure to involve some wilderness camping. Last time I went to New Zealand I made this amazing discovery at Cascade Creek that my hair could be washed (without shampoo) in a stream and would dry by itself without a hairdryer.
And again at Lake Hawea..
A skill once learned that I readily transferred to Dartmoor
Extraordinary.
As it is we seem to have been on a different ‘wilderness’ experience this last few months and although the fringe goes sideways it still has the power to annoy me when it grows too long, but years ago someone taught me a cutting trick that never fails...
You carefully separate off whatever constitutes fringe, gather it together, twist it and twist it into a tight bundle and just chop off the end. Hey presto. you can see where you’re going again and it annoys you slightly less.
Someone said at the beginning of all this that after six weeks people would realise there is no such thing as natural beauty. Now being a person who worries more about my dahlias than my eyebrows I wasn’t too worried, but I suspect plenty of people have quite enjoyed a rest from the treadmill, maybe rediscovered something that had been lost in a sea of habit, even found a new style, who knows.
But hasn’t the unruly, over-long hair also become a badge of Lockdown Survival. We’re seeing it left and right on the TV (no names, no pack drill) and as Bookhound approaches the moment when he might need a pony tail it’s all become quite hilarious here.
Anyway, I’ve got my appointment, how about you...
How are your lockdown locks doing...
Anything else that you surrendered graciously and may never bother with again...
Anything that has driven you crazy and you are first in the queue...
'Like a crossword clue, history never makes sense at first reading. The surface is plausible, but discordant. We need a second reading to impose order.'
I honestly don't know what I'd do without you all.
How would I find books like this if one of you didn't email and suggest I read it.
It was one of those mornings when I was in need of 'different' then in whizzed an email from one of you suggesting I read Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose (8) - A memoir of love, exile and crosswords by Sandy Balfour. It took me less than a nano-second to be convinced and order a copy...perhaps a sort of reverse version of what I do to some of you sometimes...maybe.
Here's the blurb...
Half a million people a day do it in the Telegraph. The Times claims almost as many, and the Guardian 300,000. Most people remember their first time, and everyone has a favourite. You can do it in bed, standing up, or on a train. You can do it alone, with a loved one or in groups. The Queen does it in the bath. It is not illegal, immoral or fattening. In fact it tops the Home Office list of approved entertainments for prison inmates. Crosswords are a very British obsession.
Crosswords are a very British obsession. Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose is a personal reminiscence and a guide to solving crossword puzzles. But it is much, much more than a 'how-to' book. Each chapter starts with a clue, and uses anecdote, history and autobiography to solve it, in the process describing something of what it means to love England. In the process, we encounter The Best Crossword Clue Ever, The Most Beautiful Clue in the World 'Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose' and the eccentric personalities behind such legendary compilers as the Guardian's Araucaria and The Times'Ximenes.
The Queen does the crossword in the bath??
I can't pretend to be an expert, nor obsessed, but crosswords do fascinate me whilst also making me feel that there's a whole world of knowing that I am excluded from. It is this knowing when you are looking at an anagram, when you are not, when the word is hidden in plain sight in the clue, or when you've got to really stand on your head and turn your logical and ordered world a little upside-down, and think way beyond the box. Sometimes I get into the mindset, sometimes I don't, so it was good to read that it took Sandy Balfour years and years before he felt at ease in the world of the crossword.
I hadn't realised how traditional the whole thing is either. Famous compilers who garner a reputation and a following, one of earliest of whom was the nature writer Adrian Bell (Corduroy, Silver Ley, The Cherry Tree, Men and the Fields)
One of the lasting memories I have of sitting as an observer in a workshop on memoir writing with Julia Blackburn and Penelope Lively, was their suggestion that all memoir needs a scaffolding. Once you've found it the book takes shape around it and Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose is that clever memoir that has used its scaffolding well.
Born and raised in South Africa Sandy Balfour's journey begins in 1983 when he and his girlfriend leave Cape Town, avoiding army conscription and apartheid, and with a plan to hitchhike to London. The journey takes him around the world but effectively into exile, in search of a place he can belong and which he would like to call home...
'I have only a desire to be on the move. I have cut myself off from friends and family. I have discarded my past. It feels like a kind of death. All that is left is myself. I am not sure that is enough.'
Weaving through the quest are the crosswords, a quest in themselves, and if I could remember all the details I think I could probably smash out the Times crossword in hours rather than the days it would take me if I stuck at it, rather than surrendering. It felt as if I'd stumbled into a new world that has always been a mystery to me...
That each newspaper has its own style...
This whole network of compilers who go by pseudonyms like Rufus, Araucaria (a Monkey Puzzle tree) Bunthorne, Hendra, Custos, Logodaedulus. Gemini, Quantum...
That the editor has the final say if they feel a clue doesn't play by the unspoken rules...if it isn't 'cricket'...
And that cricket itself is a compilers dream providing a plethora of clues and solutions...
Sandy Balfour's journey woven around the crossword clues, of which there are plenty to solve, was indeed a great read and highly recommended if you fancy not only a life-journey but also a glimpse into this mysterious world of wordplay.
So tell me...are you a crossword guru who knows all the tricks...
Or, like me, have you spent your life in the half-light not quite understanding the rules of the game...
Do you ever cheat and look up the answers online...
PS Thank you again to the recommender and what about the answer to the clue which is the title of the book... shall I spoil it...no maybe not just yet...
And what about these...
'The real reason for the meeting of Volkswagen and Daimler (6, 6)'
And this apparently one of the best clues ever set...
"In this contemplative short narrative, artist and acclaimed writer Sara Baume charts the daily process of making and writing, exploring what it is to create and to live as an artist. Elegantly encompassing images and in itself a significant artefact, handiwork offers observations that are at once gentle and devastating on the nature of art, grief and a life lived well."
What a beautiful and thoughtful book this was. Sent as a gift from a friend via Much Ado Books in Alfriston, Sussex, and arriving gift-wrapped and clearly much-loved before it even fell into my hands. I read a few pages a day through May, feeling not only the creativity and that flow which comes with an engrossing and all-consuming craft project, but woven in alongside was Sara Baume's grief at the death of her father. It inevitably reminded me of that summer after the Tinker journeyed on, the six weeks I spent finishing a quilt whose making had spanned some twenty years. I'd started it soon after we moved here, three children living here, my mum and dad regular visitors. Somehow it joined up all the dots that I held dear and needed to stitch into one. I took that quilt to New Zealand and gave it to our farthest-flung family member to somehow bridge the miles and keep the dots joined up.
There is much to cheer here. Sara Baume quoting Stephen Knott for example...
'Modellers often have a variety of different projects that are left half-finished or are completed at different speeds: it is not always a case of finishing one thing and going onto the next...'
'Oh good' I wrote in the margin.
There was so much that I understood and acknowledged about handiwork (the lower case is deliberate) and the book jogged many lovely memories too...
'What we all shared - me, my dad, his dad - was a suspicion of modern life, a loathing of fashion, a disappointment with the new technologies and a preference for the ad-hoc contraptions of the past - anything that can be disassembled and reassembled with hands and tools, based upon the principles of common sense.
Each in our own time, we lived and live in consonance with nostalgia for a former one...'
The importance of, and inspiration from a book like this for me, whilst acknowledging the author's life as portrayed, is also its ability to segue into my own memories and experience. I think that's true for just about every book I read, and this one was no exception.
One memory in particular about the Tinker's dad, my granddad...there's me in the smocked frock sitting on the wall with him, my brother too and my dad (in his reindeer jumper).
My granddad joined the police force after the First World War until eventually, retiring from a life doing point duty on Tooting Broadway in the mid 1950s, he and my grandmother moved from the London suburbs to a cottage built into the hillside in a little village just outside Crediton in Devon. The stairs were carved out of the rock and there was no mains drainage or indoor facilities. it was jugs and ewers and an Elsan up the garden. Milk had to be collected in a jug from the local farm... everyone thought they were crazy. But they loved it and so did we.
We would all travel on the steam train to Bow for our own 'fortnight in September' where we would be met by the Austin A30 and don't ask me how we all fitted in. I'd sit on my dad's lap in the front seat and 'do' the indicators (the switch on the dashboard that sent the little pointed arm out of the side of the car). It would be a very sedate drive because my grandfather was of the opinion that anything over 30mph and you were aiming a car, not driving it. We'd all settle in, visit the Elsan up the garden, smell the familiar scent of the geraniums in the conservatory and then head to my granddad's workshop to look at the brass microscope in the wooden box (I have it now) and where he'd always be making something out of something else. It was at this point that I obviously told him that the latest school craze was the hula hoop but I didn't have one. 'Hang on a minute,' he said, and before you knew it he'd found and coiled a piece of polythene pipe into a circle, joined it with a wooden stopper and I spent the next two weeks doing nothing else but hula hooping.
I was also extremely disappointed not to be allowed to take it home with me on the train. I couldn't see what the problem was.
Sara Baume's memories are intertwined with the making of a series of carved and painted birds and I used the book like a journal, writing in my own thoughts and recollections, prompted by Sara's, through that strange and surreal month of May 2020 that we have all just travelled through. The book is beautifully sized at 5" x 7" and well-spaced, often just a paragraph on a single page, almost begging me to add something of my own while giving me permission to use that blank space to think.
If you have read handiwork please do share your thoughts in comments..
And now I'm reminded of The Repair Shop...does anyone else watch it...and think the chap who does the clocks is a dead ringer for Steve Redgrave...
And though I understand it might not have been the case for everyone, I hope plenty of you have good memories of granddads too...please do share them.
Did anyone else 'do' any of the Hay Festival online a few weeks ago?
I booked a few things though wasn't really sure what to expect but was pleasantly surprised at how lovely it was not to have to drive 185 miles, try and park the car, find the venue, queue, pile in, try and stay awake in a hot and crowded tent after lunch, fight my way out and drive home again and take days to recover.
I caught an interesting talk by Rhidian Brook about his book Godbothering, a compilation of his Thought for the Day broadcasts on Radio 4, and was impressed with his combination of assurance and humility as he talked about his faith, about what mattered to him and to the many millions who must have listened to him over the years. I knew the name rang a bell, I wrote about Rhidian's novel The Aftermath back in 2013.
And I also 'went' to Maggie O'Farrell's event.
I know, I know, it's all about being sociable and being there and soaking up the atmosphere, but as I sat on my sofa listening I'm afraid I realised that this is the litfest of the future for me. You know, that falling asleep thing in the midst of the crowd...where you allow yourself a very long blink...just the one and before you know it your head slumps forward and you wake with a jump and hope no one has noticed. Well I sat on my sofa, may have closed my eyes as I listened, but Maggie O'Farrell's warm and engaging voice was all enough to confirm what my partial listening of Hamnet had already confirmed, that here was a book I needed in my hand.
I 'visited' the bookshop and the book arrived the next day.
It is 1596 and while the reader is never told this is Shakespeare's family, and the playwright is never named, it is quite clear that here is an aspect of his life told from an entirely different angle and giving centre stage to Anne, or Agnes as she is named in the book, and their children, Susanna and twins Hamnet and Judith. Given that we were also mid-plague it was fascinating to read of the bubonic version arriving in Stratford and its detailed journey there via a single flea.
Family relationships are fraught and complex in the feverish atmosphere of Stratford and there is only one way that the couple know they will get permission to marry. Months later their first child Susanna is born, followed in a few years by the twins. There will be a terrible death that leaves Agnes undone, unravelled, dismantled and utterly changed and the book gives an incredibly moving account of the impact of that grief. The burial is both powerful and visceral while the aftermath sees the couple take diverging paths, thinking that neither really understands how the other is feeling. It is the writing and production of Hamlet the play that holds the key, and has the power to bridge the couple's divide, the question is will they meet in the middle and understand.
Expect more tears...
In fact maybe expect to feel like a wrung-out dishcloth by the time you turn the final page, but in the best possible way.
Along the way I was regularly stopped in my tracks by the imagery, and it was listening to the audio that made me realise I needed to read the words and let that happen...
'The fireplace, which is filled only with ashes, held in the fragile shape of the log they once were...'
Taken out of context that line may not seem particularly powerful, read in the narrative moment for which Maggie O' Farrell intended it and my breath was well and truly taken away.
And also perhaps expect to have your interest in Hamlet revived a little. If it is a play you know you might find that Maggie O'Farrell has invested it with a new significance, around themes of eternal life and remembrance. If it is a play you are less familiar with you might at least feel tempted to explore it with Hamnet in mind.
If you have read Hamnet please do add your thoughts in comments.
And talking of Shakespeare does anyone have a favourite play...
It is a long time since I have read any, probably too much studying and essay-writing in a previous life, but I do feel the urge to go back, and there are plenty of the plays that I don't know at all.
And other fiction based on Shakespeare plays...heavens there must be hundreds..
A post coming up about Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell in a few days' time, but a heads up that it is 99p on Kindle today, and I'd hate you to miss it if it's a book you've been thinking about reading.
Now don’t get me wrong...Bookhound has been wonderful company through these weeks of staying out of the way and not becoming a liability to the NHS or our family. We’ve rubbed along well enough for over forty-five years so that’s plenty of time for our annoying habits to be acknowledged and then ignored (if only he could hang a towel up after he’s used it, not leave his wellies in the doorway where I trip over them..if only I could shut the kitchen door...major issues I’m sure you will agree) but I have to say I have really missed my friends.
We’ve talked and emailed and kept in touch but nothing beats a face-to-face gathering, and once the guidance allowed for garden gatherings I was in contact with the Happy Campers like a shot. We have met for coffee together every few weeks for years now and it turns out that they had missed our meet-ups too. And so on a rather damp and chilly day they arrived in separate cars (despite living a few hundred yards from each other in town) bearing their own food and drink, anoraks, blankets and with special instructions to bring their own scissors if they wanted a bunch of sweet peas.
After a quick walk around the fields so that we could then justify sitting down, we each collected our gravity recliner from the summer house and set ourselves up two metres apart, swaddled like patients in a TB sanitarium, and proceeded to talk. Five hours later we’d just about covered all the ground we’d missed, eaten our own food, managed to safely share a full box of Lindor, they picked their flowers and I waved them off. Despite the near Arctic temperatures (felt like) our first socially-distanced gathering felt like a huge and normalising success. I actually felt as if I’d done something that I used to do but took for granted in that previous life.
One of our topics for discussion was obviously books and one of our number had come with a list of books that had felt important at seminal moments in her life. We all threw out author names from the past...Jean Plaidy, Norah Lofts, Anya Seton and what on earth had become of Susan Howatch we wondered. Cashelmara, Penmarric. The joys of the internet in the hand meant we could find out immediately and I recalled reading TheWheel of Fortune back in September 1985. I know it was then because I’d bought it as my book to read whilst languishing in the local maternity home for ten days having giving birth to the baby Gamekeeper (weren’t those the days). I’d thought it would be a good idea to make a start before I went into labour but hadn’t bargained on him being two weeks late, or the book being so compelling that I must have let a four-year old and a two-year old do their own thing while I sat and read. I’d finished the book long before the first contraction. The copy long gone but suddenly we all had the urge to read it...
"Robert Godwin's tumultuous ride on the Wheel of Fortune begins with his passion for his sensual cousin Ginevra, as they waltz to "The Blue Danube" beneath the chandeliers at Oxmoon, his beloved family home in Wales. As Robert discovers, his rational, well-ordered mind will be forever altered by his obsession for Ginevra, and his destiny will be forever linked to Oxmoon by the skeletons that lurk in the family closet. For fifty years, from the sinister summer afternoon of 1913 to the 1960s, the Godwin family is sucked into a maelstrom of passion, disorder, madness, and murder. Fortunes rise and fall in this sweeping, compulsive tale, until the Wheel of Fortune finally comes full circle."
This, however, was the theme that I had no knowledge of back in 1985...
"Susan Howatch acknowledges that this novel is in fact a re-creation in a modern form of the story of the Plantagenet family of Edward III of England, the modern characters being created from those of his eldest son Edward of Woodstock (The Black Prince) and his wife Joan of Kent, John of Gaunt and his mistress, later wife, Katherine Swynford, Richard II (son of Edward of Woodstock), Henry IV (son of John of Gaunt) and Henry IV's eldest son King Henry V."
Anyway by the miraculous powers of 4G we were able to find three cheap copies on eBay which were duly purchased from our reclining pose, and we are all looking forward to jumping back into to this whopping great big book. I'm fortunate that I will be reading alongside two Plantagenet experts because it might still pass me by thirty-five years later. Incidentally I did eventually give birth to my whopping-est baby at 8lbs 6ozs, sans pain relief and about two hours after consuming a huge hospital dinner and a Mars bar. You get the hang of it by number three, but I have always associated The Wheel of Fortune with that moment in my life.
In other news, I found Avalon by Anya Seton for £2.99 on Kindle so I made a start. Could I ever have known, back when I was reading it as a fifteen-year old, that the action and the plot would walk right past my front door fifty plus years later.
I’m wondering if you have books that hold similar memories for you...
A memorable book from a memorable life-moment...
And were you a Susan Howatch fan...did anyone read the Glittering Images and the rest of the Starbridge series... I'm really hoping these books stand the test of time
A few books find their way onto my Kindle via Netgalley, a site where publishers make titles available pre-publication for reviewers. I particularly enjoy page-turning crime and thrillers on Kindle so I always have a handy supply ready, either via Netgalley or the 99p Daily Deal. It was whilst the nights seemed rather long, in the early days of the pandemic, that I started Allegation by R.G.Adams published by Quercus and found myself quite pleased that I was awake at 4am.
Kit Goddard is a rookie social worker nursing her own experiences of the care system, and freshly principled in a way that can often fade as the rigours of the work take their toll. When allegations of historic sexual abuse of young teenagers are made against Matthew Cooper, a pillar of the local community and the father of three children, one of them disabled , the family is allocated to Kit to investigate.
I slotted right back into this scenario as a professional. It's one of the worst dilemmas imaginable (and one I was occasionally involved in as a health visitor in that previous life ) and whoever R.G.Adams is they really know their stuff
Some of you might recall how I berated (something I so rarely do on here that it might have been a once in fourteen years one-off) a certain famous children's author on her first foray into adult fiction...for slack research, and for misrepresenting professionals and the difficult work they do, well top marks to R.G.Adams because Allegation was factually accurate to the nth degree. I know it's fiction, and they 'make it up' but there's really no excuse for a 'casual' approach to research.
Here is someone who truly understands the stomach-churning meetings and the high profile case,
The well-to-do parents and the threats they make...
The potential for false compliance...
The doubt and uncertainty that pervade and challenge the professional instinct...
The fear of misreading it, of missing the obvious, those home visits and the antennae waving...
The fear of being on what the legal advisers used to warn us was a 'frolic of your own'...
The paradigm shift from proactive to reactive practice where you decide you have to cover your back..
The antagonistic new manager full of ambition for spicing up their CV who swoops in and changes everything before moving on and up the pay scale...
And throughout all this the anxiety like a knot in your stomach that never quite goes away, pops back into your thinking at the weekends or the evenings.
Kit goes through all of this and more as she tests the limits of the system and her own expertise.
I tell you it takes nerves of steel to do it and R.G.Adams has either done it themselves, or knows someone else who has, because Allegation is gripping, well-researched and well worth a read if you fancy a jolly good page-turner. I think publication of the hardback edition may have been held over until next year, but the Kindle edition seems to be available this month and my hope is that this may be the first of a series. Kit is an endearing and interesting character and it would be a shame to lose such a promising theme.
Meanwhile your suggestions for page-turners if you have any...
I'm sure they will have helped some of you through recent months too...
And while we're on the subject of series, any suggestions about those too...
Footnote : In case you look for anything connected to dovegreyreader on Twitter this is to let you know that I have deactivated my account on there as of this week. Though I had 5500 followers built up over thirteen years, and who I valued enormously, I’m afraid it is not the place it once was. It is now a forum I no longer wish dovegreyreader to be a part of, it is not a place I wish to look at, or where I want my writing to be featured or linked.
While I seem to be in a happy reading groove now things were all over the shop backalong, but I did manage to finish a disparate range of books and here's a selection...
The Comforts of Home ~ Susan Hill
I do enjoy the Simon Serailler series (especially as I'm in one of them...number six I think) but had fallen behind with the life and times of our erstwhile hero and his detecting life, so it was good to catch up with the eleventyfourth (I'm losing count)one. There is some cold case crime to be resolved as well as a bit of drama on the Hebridean island that our man has travelled to in order to escape the stresses and strains of ...well 'that' accident of which I can say no more for fear of spoiling. Good plotting, involving characters and their lives as always, and lo and behold I have another one waiting in the wings.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe ~ C.S. Lewis
I first read this aged about seven or eight on a holiday in Tintagel, staying with one of those aunts and uncles based on friendships your parents had made during the war. Tintagel had one gift shop and empty beaches, Uncle Bill ran a market garden, Auntie Pam was a teacher at Delabole Primary School, there was always a pile of children's books by the bed and this was one of them. I was transfixed all over again. Back in the day us children (Auntie Pam had three boys) were ushered out of the door and sent off to explore, and well I remember walking to St Nectan's Glen and imagining here could be Narnia.
Of course the religious allegory had by-passed my completely back then, but it jumped off the page this time around.
The question is...I don't recall ever reading any of the other Narnia books...should I, and if so which ones.
Officers and Gentleman ~ Evelyn Waugh
I mentioned my stately progress through the Sword of Honour trilogy a while back. It's all thanks in large part to a beautifully tactile, floppy, new Penguin Modern Classics edition that is everything you want the book in your hand to be. There is no wrestling the spine into submission to keep the book open, the paper is soft, the font is large enough and with the 1.5 line spacing I'm in reading heaven.
Having finished Book Two Officers and Gentlemen I remain constantly amazed at Evelyn Waugh's ability to find humour in the midst of war. The invasion and eventual retreat from Crete was horrific and yet still he spots the risible and the ridiculous amid the bureaucracy, and the rigid adherence to protocol and orders even in the face of danger and defeat.
It's also a very small world, this world of conflict. Everyone seems to know everyone else and old friends or foes suddenly find themselves flung together again. Old misdemeanours follow them around like a bad smell and it comes as little surprise when they carry on where they left off. And in the midst of it all Guy Crouchback seems to be doing his honourable best to preserve every else's honour and reputation as well as his own.
I'm saving the final book, Unconditional Surrender for exactly the right reading moment.
Meanwhile, as always please do share your recent reading successes...
Goodness me, June already. Didn't that predicted twelve weeks seem half a lifetime away when this all began in early March, and yet here we are. Summer has been upon us for weeks in the UK and what a blessing it has been. The garden is looking wild and very lovely, I'll take you on a walk round soon.
Last year I had a magnificent summer of indigo dyeing. So much so that I still haven’t used up all the fabric that resulted, but it’s a well known fact that blue is my favourite colour, so when the Kayaker sent me everything I would need to try cyanotype I couldn’t wait to have a go.
The process of exposing treated paper to sunlight dates from 1842, just three years after the first daguerreotype processes were described. It involves a bit of alchemy in the form of two chemicals which when mixed and applied to paper (or fabric) can then be used to create an image.
I did the mixing and painted some paper and fabrics and then read the next bit which involved allowing everything to dry in a dark place to stop it changing colour. Had I read that properly beforehand I would then not have been panicking and had to put it all in the larder. Once dry you expose the paper to the sun with whatever you wish to ‘take a picture of’ resting on top.
The paper instantly turns from lime green to grey and then a deep bronze colour and the magic starts to happen until eventually, after washing, the end result is the most perfect shade of Prussian Blue.
I quite like the in-between stages too so I need to experiment with exposure times.
There’s no arguing with Prussian Blue is there, really there can be no better colour and it deserves to be in capitals.
I then got fairly ambitious. This is called running before you can walk, and not helped by sitting to watch the SpaceX dock with the International Space Station and forgetting all about my cluttered masterpiece roasting away in the sun.
We had watched the SpaceX launch the day before with great excitement, all a wonderful reminder of that childhood Apollo addiction, so it had seemed only right to see Dragon crew safely there. By this time I was using a piece of glass on top of the cyanotype to hold everything in place, and this was all fair done to a crisp by the time I remembered it
The Before Washing (below) was actually quite interesting too, so I really need to experiment some more...
As luck would have it, earlier in the week I had spent a day clearing out my potting shed and now realised it would make the perfect ‘dark room’, so I have painted up another batch of fabric, now drying in said 'dark room', because of course there's a quilt begging to be made (along with the others shouting to be finished). I'm thinking leaves and plants from around the garden...ivy, honesty, lady's mantle, so many lovely shapes to choose from, so that's me sorted for this week.
Update : I’ve had another day of experimenting...some metal stencils and leaves various...
But how about you...
Setting aside the things we all miss, have you also found yourself adapting...
Have any new crafts or hobbies jumped up and bitten you with a bout of enthusiasm...
Or have you sensibly done what I said I would do (but haven't) and completed the Great Unfinished...
I’m not sure why I picked this up. Maybe it was all the news about Nightingale Hospitals, but anyway there it was.
I have a shelf full of these because I lapped them up as a girl who was always going to be a nurse (blame my mum, the uniform was the only thing in the dressing up box) and I think the SRN was about giving this novel for girls a bit of credibility as in...here is someone who knows their stuff. And I have to say, written as it was in 1961, only eleven years before I would start my training, things hadn't changed much by the time I started in PTS (Preliminary Training School) at Gt Ormond Street.
Putting on the uniform for the first time and feeling a bit of a fraud whilst hoping no one would collapse in front of you. I wasn't there but one of our set witnessed someone jumping under a tube train and the crowd on the platform parting like the Red Sea at the sight of her nurse's uniform that shed only been wearing for a matter of days. The motto behind this was to do up all the buttons on your hospital issue gaberdine raincoat when travelling.
Then there was the good old fashioned discipline, the Sisters you loved, the Sisters you didn't, the tutors who understood us and those who seemed more remote. My encounters with The Big Bruiser (as we fondly named her) still give me nightmares.
And then all the doubts and fears amongst the intake. Those of us who felt fairly sure we'd done the right thing, those who were plagued by doubt and would either put shoulder to the wheel or leave. We all learned quite quickly that getting emotional at the work wasn't going to help us at all, we'd need a teflon coating to survive, and those who stayed became a supportive and close-knit community, someone's door was always open, the kettle was always on somewhere.
Going home with friends for days off. My roommate's family lived in Heptonstall, her father's chauffeur would meet us at Manchester station and drive us there. When she came to stay with me my dad would meet us in the Vauxhall Viva. When Diana goes home with Jean she is mightily impressed by the dove-grey walls glowing softly in the sunlight, the curtains and chair coverings in cretonne with a pink and wine flowery design and the black carpet.
Jean is struck down by appendicitis which we can all see coming (except Jean) and she is whisked off to sick bay. I had to go to sick bay in a taxi in the middle of the night from our PTS home in Belsize Park. I know exactly which Chinese restaurant in Hampstead gave me food poisoning, but I'd better not mention it as a quick google check and I see it's still there. But heavens was I ill. They kept me in for days and I was like bambi when I finally emerged.
It's all captured in Yvonne Trewin's surprisingly readable book and I have to say I had a good old wallow whilst conveniently forgetting all the terrible times.
And I'm really sorry but I had to smile over this picture, the frontispiece to Jean Becomes a Nurse...
I mean...what exact bit of Jean is the doctor looking at in making his assessment that "She'll make an excellent nurse." How times and attitudes have changed.
And I'm thinking that there must have been other books trying to steer young girls into particular professions but I can't think of any now, can you...
And as always please do share your memories of these books, or their ilk, were they your childhood reading fare too.
It seemed to appear out of nowhere, because I'm not really sure I knew it was even being filmed, but the six-part series of The Luminaries is coming to BBC One very soon.
It was all enough to make me drag the book from the shelf only to discover that it is five years since I read it, and that was before I had ever visited New Zealand. or done the entire Luminaries Trail around South Island.
We first drove from Christchurch to Clyde and cycled a hundred miles or so across the gold fields of Otago and the Maniototo, following the old railway line to Middlemarch...
It was dramatic, very hot and shadeless and no, I hadn't ridden a bike for about thirty years, and no I hadn't trained in the slightest despite saying I would, and yes I did wear padded shorts, and yes I absolutely did plead for an electric bike on the second day. And I got one and sailed around the rest like a pro.
But the scenery was magnificent and just to be there, 11,000 miles from home felt extraordinary ...especially now when I can't envisage even going into Plymouth just twenty miles away...no scrap that, into Tavistock a mere six miles away.
Having wild camped our way across to the much damper and cooler Westland, and made the acquaintance of those innocent little black dots called sand flies that give you the worst bite ever (and in quantity), Offspringette and I spent a day in Hokitika following the Luminaries trail. New Zealand is really good at the small museums in small places that do these wonderful tableaux reconstructions of What Life Was Like and I really enjoyed every one that I found. They are scattered around the old gold field sites and are chock full of artefacts and information, enough to give an impression of life for the early prospectors..
I'm slightly embarrassed to say that it was all a bit moving to find myself standing on the grass, on top of the gold fields, alongside Lake Kaniere (pronounced 'canary') and feeling quite emotional. I can completely understand why people love to come to the UK and follow in the footsteps of James Herriot, or travel on the railway to Hogwarts, in order to bring the books they have loved to life.
And then looking at the photograph again this week, and then at my feet now, to see that I'm still wearing the same shoes four plus years on ( bought in a sale in Christchurch the week before we set off) this very minute. If that's not a good advert for Keen Targhee III trainers I don't know what is, even if they are now in a bit of a sorry state and I have some replacements to wear in.
But they won't be the same because they haven't actually set foot there if you see what I mean (this might just be me, getting sentimental of course). Offspringette bought me a pounamu in Hokitika, a 'koru' spiral which I love and have worn every day since. And every morning, when I put it on again, I remember her and that day, and the fact that to be given one means you will go back again....or so the Kiwi working in a shop in Plymouth, who saw it, told me one day.
Anyway, with fondest memories of Hokitika I settled myself momentarily in the Sunny Chair at about 10.30 on Monday morning to read the first chapter of The Luminaries again. This felt highly illegal (surely morning reading must be non-fiction, learned and improving, to be legitimate) but was unanimously approved as permissible, and before I knew it I was back on South Island and the gold fields, but another interesting thing happened too.
Looking back I see that I found the book mystifying when I read it in 2015 and had to ask for your help in deciphering and persevering, and I'm not really sure I had completely grasped those nuances by the end either, (I'll dig out the original post for redux) and yet here I am 200 pages in and sailing through with ease and clarity. I'm sure having walked those shores helps no end because I have images in my mind.
And with that another connection landed plop into my mind too. Adele Geras kindly sent me something in the post recently and included this postcard of Lucy Boston's High Magic patchwork quilt. The card now sits on my desk...
Isn't it amazing where imagination and memories and a book can take you.
Meanwhile have you read The Luminaries and will you be watching...
And what about literary or artistic trails and travels...are there any you have done or would like to...
Anyone's footsteps you would love to follow...
Incidentally...
The best concoction known to mankind for repelling sandflies, and invented by the Christchurch cohort, is a mixture of baby oil and Dettol. Nothing and no one else will come near you either.
There followed the whole business of ordering a copy of the now out-of-print book online and awaiting its arrival. Mine was the last to arrive and I was about ready to mug the postman on each successive day that he drove straight past. This whole ‘waiting for the post’ has only got a whole lot worse because I’m not sure any of us could have imagined the reading trails that one small book, published in 1939, would open up for us....and the subsequent books we would be ‘forced’ to buy.
Robin and Heather were an arts and crafts couple. True to their values both spiritually and aesthetically, and kindred spirits from the day they first met as teenagers in Chippenham at the end of the First World War, forging a creative life together that makes for the most fulfilling exploration all these years on
Robin trained as a teacher, became a schools inspector but was also an artist of prodigious talent, specialising in etching, whilst Heather, with her First Class degree in English Literature, could provide the written word to accompany his work. Wiltshire Village was their first collaboration and is a fresh and vibrant now as the day it was first published. Recording what, even then, was a vanishing way of life, I have revelled in a book whose traces still echo today in the countryside here. Along with the village buildings and crafts there are beautiful accounts of the village year and the people, all accompanied by Robin's etchings.
There was much discussion here over coffee one day about the Wiltshire hoop-raved wagon. How practical it was, the width of the wheel base to fit the ruts in the track, the outward tilt of the wheels and how these wagons would doubtless have been trundling up and down the lanes around us here....and how the carved decoration and chamfering was about removing as much unnecessary wood as possible to lighten the weight of the whole.
At a time when life has felt a little as if it has stepped back more than a few decades it’s been good to be reminded of how things used to be...
’There was no room for petty selfishness in true craftsmanship; whoever found a new way or improved on an old one shared the discovery and it became part of the tradition followed by all the fellow craftsman who came after him...’
And I find myself relating that to the now and the worldwide collaboration in science and research as we seek ways to treat and improve life chances with the latest affliction. New advances are shared and publicised and we can only hope that, whilst a vaccine may be a long way off, if it does happen its discovery and production will be a worldwide endeavour.
Talking of the postman, or in this case post mistress, she gets a mention in Wiltshire Village (based on Robin and Heather's home village of Kington Langley) along with the complexities of delivering letters to a scattered community many of whom may have the same surname. We love our postie and hats off to him for the round that he has to do.
It reminded me of my early days as a twenty-four-year old rookie rural health visitor. Finding my way around the byways of West Devon and Dartmoor and being paid for it (and with car provided) was quite the novelty in 1978. However, when the only address I had was a cottage name and the village, with no postcode or satnav to guide me, my arrival was often a lengthy process. I would be wholly reliant on the older health visitors who would give me instructions that invariably started with ‘Turn left/right/go straight at Pridham’s Garage...’ The Garage is still there albeit under a different name, and we still direct people to our house by the same method..turn left at the garage, turn right after a hundred yards, go straight for two miles, only house you come to on the right.
I wonder if many of you have recently reconnected with that sense of community that was a given in the days of Wiltshire Village. For most of us our radius from home had shrunk to about a two miles, and it was the introduction to another book, The Open Air - An Anthology of English Country Life by Adrian Bell that made me think...
’Another form of isolation has been brought by motors into country districts. ones circle of friends is no longer the circle of a ten mile radius ...one friend is forty miles in one direction, another twenty-five miles in another, half a dozen are in London...thus people living in a place may have no part in that place fundamentally, or in any place.
I hadn’t really given this much thought ...the advent of the car and what it must have meant...
’Whereas in the old days whoever lived round about you, unless they were extremely difficult, you fitted into your circle of friendship. The more socially gifted thus helped out the less, and the whole was leavened. Now, by more peremptory standards we choose only those with whom we are ‘in sympathy’, the spontaneous functions of local life consequently decay and the number of lonely old people must be legion.’
First published in 1936 The Open Air is, as Adrian Bell suggests, ‘an attempt to catch some glint of the genius of the country in an oblique, perhaps the only way.’ The world order was shifting and I’m grateful that visionaries like Adrian Bell, and Robin and Heather Tanner, captured it and pinned it down before it was lost.
The three of us have exchanged almost daily emails and Wiltshire Village has led naturally along the Robin Tanner trail to his book of letters From Old Chapel Field and his autobiography Double Harness (more work for the postman) both of which are (or were) readily available at You Know Where and reveal more about this astonishing man.
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