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 The Wheel 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
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