dovegreyreader scribbles

Rose Macaulay

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. 

Business as Usual ~ Jane Oliver

Desire ~ Una Silberrad

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.

Potterism

What Not - A Prophetic Comedy

Non-Combatants and Others

Personal Pleasures - Essays on Enjoying Life

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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...

 

 

Pleasings...

I think we might be in need of some Pleasings so get your thinking caps on (like this cat) ready for comments while I whizz through a few of mine...

The weather...could it have been kinder to us here in the South West these last few weeks, and having been absolutely nowhere for lunch for months we suddenly found ourselves ‘out for lunch’ twice in a matter of days. Cowslip Workshops are up and running on an appointment basis for shop and cafe, and we happened to be passing there on our way to get layers mash for the chickens from the farm where we had bought the girls. This is a trivial but important detail because I doubt we’d have gone on the Egloskerry road but for the welfare of the girls. Bookhound had made the mistake of replenishing early stocks that came with them for  something which turned out to be very sub-standard. Anyway we had a lovely long chat with the Chicken Farm Man, and as we passed the driveway to Cowslip we turned in and rang on the off chance they could squeeze us in. They could and we scored the gazebo on the warmest of days with the gentlest of southerly breezes and proceeded to fill our boots. It was all very normalising and lovely. 

I also slipped into the shop and found just the right fabric for the corners of the Knot Garden. I’d run out of the original green but have a near enough match so I can chug along with that this winter. More soon.

And then two days later we were invited to meet my oldest (as in known the longest) school friend and her OH for lunch at the Pig at Combe, where they were staying for a couple of days. It’s near Honiton, so the furthest we’d travelled since February, and it was glorious.

Beautiful setting, everything safely organised, and having known each other since the age of twelve we always have much to talk about. This included Mrs McClennan Smith’s needlework lessons and the fact we made all our own clothes as a result, writing everything in turquoise ink, cutting around the edge of our velour hats with pinking shears and wearing the brim down, and countless other school moments. The chaps sat and listened patiently and with some incredulity, but more normalising and more loveliness which all feed the soul right now. 

 

I wonder if anyone remembers me writing about a book called American Style & Spirit - Fashion and Lives of the Roddis Family 1855 -1995 by Jane Bradbury. The clothes had all been preserved by Jane’s aunt, Augusta Roddis and the book was a beautiful blend of fashion, history and family memoir...

"Whilst couture clothes might be preserved it is rare for ordinary everyday clothes from an ordinary working family to survive both the passage of time, and the one-way journey through thrift, jumble or charity shops to then remain in the possession of a single family for 150 years. It is therefore thanks to Augusta Denton Roddis (1916-2011) who saved the family clothing along with letters, photos and ephemera ...

'The way I felt about these older clothes is that it is nice to wear them but that it is also nice to save them...they get increasingly interesting with each passing year.

The Roddis collection recounts the life and times of an educated, civic-minded, upwardly mobile, middle-class American family. It tracks where they shopped, the influence of fashion trends, the varying fortunes, lives and losses of the family, the love of home-dress-making and alterations to update a style, the sharing of patterns and designs among themselves along with the excitement of new purchases. At a time when many women might have concealed the fact that they made their own clothes, not so the Roddis women...they stitched and embellished and wore the results with justifiable pride. If they bought they bought wisely and well because good quality clothes were an investment."

Jane very kindly sent my a very unexpected but welcome bouquet of flowers for writing about the book. The bouquet including hydrangeas which lived on in a vase for so long that they eventually grew roots. I planted up several, lost several but managed to save one. Even though I’d planted it out too soon it survived a winter and threw up a tiny green shoot which I could so easily have missed the following spring. I put it back in a pot, nursed it along all last year and was thrilled to see green shoots again this year. Bigger pot and for the first time flowers. They would eventually emerge as a very delicate shade of almond pink and so Augusta’s Hydrangea lives on.

And one final Pleasing.

My Preserving Life has been revolutionised with the arrival of the new apple peeler...

We had one years ago, long gone so I ordered a new one from eBay. I couldn't quite believe that anything that only cost £7 post free would be any good, but it's metal, sticks to the surface like glue, is sturdy enough and does the job. The freezer is filling up fast and I've made the Apple & Mint chutney too.

We have enough to see us into the next millenium.

Oh, just one more. I'm reading the new book by Robert Galbraith aka J.K. Rowling. I bought it in solidarity as much as anything else having written to her recently and received a lovely personal reply from her team, but you may recall that JKR and I have a chequered history over a previous book. However all is forgiven and we are now best friends because I do like Cormoran Strike. I am completely immersed in this doorstop, which is as much as you can ask from a book in these times of frequent distractions.

So now over to you and your Pleasings. We eagerly await...

Legacy ~ Thomas Harding

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...

 

A Chelsea Concerto ~ Frances Faviell

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 A Chelsea 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.

Budleigh Literary Festival & other Pleasings

Get your diaries out because there is good news...yes, really... I bring you glad tidings of great joy.

We can ALL go to the Budleigh Literary Festival this year thanks to Covid, so there are silver linings to the this whole shenanigans if you look hard enough.

From Wednesday September 16th to Sunday 20th the sun will be shining because the sun ALWAYS shines for Budleigh. Glorious Budleigh Salterton by the sea in Devonshire.

You can check out the programme here

A brilliant line-up that includes Dame Hilary Mantel’s first live interview (rather than pre-recorded) about The Mirror & the Light with James Naughtie. Now I’d heard this was was going to be in front of a socially distanced ‘live’ audience, but I’m not sure how that stands with new regulations here in England. But we don’t need to worry...we haven’t got to get in our cars, drive miles and worry about parking, because we’ll all be comfortably perched on our sofas with a pot of tea, or a gin and tonic according to preference. 

From what I can see there is no need to register, you can just pitch up when the digital marquee opens on September 16th and join in with events wherever you are in the world.

I’ll see you there and if you get to the coffee and walnut cake first please would you save me a slice.

And here’s another cheering Pleasing thing this week...

I have finally googled ‘how to update a digital radio’ and retuned my beloved Pure Evoke 1 DAB with all the new stations. I’d  bought the radio years ago, the minute they were invented and it’s been stuck in the same old ever since. The upshot of my retuning is that I have discovered Scala Radio and the Simon Mayo weekday programme. Honestly, if you are in need of great music and an optimistic presenter then do tune in. You’ll find it online too but be ready for him to suddenly play Morecambe & Wise singing Positive Thinking right after Bach’s Magnificat ‘because we all needed cheering up’.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘at least you can meet up with six people.’

The conversation is intelligent and uplifting, the music is different and varied; lots of classical and movies, lighter instrumental and I could feel myself singing inside (and out) very quickly. As with all commercial radio there are adverts, but nice M&S ones, thankfully not the dental implant one (yet, please no) ..which if I heard once more on Classic FM I might have chewed the radio to shreds.

Meanwhile if you have anything Pleasing to report please do. I’ll be here peeling and blanching apples, and dealing with the socially-distanced blackberries I picked with the Happy Campers yesterday, who came over for a field picnic and a five hour natter....another very Pleasing thing.

And on another note, Bookhound and I will be celebrating Anniversary Forty Four tomorrow which has to be another Pleasing.

I suspect we will be celebrating over a preserving pan or two of bubbling chutney...oh how the times, and we, have changed...

 

 

Perilous times...

Dearest book lovers, we are in great peril.

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. 

Vesper Flights ~ Helen Macdonald

I was a late arrival with Helen Macdonald's first book H is for Hawk. Several false starts until I eventually understood what so many others had...that it is a superlative book...

'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...

 

 

House of Glass ~ Hadley Freeman

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.