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Julian Grenfell ~ Nicholas Mosley :: Persephone Lunch October 15th 2014 - Part Four

Saved for today for obvious reasons, my final choice of books for that Persephone Lunch talk...

I suspect anyone who knows Persephone Books has a favourite endpaper and mine has never been displaced from its number one slot. A few have come close but none have overtaken the 1888 'Poppies' by Thomas Wardle & Co which adorns Julian Grenfell: His Life and the Times of His Death, 1888-1915 by Nicholas Mosley.

But it seems not even a nice endpaper can persuade me to read a 400 page book before its right moment, and that seems to have arrived fifteen years after Julian Grenfell was re-published and almost thirty eight since it first appeared. I was expecting a sort of Great War soldier's biography, and indeed that does inform the final sixty pages of the book, though by the time I reached that phase it became clear that war seemed infinitely preferable to anything else in Julian's life to date.

Julian's mother Ettie, the granddaughter of the Earl of Westmoreland marries Liberal MP Willy Grenfell in 1887, Julian's birth follows in 1888 and that of his brother Billy in 1890. Julian is immediately left with a wet nurse while his parents nip off to holiday away the summer in America. Within ten years this 'very beautiful boy' will be packed off to boarding school, thence to Eton before studying Greats at Oxford, and you would imagine that Julian's socialite mother plays little part in his life.

Wrong.

This is as much a book about motherhood as it is about a young man and the Great War, and it has been a real surprise. Though not physically demonstrative towards her children, Ettie has a genuine commitment to motherhood…she is thoughtful, conscientious, sincere and works hard to instil zest and pleasure into the lives of her children,

‘They live in the sunshine, and when the sun doesn’t shine they pretend it does,’ said Ottoline Morrell of Family Grenfell.

but Ettie’s love seems conditional because she expects much in return.

‘I rejoice in his dear whole-hearted devotion while it lasts,’ writes Ettie, ‘and cling to keeping some of it always.’

…which is all fine, except children have to become grown-ups and you wonder how on earth Ettie is going to allow this to happen.

Ettie's stifling maternal love for Julian knows no bounds, likewise her love for other men, and Nicholas Mosely astutely explores the potential roots of all this in Ettie's early life, as well as the impact and the confusion of the various male role models and his mother's behaviour on the young Julian's life.

'The pattern for men was not to ask questions, not to think, but to make jokes and do one's duty...and the pattern for women was to dissimulate, to come and go, to be worshipped by seeming to be first one thing and then another. And this was held to be the real world, the world of gods and goddesses; while those who cooked, sewed, dug the garden, cleaned stables, were smiled on but were thought to be insubstantial.'

Nicholas Mosley offers Ettie's grief-laden childhood and adolescence by way of explanation for her modus operandi. An over-exposure to the death of close family members with little recognition or understanding of a child's need to grieve, and with no means of expression for that mourning. With the emotional scaffolding of her life dismantled at an early age who can know Ettie's deep-rooted fear of expressing any negative emotions. Having recognised her own family’s tendency towards melancholic depair Ettie decides to conceal it all behind a ‘veil of high spirits. She is often described as possessing and living ‘the stubborn gospel of joy.

For all her surprising devotion to Julian, and Ettie was more involved in her son's life than most, her policy with all men of creating an attachment dangerously interlaced with a purposeful separation anxiety, coupled with her penchant for the 'stubborn gospel of joy,' ensures a tangled and dishonest emotional web of dependency for all concerned. This is John Bowlby completely turned on his head. Suitors fall at Ettie’s feet begging for attention, others swear lifelong but unrequited devotion and can make no other meaningful relationships beyond her, whilst Julian grows up confused and trapped in a cycle of guilt, penance and forgiveness.

Ettie's constant admonishments in her letters to him, suggesting that he shows a lack of affection, make astonishing reading.

It's all a rather disturbing master class in the power of a woman to control all around her.

Willie, Julian's much-cuckolded father, though elevated to the Peerage in 1905 to become Lord Desborough, is rarely mentioned. With those themes of Ettie's possessive love, dependence, power and control and emotional blackmail I could only think he was probably doing the very sensible thing and staying well clear of her tangled web.

There are revealing moments too when Ettie suffers her first loss as an adult. With little resilience to fall back on, her insistence on order and light in her life will falter and moments of poignant sorrow surface...

'Oh show me the way to laughter town
    For I have lost the way.'

...writes Ettie in a rare and candid moment of insight into her true feelings usually masked by that insistence on light, order and denial.

Julian meanwhile is growing frustrated, angry and depressed. He can have no outlet for his own emotions, and should he favour a girl Ettie is in for the skirmish and to frighten her off. Julian is hers, trapped and disempowered and his eventual breakdown comes as no surprise. At the age of twenty-one, he takes refuge in a series of essays as a means of telling Ettie indirectly how damaged and trapped he feels. They are intense and convoluted yet replete with very obvious messages for Ettie who is sadly almost incapable of discerning between her lovers, her admirers and her son.

It's a complete mess and a muddle...poor Julian. He eventually has an affair with a married woman, Pamela Lytton, Countess of Knebworth and there is nothing Ettie can do about that. But constantly kept on the back foot, always apologising, trying to please and appease, and emerging from each emotional skirmish with his mother a little more damaged and further consumed by guilt and inadequacy. You want to airlift him out and give him to Dorothy Canfield Fisher.

Described as the best of friends, the dearest of men, one who hated pose and affectation, blessed with a natural courtesy and grace and the finest manners, a winning smile both charming and intimate...and seemingly the mother from hell. Little wonder that Julian is frequently on the brink of suicide and also takes up boxing which seems, in the context of his life and its troubles, like a legitimate means of self-harming.

Ettie meanwhile is the most sought after house guest in the upper echelons of society, a friend to politicians, Balfour and Asquith, trusted by Royalty, the confidante of authors…H.G.Wells, Kipling, Yeats. Everyone confided in Ettie, your secret would be safe with her. The Hostess with the Mostest and can you just imagine the rivalry with near neighbour Nancy Astor…no love lost apparently and it is as if Nancy has hacked into Ettie's Facebook page and purloined all her friends.

When the war finally does loom on the horizon, and I realised I was nearing the end of the book, it became clear that the war was almost the least of it. For many of these young men it couldn't come soon enough, a welcome release from the emotional predicaments of home, with the thought of a glorious hero's death in battle to be desired. The twenty-six year old Julian finally feels he has a purpose in society, even if that purpose is to break up what is accepted and known before remoulding it.

Except Julian had never been accepting, this is what he and many like him had yearned for, so what a refreshing and different light this book has cast for me over that pre-war Edwardian era and the war itself.

Young men largely unfettered by the rules of society (one of Julian's greatest pleasures was to be allowed to go unwashed) and all that suppressed inner rage and violence suddenly given legitimacy. It is no spoiler to tell you that Julian is fatally wounded at Ypres and dies two weeks later, but not before becoming a legend for his light-hearted courage, and what of Ettie who was at his bedside?

Whilst not denying the reality of her son’s death Ettie will not break down in public, she wears colours and refuses to succumb to grief. She remains calm and continues to sense Julian’s presence and his love and is held up by many as a heroic role model. Cynthia Asquith noted as follows…

‘She inspires one with tremendous admiration. There seems nothing strained and artificial about her marvellous courage, just a sort of alchemy which has translated tragedy to the exclusion of all gloom…Her determination to go on fighting with broken tools and to save whatever was still worth keeping was wholly admirable.’

But there is a public and a private face to Ettie’s grief as Cynthia Asquith notes in her diary.

'Alone with a close friend tears pour down her cheeks, she talks endlessly about her dead boys and reveals her bleeding heart and the emptiness in her soul.’

Billy had been killed some months after Julian. Like many the war was indescribably cruel to Ettie who converts the family home at Taplow into a convalescent home for exhausted nurses and over the next three years over a 1000 would stay there.

At one point in the book Nicholas Mosley (who married Ettie's granddaughter) voices some italicised personal insights of his own. Stepping aside from his role as a biographer, to offer more subjective opinions, he confesses his love and admiration for Julian whilst offering a form of apologia for Ettie's behaviour. I relished this moment because it affirmed my own feelings. Rare to find in biography and many would say breaking the first rule of objectivity, but surely the question we all ask of the author as we read, and in this case I felt very well-placed..

Perhaps this extract sums up the heartfelt essence of this captivating read...

'What Ettie did provide for her children - and this might have been her triumph if she could have seen it - was an upbringing and a love by which her eldest son could see what she could not. It was Julian who looked at reality, at darkness as well as joy; who could stand back from himself, which she could not. This was Ettie's true achievement as a  mother - she passed on something more than she possessed herself. Her tragedy was that her achievement - Julian; together even with the fact that he fought her - was destroyed before he had a chance of defeating her. But it took the forces of a whole society to defeat him.'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Great War in Portraits ~ @NPGLondon

Way behind the curve but one of the advantages of a day in London back in June, was the opportunity to catch The Great War in Portraits Exhibition on its final weekend at the National Portrait Gallery. 

"In viewing the First World War through images of the many individuals involved, The Great War in Portraits looks at the radically different roles, experiences and, ultimately, destinies of those caught up in the conflict.

Setting the scene in 1914, the splendour and formality of portraits of national leaders are contrasted with a press photograph of Gavrilo Princip, the 19-year-old assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The narrative unfolds with power-portraits of commanders Haig, Foch and Hindenburg, asserting  military authority, which are displayed together with dignified pictures of their troops by artists including Orpen, Sickert and Nevinson. Finally, images of heroes and medal-winners are shown alongside the wounded and the fallen, representing  the bitter-sweet nature of a war in which valour and selfless endeavour were qualified by disaster and suffering.

From paintings and drawings to photography and film, the exhibition considers a wide range of visual responses to ‘the war to end all wars’, culminating in the visual violence of Expressionist masterpieces by Beckmann and Kirchner."

I had had this exhibition in my sights since reading A Crisis of Brilliance earlier this year, with especial reference to Henry Tonks and his portraits of the injured soldiers. Though not one of the five artists featured in the book, Henry Tonks emerged as a compelling and influential player, a London Hospital-trained doctor, house surgeon to Sir Fredrick Treves in 1887 but eventually to become Assistant Professor of Drawing at the Slade. It was the link to Treves that had piqued my interest.

Whilst student nurses at the London Hospital in the mid-1970s we were subjected to a tour of the old hospital museum. I've since visited the newer one and of course revelled in it...back in the day it was all a bit of a grisly pointless chore and we'd rather have been scrubbed up and in an operating theatre, or enjoying the drama of casualty. But I do have lasting memories of Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, and the museum displays, because Sir Frederick Treves was the doctor who had befriended and cared for Merrick in his final years and prior to his (Merrick's) death at the age of twenty-seven in 1890. By association it seems likely that Henry Tonks would have been involved in Merrick's care and thus facial disfigurement would hold no fear.

Praise was a rare commodity from Henry Tonks. Art was his religion and his criticism could be ruthless and withering, whilst the control he exerted over his Slade students was legendary. Fearing the influence on his students of Roger Fry's Post-Impressionist exhibition Henry Tonks forbade them to attend. The instability, danger and uncertainty about civilisation, reflected in the work of the avant garde, would contaminate the Slade ideals and teaching, something far too precious in the mind of Henry Tonks to be jeopardised.

But General Haig's instruction to...

'Go and paint the men, they are getting killed every day...'

ensured that the artists most certainly did capture the essence of what was happening, and in any way they saw fit, and The Great War in Portraits presented an inspiring microcosm of that.

Walking into the first 'room' of this very compact exhibition (David Bailey's 'Stardust' liberally scattered over the main exhibition areas...)  was like walking into the midst of a really important meeting, all the key political and military figures of the conflict, many in almost life-sized portrait, gathered around the walls of what felt like an office space...a war cabinet, and goodness me how alike so many of them looked. The royals like peas in a pod, the khaki generals kitted out to the nines; all imposing and authoritative, confident in bearing and purpose, and if it wasn't for the fact that we all know what happened next, well I could almost have been beguiled into trusting them to sort it all out. Haig, Hoch, Hindenburg, the Kaiser, King George V, Tsar Nicholas all there.

This, in exhibition terms, is all in stark and rather elitist contrast to what happens next, their hubris bouncing off the walls as we walked on and through, the failings and detached isolation of those leaders shut away in that room becoming ever more apparent as the pictures increased in their pain, horror and intensity. Here Gassed and Wounded by Eric Kennington

And, whilst at the Laura Knight exhibition it had been the hands that had drawn my attention, here it was the eyes. Immediate, direct and piercing, insistent that I met their gaze, and expressing every possible emotion from fear and terror to resignation and a weary acceptance.

In the end the Henry Tonks paintings were fewer in number than we had hoped for but maybe all the more powerful for that.

Working as a field orderly at the outset of the war, Henry Tonks was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1916 wherupon his interest in facial disfigurement took him to the Aldershot-based clinic of Sir Harold Gillies another pioneer of plastic surgery. Anyone who has worked in an operating theatre, and has compiled what is known as a General Set of instruments, will be familar with the name of Gillies...

'Gillies please nurse...' and you would (hopefully) slap a pair of forceps into the surgeon's waiting hand.

It was inevitable that the drawing skills of Henry Tonks would be utilised to the full, and his pastel drawings of facial war wounds would prove to be a huge asset to the surgeons.

The paintings on display clearly demonstrated not only the harrowing severity of the wounds but also the changes and improvements that surgery could make. And yes, they are disconcerting and that says a great deal about the human need for, if not perfection and beauty, at least for facial symmetry and a completeness. It is not hard to see why so many soldiers returned to lives of loneliness, and great sorrow and embarrassment.

As always it is not only the impact of an exhibition on the day, but the thinking and reflecting on it in the weeks and months to follow, that make the effort to get there so worthwhile and The Great War in Portraits has been no exception. Sadly the exhibition is now over but If you have time to spare and the inclination to know more, this very accessible essay by Suzannah Beirnoff  Flesh Poems : Henry Tonks and the Art of Surgery offers an absorbing insight into the work of Henry Tonks and the whole subject of the relationship between art and surgery and the complexities of public perceptions...

'...‘Nowhere do the sheer horror and savagery of modern warfare appeal so vividly to the mind and senses as in a tour of these wards’.Unlike the patriotic and sentimentalized figure of the ‘broken soldier’, the wounded face was taboo. Facially disfigured veterans were very rarely included in the public visual record of the war (despite the fact that some 60,500 men suffered head or eye injuries compared with 41,000 who had one or more limbs amputated). With few exceptions, newspaper and magazine stories did not publish photographs of facial casualties, although amputees were often pictured, their prosthetic limbs objects of fascination and even beauty...'

Having nursed children with severe facial deformities at Gt Ormond Street I can confirm that at nineteen it was a serious shock to my system, but one out of necessity that I quickly assimilated. I can also confess that the only occasion in my entire nursing career when I felt even remotely in danger of passing out was whilst watching a film of a Tessier facial reconstruction in the School of Nursing. Not even the real thing... a film for goodness sake. Paul Tessier, considered the father of cranio-facial surgery, had in turn been mentored by Sir Harold Gillies and interestingly when I eventually saw part of the procedure for real in the operating theatre ( with a wall to lean against and my gaze ready to avert just in case) I couldn't take my eyes off it, and I happily scrubbed for plastic surgery operations thereafter with no problem.

I feel sure many of you also saw this exhibition... I wonder if it has stayed with you too?

As luck would have it we had timed our visit to the Gallery to coincide with a choral recital by The Portrait Choir, an assembly of young and aspiring singers from music conservatoires around the country, and we caught snippets of the 1603 Officium Defunctorum by Tomas Luis de Victoria as we wandered around. It is a form of requiem mass entirely suited to the images we were seeing, balm for the soul, soothing and mollifying in equal measure and the whole experience all the more moving for it...here's the Graduale to soothe you too, 

 

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine:
Et lux perpetua luceat eis.
In memoria aeterna erit iustus:
Ab auditione mala non timebit.

Eternal rest give unto them , O Lord:
And let perpetual light shine upon them.
The just shall be in everlasting remembrance,
He shall not fear the evil hearing.

Howards End ~ E.M.Forster

'We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. This story only deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they are gentlefolk...'

I mentioned a while ago that finally I had succeeded in reading Howards End, a book with which I had notched up at least six previous failures. It was a failure that mystified me, firstly loved and lauded by so many, and secondly with such a beautifully enticing cover. I would stare through that door, onto that garden and desperately want to know what was happening within, but to no avail.

Maybe I was misinterpreting E.M.Forster's intentions with that quote... I was missing the fact that beneath that seemingly genteel exterior of Howards End lies an excoriating critique of money and class, and women's lives along with a dazzlingly brilliant overview of the era. Written in 1910 the 'social, economic and philosophical forces at play' make for a very revealing read which shines a piercing spotlight on pre-First World War England, thus adding much to my Crisis of Brilliance reading trail and attempts to read of all this at a slant.

It all appears to be a paeon to the virtues of England...rural and timeless 'lying as a jewel in a silver sea,' as E.M. Forster looks down over his country and sees an island 'sailing as a ship of souls,' before separating those 'souls' into three distinct classes for his dissection.

There will be the Schlegels, the literary, cultural, idealistic upper class intellectuals of independent means.

There will be the Wilcoxs, the materialistic, pragmatic family imbued with the work ethic, who assume the right to judge but prefer not to be judged themselves

And then there will be the Basts, the lower middle class couple, and between all these E.M.Forster's famous words 'Only Connect' must resonate as he starts to spin his clever and intricate web of connections.

I started reading Howards End by E.M.Forster (yet again) on my Kindle one day... just like that, and before I knew it I was beyond the whole umbrella fiasco and into new and previously unconquered territory.

The umbrella thing had driven me mad becoming a real hurdle which somehow lost me every time in the past...

'Oh God , it's that umbrella again...'

The novel doesn't start with the umbrella though, it starts helpfully and interestingly enough with Helen's letters.

Sisters Helen and Margaret Schlegel and their brother Tibby, have been left to fend for themselves in early twentieth century London following the death of their parents. Mrs Schlegel has died in childbirth following Tibby's arrival, the girls aged five and thirteen respectively, and with Mr Schlegel dying five years later they are, by then, all just old enough to be their own parent-free family.

It is whilst visiting the Wilcox's, friends met on holiday, at their country retreat Howards End, that Helen believes she has fallen in love with a Wilcox son and writes to tell her sister as much, at which point action must be taken to avert a potentially disastrous engagement. Aunt Juley, always desperate to be of use to the family but invariably not required, is dispatched to deal with it all, and still not an umbrella in sight which means I have read this much at least six times before and never quite got into it.

Why ever not...I have no idea because this time I was completely hooked and was soon sailing past the mix up with Leonard Bast and the wrong umbrella

Maybe it was the cover picture on my copy of the book lingering in my mind..

Maybe it was the trip to Charleston while Bookhound and I were on our mini-tour that reminded me of the very obvious similarities to the real-life scenario faced by Vanessa (Bell) Virginia (Woolf)  and brothers Thoby and Adrian Stephen, also left to 'raise themselves' in early twentieth-century Bloomsbury. 

With one disaster successfully averted more potential disasters follow, and it is the savvy older sister Margaret who proves herself to be the assertive,canny and capable one when more complex relationships play out. Ultimately Howards End (the house) becomes a refuge, a welcome port in a storm and a sanctuary as E.M.Forster explores the notions of social class and its foibles through his characters, and especially through the lives of women. It struck me that Forster challenges the constraints in the most feminist of traditions, and with wry humour too, surely way ahead of his time and deeply and astutely perceptive.

Although Howards End was written long before Vanessa Bell moved to Charleston I had a bit of deja-vue, life-joining-up-with-fiction moment as the guide took us around the house which was looking as lovely as ever...



There is a moment in Howards End when mention is made of Margaret and Helen's sentimental attachment to a chiffonier of their mother's, and as we stepped into one of the bedrooms at Charleston the guide pointed out one of the few pre-Bloomsbury pieces of furniture in the house...a dressing table that had belonged to Vanessa and Virginia's mother, and which according to Virginia's diary had been in the room when their mother had died.

'We can only surmise that they kept it for sentimental reasons,' suggested our guide, and I had an Only Connect moment of my own with that description in Howards End as I stared at it. By comparison to the other furniture in the house it really was a rather ugly thing, with its mottled mirror and overstated proportions...the sunken recess on the top and the deep drawers each side. It seemed slightly clumsy and out of place, the sort of thing that the Omega Workshops were challenging with their avant garde prices, but then don't so many things invested with sentimental value declare their beauty only to the eye of the original beholder. 

E.M. Forster was certainly part of the Bloomsbury milieu...might he have 'borrowed' this little cameo I wonder, someone will know. And perhaps someone else will know where the reference is in Virginia Woolf's diaries, it's like looking for a chiffonier in a very large haystack.

And interesting questions of inheritance are writ large over Howards End (the house) too, and ultimately over the heritage of England destined to be placed under such serious threat in the years to come and with its class structure exposed and thwarted.

So there you have it. Finally I understand and love Howards End, that perseverance rewarded because it is a book I know I will treausure and read again...and maybe again, and one that now earns its place on my Best Books shelf.

All in good time etc. do these good things reveal themselves, so how about you and Howards End... have you read it...is it a favourite, or are you still trying to get beyond the brolly episode, and while you are thinking here are some nice Charleston tulips for your delectation...

 

 

 

 

The Manor at Hemingford Grey, Lucy Boston and Vera Brittain..

'I first visited Hemingford Grey in 1915, when it seemed to my eyes the most forgotten bit of rural England, wonderfully left behind...wrapped in the primeval quietness...it appeared a semi-derelict Georgian farmhouse, lived in joylessly if at all. Yet it held its position in space with dignity...I was not to know it was waiting for me, but as I punted past I gave it a friendly thought. If I lived there I would at least give it sweet briar.'

Whilst Lucy Boston caught her first glimpse of her future home in 1915, Bookhound and I caught our first glimpse of the house just a few weeks ago, late one evening having arrived at our B&B in Hemingford Grey and strolling out to see where we needed to be for our tour of The Manor (Green Knowe in Lucy Boston's books) scheduled for the following day....

It was approaching dusk as we walked through the village and spotted this cheeky little thatcher's folly on a cottage roof...

and marvelled at how imperceptibly the river flowed (we are so used to our fast flowing Dartmoor torrents) as we strolled along the banks of the Great Ouse...

...before stealing (well it felt a bit like that) our first glimpse of the house, the Green Knowe that for so long has only been built in my imagination.

Back in 1915, when she first saw The Manor at Hemingford Grey, Lucy M. Boston, then Lucy Wood, was working as a V.A.D. at Addenbrookes Hospital in nearby Cambridge. In 1914 Lucy had gone up to Somerville College in Oxford to study Classics, having (according to her memoir) taken her entrance exam and secured her place in 1913, and my interest was immediately picqued because I had been re-reading Testament of Youth and surely this would have been at exactly the same time as Vera Brittain.

I had no idea, but don't you love it when the most unlikely connections start to form, and even though this seemed like a very disparate set of dots to try and join up.

Whilst Vera slaved over her entrance exams Lucy, writing in her autobiography Memories, seems to have been much more relaxed. Sending a girl to university was, in Lucy's words, 'an ultra-modern idea' for her school which was woefully unprepared for educating to the necessary standard, and Somerville was chosen only because Lucy's brother declared he would never live down the appalling idea of a sister at Girton.

'I had no ambition. Formerly they had tried to make me a missionary, now it was to be a 'blue-stocking.'

'The entrance examination for Somerville...appalled me when I read it through. It was at once clear that I had received no education. There seemed to be nothing that I had ever heard mentioned, let alone knew anything about. The only question I now remember was 'What was Shakespeare's idea of Woman?' which struck me as so silly that I said so, and wrote quite a lot with vigour....in those days there was no competition and greatly to my surprise I was accepted.'

But apparently this was in 1913, Lucy had to wait a year to take up her place, and perhaps all is explained in Vera Brittain's diary entry for March the following year...

'This is the worst possible year for anyone trying to get into Somerville. Last year they had forty vacancies owing to new buildings, but this year they have only 18, and 82 people trying for them.'

I say 'apparently' and 'perhaps' because having made some inquiries with the archivist at Somerville College to check my theory about Vera and Lucy (and my thanks to them for taking the time and trouble to seek out the answers and reply) it would seem there is some discrepancy in Lucy's dates...she sat the entrance exam in March 1914 and went to the college that same year, so the competition must have been fierce.

But how interesting (well I thought so...) that Vera, largely self-tutored, experienced that same sense of inadequacy as Lucy when she read the exam paper...

'The moment I read mine, I realised that I could not have any chance at all. I was so petrified by the discovery that I sat staring for half an hour at the questions without writing a word...'

In fact Vera fared much better than she thought and was offered a scholarship to Somerville. War had been declared the month before both women headed for Oxford in the Michaelmas term to embark on their university education, and to study on the same course.

Though I can find no reference to a meeting I like to imagine that when Lucy faced this...

'The first evening was rather overwhelming. The whole college assembled outside the dining hall. It was the rule that senior students must always take in a junior. Some fourth year girl offered me her arm. Was this meant to be manly? It was always ritually done and we all crocodiled in. We addressed each other as Miss So-and-so. Among one's friends it was shortened to the surname only, as among men...for the first time my ears were affrighted by the violent treble vibrato of a hall full of intense females talking for dear life. I never got used to this detestable sound.

and Vera, writing in her diary, recounted this...

'Being a fresher here is very comic. It is like being a new girl at school, without the terror, on an enlarged scale & with full consciousness, which you never have at school, of the humour of the situation. One 3rd year girl asked me today if going into meals was not an ordeal, & another whether it did not worry me to see so many strange faces. I was able to reassure both ladies as to my freedom from perturbation on that point.

Well I'd like to think that perhaps they glanced and smiled at each other in a grimace of sympathy across the table or something.

In her second term Lucy, realising that she needed to be 'sharing the experience of my generation,' decided to leave Somerville and go to the war as a nurse, but perhaps her Greek was letting her down too...

'I was doing classics and quickly learned how badly I had been taught and that I should never pass the first exam, but I still loved Greek and with it the shrewd humorous Scottish don who tutored me...'

I wonder if that was the same one, Mr May, who tutored Vera Brittain to a well-deserved Pass attained during a term when her every spare waking moment was also spent watching and waiting for letters from Roland Leighton soon to be heading for the Front.

Vera was to leave Somerville during that Hilary term of 1915 too, putting on hold an academic career full of promise to be resumed after the war. Lucy Boston (nee Wood) would not return to Oxford instead marrying in 1917 and giving birth to her son Peter. It was following the break up of her marriage, and a return to Cambridge (because Peter was a student at King's College), that Lucy became reacquainted with her beloved future home, and The Manor finally became hers in 1938 and in the most fitting yet serendipitous way...

'Someone chanced to say,' I hear there is a house for sale in Hemingford Grey.' ...without further question or thought I took a taxi out to that sombre house standing in a perfect position.

    'I hear this house is for sale,' I said at the door. They asked how I knew. It was their intention to sell but they hadn't yet begun to advertise it. (The house I had been told of was another which I had never noticed.)

What a wonderful way for a house and its caregiver to find each other.

More soon but here's our first glimpse on the following morning...

Related articles

Interlude in the Intermission...

Lucy M. Boston

The Patchworks of Lucy Boston

Channelling my inner Lucy...

The Crowded Street ~ Winifred Holtby

I have to confess it's been a funny old reading month.

Days would pass and I would realise I hadn't had a minute to open a book, let alone concentrate for long enough to read one, so I have no idea why I suddenly decided to read Winifred Holtby other than hearing mention of Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth and in connection with some rather vociferous criticism on BBC Radio 4's Front Row of the latest BBC TV Great War offering The Crimson Field. Such vehement criticism can sometimes backfire and in this case create a strangely inverse effect, resulting in a digging in of heels and the determination that I would give this series a fair chance and find things to like about it...

Did anyone watch all six episodes...if so I wonder what you thought.

I look upon all these 9pm on a Sunday night TV series as a variation of Downton. They fill a particular slot before the week begins and I have a low threshold of expectation for anything superlative, rather something enjoyable. There's Call the Midwife aka Downton with Forceps, and now The Crimson Field aka Downton with Bandages as it recounted tales of nurses at the Front, and whilst I know many people have found it dire, Bookhound and I really enjoyed it for what it was...Sunday night drama, and Offspringette, with her hyper-critical ex BBC post-production editor hat on was likewise very impressed. We thought the acting was excellent and if you watched it didn't you just love the rather gauche and naive Flora played by Alice St Clair...she absolutely nailed the role to perfection as did so many of the other actors, with the final episode having me on the brink of tears. 

The very vocal critic on the radio suggested that a re-run of Testament of Youth would have been preferable but in fact there is a new film version on the way and The Crimson Field was something entirely different, offering a much broader scope. Not just one central character but many, and revealing the differing impact of the carnage and their various coping strategies along the way, plus tent flaps seem to have been left open on the storylines for a second series and we for two would watch it.

But back to Winifred Holtby and The Crowded Street published in 1924, and how easily could Muriel have been one of those girls nursing at the front had her overbearing family not laid claim to her life already, with the monotonous round of committees, needlework and the interminable wait for a husband. Not even a suitable one to be honest...any offers would have been welcome.

Muriel the eldest of two daughters of Arthur and Rachel Hammond is born and bred in Miller's Rise in Marshington (can't you just tell how 'bogged' down the place must be); the eleven-bedroomed, triple bathroomed family home bought with the proceeds of Arthur's succesful business ventures. Arthur is ponderous and aggressive, radiating heat and energy and with a vulgar turn of phrase that betrays his working class origins, whilst Muriel his daughter is sensitive and ambitious, eager to learn astronomy at school but the nuns prevail and needlework it is. The aim of the education of girls at Hardrascliffe is to learn to be a comfort to their parents...the school motto 'Loeta sorte mea' saying it all...Happy in my lot.

Poor Muriel is a loner, the one not chosen (haven't we all been there in those dire netball team choosings) and as her Coming Out approaches, and the chaperoned dances and parties proliferate, the whole process somehow foreshadows the dichotomy of a woman's world... sit quietly in the drawing room yet be the life and soul of the party. Sadly Muriel, hopelessly uncomfortable in her own skin, never seems quite able to find the party, her blank dance card ominously suggesting the story of her life to come.

I think I may have been unaware of the pressure for those not directly or even indirectly involved with the Great War until I read The Crowded Street. There was a form of levelling social kudos to be attained because, regardless of class, to be 'in' the war meant respect borne of suffering, anxiety and sorrow, to be 'out' of the war meant a form of hunger and isolation...no pride of loss, no glory in the sacrifice, and this is an aspect that Winifred Holtby delineated very clearly.

There is unbridled Wuthering Heights-ian melodrama here too. When Muriel's tomboyish sister Connie is catapulted into a quick marriage and into moorland farming stock, and far beneath her mother's plimsoll line of dignity and acceptance, Mrs Hammond, relieved to have a daughter married at all, even albeit unsuitably (and as it turns out quite miserably)  is 'forced to build a victory on the foundations of defeat,' and yet more double standards are exposed. For all that we might be questioning arranged marriage in our reading of A Suitable Boy it often seems little different here in the 1920s.

But there is plenty more action to come as Muriel, closely mirroring Winifred Holtby's own experience of her friendship with Vera Brittain, does make good her escape, finding a degree of freedom and the path of self-discovery. As the book moves towards its conclusion I found myself feeling surprisingly gratified by the outcome, all would have been for nought had Winifred Holtby chosen any other route. I cheered her courage whilst feeling desperately sad for the overall plight...

'Suddenly we find ourselves alone in a dull crowded street - with no one caring, our lives unneeded.'

Apart from reading half of South Riding, before being overtaken by the recent TV series, The Crowded Street has been my first Winifred Holtby and I am now looking forward to the others. No plans to gorge in a rush because I can sense I need recovery time inbetween each one or they may seem a little...dare I say...'samey', but I am tossing up between The Land of Green Ginger and Anderby Wold with the biography The Clear Stream by Marion Shaw also vying for my attention.

So, as always, I would love to hear your thoughts on The Crimson Field, Winifred Holtby and anything else connected that comes to mind...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Berwick Church

Thoughts of painting in churches as I read A Month in the Country reminded me of my visit to Berwick Church in Sussex last year with Fran, and the promised pictures which never quite materialised on here. This seemed like the perfect week to take a look at them.

The church of St Michael and All Angels at Berwick (pronounced Berrick for anyone who may be wondering) in East Sussex is set on a small hill with a glorious, God's-Own-Country panoramic view of the South Downs from the churchyard...

...and is famous for its unique twentieth century murals, painted during the Second World War by Bloomsbury artists, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Quentin Bell. I had always understood that churches named after St Michael were usually located on a hill and we of course have a cracker right on our doorstep at Brentor...

Not surprisingly this Devon church, on its once volcanic outcrop, can be seen for miles around, but it is rugged and bleak on the sunniest of days, unlike Berwick which was quite the opposite and lingers on in my imagination.

The church at Berwick, less than two miles from Charleston, was looking stunning on the May morning of our visit. The copper beech tree was dressed overall in the sort of colour in nature that takes your breath away when you see it..

and in wonderful painterly contrast to the elm tree in full blossom that we had passed on our way in...

At least we decided it was an elm tree. It seems strange to think these trees were so commonplace when I was a child, but since the ravages of Dutch Elm disease here in the UK it really is quite rare to see one now. Talking of tree blight, every larch for miles around us here is being cut down because of something invasive and fungal, and as a precaution to prevent its spread to ancient woodlands.

'Twas ever thus.

I wonder, if you have read A Month in the Country, whether Berwick (even though it lacks the 'squat' tower) fits the image in your mind of Oxgodby...

'There were some good eighteenth century headstones, their lichen-stained cherubs, hour-glasses and death's heads almost hidden by rank grass, nettle patches and fool's parsley. I glimpsed two or three spikes of a family grave overwhelmed by briars...'

And then, having walked with Tom Birkin through the Oxgodby churchyard, when you see the murals inside Berwick Church, does it seem in your imagination, as it does in mine, like the most perfect fit...

Then there's the smell... if this was scratch and sniff maybe you would recognise it...

'But, of course, it's the smell of the places, always the smell which makes an immediate impression - and this smell was damp hassocks...'

But this is not the judgement that faces Tom Birkin as he reveals the Oxgodby painting hidden for five hundred years, this is Christ opening his arms to the world with angels of adoration in attendance. All this and more I have discovered anew in Simon Watney's excellent little vade mecum for a journey around this part of the world, Bloomsbury in Sussex.

Every which way you turn there is something more to see and look at more closely...

Much more than a few months work for Tom Birkin had he been hired to uncover these...


and thankfully, despite some vandalism back in the 1960s (now restored) all beautifully preserved and there for everyone to enjoy..

As Simon Watney elaborates, what a daringly ambitious project this was for the artists to take on at the height of World War Two, and whilst the skies overhead were a lethal theatre of war...

'The entire project represented an impressive assertion of confidence in the enduring values of parish and indeed of national life at a time of such considerable adversity... supporting the project seemed in its way like part of the war effort, and the decorations at Berwick remain a uniquely poetic expression of Britain in wartime.'

For Tom Birkin redemption and deliverance for his war-damaged soul, for the Bloomsbury artists perhaps redemption of a different kind; a reconciliation and a reconnection with the national identity, one that perhaps, as a group, they had seemed so out of step with for so long, and with an even deeper connection to that of the tradition of ecclesiastical art.

As always when I go into a church, and the facility is there, I light a candle, always plenty of people to think about and remember, and in place like this, just to be thankful that it is there and visible...

Simon Watney suggests that Berwick Church is a 'visionary example of engaged war art,' and it is certainly a wonderful legacy to the nation from those who, perhaps unwittingly, had picked up the baton from the Crisis of Brilliance artists of the Great War.

If you are nearby it is definitely worth a visit.

 

 

 

 

 

A Month in the Country ~ J.L. Carr

'We can ask and ask but we can't have again what once seemed ours for ever....they've gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass...'

I have been giving some thought to my COBALT (Crisis Of Brilliance Art & Literature Trail) reading plans for this year, and much as I used to hate having to come up with Aims and Outcomes back in my working days (couldn't we just get on with it and see) I did want to try and outline for myself the Objects of the Project..

1. Not to be cast down (as in become overwhelmed and downcast by it all) 

2. That's all really.

Of course I want to honour the centenary and the sacrifice, and discover, and be challenged and more, but above all I don't want to feel miserable all year either, so I continue to pick my way gingerly through the mass of potential reading 

I first read A Month in the Country back in ( checks journal) September 2006 which meant I had to go digging around in the blog basement to find out what I had thought about it over seven years ago. To my surprise I discover that I had read it on a train journey home...

'The fraught rail journey home to Exeter from London, Paddington last Thursday, all complicated by a suicide on the line at Ealing was tempered to some extent by a therapeutic read.

I was sitting surrounded by disgruntled, delayed travellers and constant, half heard apologies over the intermittent loudspeaker system "pl...s ac... ... igies ..lay ..is ser.. to ...mouth".This is usually my favourite part of a day spent in The Big Smoke, a taste of the city, a sniff of some big bookshops and then the journey back to the The Valley....'

What a wistful book to read under such circumstances, and I can only imagine how much I may have missed with that sadness lurking.

It has all made me realise yet again how open I am to seeing different meanings at different times in the same book, and all dependent on what life holds at that moment of reading. My life in 2006 would have been fraught with NHS work and, thanks to ...oh let's not go there, just say Politics... a slow diminution of a career in which I had invested a huge proportion of that life to date. This time around I am awash with life contentment, and with time to do the things I love with the people I love and in a home I love, and those days have been left far behind, so I feel as if I have settled down to read a completely different book.

The story was the same.

The book was still only eighty-five pages long.

Tom Birkin was still reflecting back over his life, and in particular those years immediately following the Great War. He has fought at Passchendaele and Ypres and nurses a stammer and facial spasms that give some visual clue to the trauma that lies beneath... a soul in pieces, shattered nerve endings struggling to calm and repair themselves. When he arrives at Oxgodby Church to uncover a Great Work (from one GW to another) a medieval wall painting high on the chancel wall, I was immediately struck by themes of restoration...for the picture, and for Tom...

'Are you here to crawl back into the skin you had before they pushed you through the mincer?' asks Charlie Moon knowingly.

Whilst Tom works up in the heavens, Charlie Moon, a fellow veteran, finds himself working in the opposite direction, out in the graveyard searching for a burial site, and the two men form a guarded friendship that seems to say much about the tragedy of war and the losses they have both suffered.

As the picture is slowly revealed I sensed countless analogies with Tom's recovery and the realisation that things can never be the same..

It simply isn't possible to return a five-hundred-year-old wall painting to its original state. At best I aimed at approximation, uniformly something that looked right...'

The impact of the war on the local village community is implicit but never overtly stated; their acts of kindess speaking volumes towards these homeless, purposeless, wandering men...tens of thousands of them, forgotten, neglected and deserted after sacrificing so much.

Whereas some books seem like a distillation of all the 'de-' words, A Month in the Country is the essence of all the 're-' words...

Rediscovery...

Revelation...

Renewal...

Redemption..

And somehow in the midst of it all I sensed a fundamental Reconsecration of a soul diminished by war, and as Tom Birkin Reconnects with the original artist there is healing to be had from the picture of The Judgement that appears before his eyes.

'I was a sort of impresario, conjuring and teasing back his work after four hundred years of darkness.'

Released from the constraints of a stiff upper lip Tom can rale against it all in occasional moments of unbridled rage...

'Oh you bastards! You awful bloody bastards! You didn't need to have started it. And you could have stopped it before you did.'

And there are glimmers of hope and optimism too...

There are times when man and earth are one, when the pulse of living beats strongly, when life is brimming with promise and the future stretches confidently ahead like that road to the hills...'

When the older Tom, with a subtle reminder that he is looking back, adds, 'Well I was young...' I could only surmise what disappointments life may have had in store for him, but at least share in his transient joy that he experienced some moments of gladness...

'For me that will always be the summer day of summer days..'

There was a mention of the Doxology which I hadn't heard or sung in years but it came back to me in an instant..

Praise God from whom all blessings flow
Praise Him all creatures here below
Praise Him above, ye heavenly host
Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

The final verse of the very long hymn that begins

Awake, my soul, and with the sun
Thy daily stage of duty run;
Shake off dull sloth, and joyful rise,
To pay thy morning sacrifice.

What a sacrifice Tom, and Charlie Moon have both payed, and how exquisitely Joseph Lloyd Carr conveys that in this quiet but powerfully wrought little book. As the time comes for the men to move on it is hard not hang on to their sense of hope for the future, and to hope against hope that their souls too will be allowed to awaken...

'The first breath of autumn was in the air, a prodigal feeling, a feeling of wanting, taking and keeping before it is too late.'

Winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1980 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, A Month in the Country most certainly takes its place in the Pantheon of Great Reads but the big question then of course was Should I Watch the Film.

In the end I found the DVD in the library (I now discover it is also on youtube here) and have watched a very young Colin (Firth...his first lead role) and Ken (neth Branagh...his first film) ) do the book some sort of justice. 

At the very least, and to my great relief, it hasn't spoiled the book for me in any way, and the setting and the atmosphere felt completely at one with my imagination. If there was any distraction it was trying to decide exactly what Colin Firth might have had done to his teeth between playing Tom Birkin and Mr Darcy.

I am sure many of you will have read A Month in the Country or seen the film.. so I wonder, does this book have a special place on your shelf too...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wilfred and Eileen ~ Jonathan Smith

Having spent about four years working my way towards the completion of Summer in February, Jonathan Smith's novel about the Lamorna artists, I decided to get a move on with another of his novels, Wilfred and Eileen, to be re-published by Persephone Books in April, and with delectable endpapers in a Vanessa Bell furnishing fabric of 1913, 'Maud.' I must also mention what might seem like a minor detail, but Persephone Books, printed and bound in Germany, lie flat when you open them and it matters, I wish all books would do this. No tussle, no spine-breaking, no third hand required when you have a cup of tea in one and a piece of cake in the other.

First published in 1976 Wilfred and Eileen was subsequently made into a four part TV series shown in the 1980s and of which I have no recollection whatsoever. My childbearing years, the 1980s passed me by so nothing surprising there, but how I would love to see it now.

The novel, opening as it does in 1913, promised to segue well with my year of Great War reading, though I sensed there was the mud of gore of the trenches to be traversed en route to learning more about the lives of ordinary people, and how this war affected them, and I wasn't wrong.

Wilfred Willet and Eileen Stenhouse meet at the Trinity College May Ball just as Wilfred, studying to be a doctor, has finished university and is heading for the London Hospital to train as a surgeon. At this point I will just drop in that, like Summer in February, Jonathan Smith's novel is based on a true story written with the family's blessing and with access to papers and archives etc. 

Despite his professional status Wilfred is still not considered quite good enough for Eileen's family and there is resistance from all sides to their 'walking out' together, along with hints of impropriety at doing such a thing unless they are engaged. With Walter still dependent on an allowance from his father in order to complete his training marriage seems out of the question, but undaunted the couple 'elope' as far as the Registry Office before continuing to live seperate lives and keeping the plighting of their troth a secret. When the secret is eventually out the couple will be forced into plighting their troth properly in church by both families as the proper thing to do.

Until then the couple are happy in 'a fragile aching way,' Walter charged with a deep vein of idealism and Eileen, tolerant, patient and seemingly submissive, but with little glimmers of the assertive and steely nature that she will need in times to come.

Of course the reader knows there will be a war, but the couple don't and it slowly becomes apparent that Wilfred will have to put his studies on hold and enlist. Heading off to Belgium and the theatre of war at Ploegsteert, fondly known as Plug Street to the Tommies and near to Ypres, Wilfred exchanges countless letters with Eileen. Eileen, not surprisingly comes across as dependent, tearful, and fragile in her replies and is not coping at all....her privileged life had not prepared her for this and as such she seems representative of many women of the time.

This might be the only bit that stymies me in books like this... letters real or letters fictional, and it something that Jonathan Smith addresses in his Afterword...

'I was planning to transform a small part of a largely factual manuscript into a novel...while trying to make the story 'work', I needed to think hard about the issues of freedom and licence. I would have to use my imagination, you can't write a novel if you don't, but I should be wary of taking liberties. Where exactly should I play straight and where could I reasonably embellish?

In order to talk any further about the book a spoiler is inevitable so look away now and come back another day if you don't want to know... though it's not hard to predict...

Wilfred is seriously injured and everything changes for both him and for Eileen. From the depths emerges a tenacious, determined and very single-minded young woman who will stop at nothing to bring her mute and paralysed husband back from the front. Wilfred meanwhile speaks via a terrifying inner monologue that conveys the acute fear of his situation.

The book is somehow written in the style of a novel of the period, it would be easy to imagine it being published in 1920, not 1976....and in a way that felt like a failing until I realised the technique that Jonathan Smith had adopted. A subsequent search of The Times online archive (via my library ticket) revealed that I wasn't alone in that  observation; Elizabeth Gray suggests the story of Wilfred and Eileen...

'...is told with direct simplicity and a sort of innocence, featuring those old fashioned virtues integrity, courage, dedication and love....a miniature work of art, full of small authentic details, deliberately written in the slightly mannered style of the period and so convincingly that I was startled to discover that the author is still in his thirties.'

Another quick search and I discovered that the TV series ran in November 1981 (I was busy with a three-month-old Offspringette, all is explained) and it was well received, critic Geoffrey Wansell also expressing some incredulity that the novel hadn't been written by...

'the imaginings of a lady novelist trying to evoke the almost unbearably tragic world of the First World War.'

I can just see Geoffrey being tweeted to infinity and beyond were he to suggest such a thing now.

Wilfred and Eileen certainly comes into a much sharper focus with Jonathan Smith's Afterword which also recounts the rest of the story... and I don't want to spoil any of that for you so am sitting on my hands rather than tell it, however the book has opened up another branch line of reading trails for me.

Marjorie Seldon writes a very polite letter to The Times in response to a critic who dares to question the 'validity and substance' of the story, suggesting it couldn't have happened...

'It did,' says an indignant Marjorie, 'Wilfred and Eileen were my parents.'

and thus am I led to my next read, Marjorie Seldon's memoir Poppies and Roses.

 

Related articles

Summer in February ~ Jonathan Smith

Four Hedges ~ Claire Leighton

It's that time of year again... and having loved the gardening reading last year I am already back at the shelves for more of the same this year.

I have been itching to read Four Hedges by Claire Leighton (1898 - 1989) but each time I had picked it up it hadn't been April, which is when the book starts its monthly meander through the year. Flicking ahead to July or September just hadn't worked, but I love books like this so I have made a time-appropriate start and this will be one of the books to read each month.

My edition is published by Little Toller and comes with an introduction by Carol Klein who elaborates on the half acre garden at Four Hedges in Monk's Risborough, in the Chilterns, taken on by Claire Leighton and her partner, political journalist (Henry) Noel Brailsford in the early 1930s. E.M.Forster lived in the area, as did artist John Nash, whilst novelist Winifred Holtby had a cottage nearby. Claire took lessons from and would also model for the sculptor Eric Gill, and thus, not unlike the lives of Gilbert and Mary Cannan, there was no lack of cultural and social opportunity with like-minded people.

I like Carol Klein's suggestion that Claire doesn't profess to know it all when it comes to gardening, that this project is a learning curve and that there is much in the book with which to identify. There might be one or two things that don't quite happen for me, like the gloves, but the episode still resonated...

'Who wouldn't identify with pulling off the gardening gloves, the better to get to grips with the soil, to feel it and love it, abandoning not just gloves but all inhibition and restraing that deny the very visceral experience of gardening...'

I'm not there yet, once a nurse, always a nurse...I still love my gloves and have pairs for every purpose... potting, planting out, pulling up brambles, weeding, wet gloves, dry gloves, pretty gloves. Who knew I would find gardening gloves such a treat and be thrilled every time someone gives me a new pair.

The woodcuts are of course things of beauty and something I understood much more about once I had read Frances Spalding's excellent and very readable biography of another wood-engraver, Gwen Raverat - Friends, Family, Affections and with whom Claire Leighton often exhibited along with Eric Ravilious. It's all about end-grain versus the much softer side-grain of the wood, and the difference between engraving and cutting took on a significance of which I knew little.

And I had forgotten that Claire Leighton's brother was the Roland Leighton who had been engaged to Vera Brittain and who was killed so tragically in the Great War. Then I discover a Crisis of Brilliance connection in that Claire studied at the Slade under the tutorship of Henry Tonks after the war.

April has already yielded a lovely moment...knowing that their chalky soil is unsuitable for Lupins, but still desperate to grow them, Noel cycles off into Oxfordshire and brings back a sack full of 'wonderful brown soil' ...strapped across the back wheel of his bicycle 'like the saddlebags of a Mediterranean donkey. Who can know the couple's joy at the sight of something so simple...

'For there is something luxurious in dark brown soil to those who live in the world of pale grey chalk.'

A gentle 'growing' rain falls which is looked on as a friend and I will try better to do likewise. I usually do but this winter has tested most of us to the limits of our precipitation tolerance. As I read of the first swallows arriving I realise it will be soon be time for ours, and then I wonder how they will cope with the absence of their old nest. After years and years of brood after brood the swallows left it alone last year so we decided to remove and will see if they might start afresh...I know this feeling well...

'We grow excited as we see them prospecting in front of the house... there seems no way of informing a bird that she will be welcome and cared for and left undisturbed...'

I would add ...'and that we feed Magnus beyond his internal plimsoll line in the hope that he will sleep and ignore you.' Cats never seem to have bothered our swallows in the past so here's hoping we see this...

...followed by this happy little brood.

Claire Leighton and Noel Brailsford's story seems to end less happily. Having been trapped in a loveless marriage since 1898, with a wife who refused him a divorce, Noel and Claire lived together for several years after they met in 1928. When Noel's wife Jane finally died of alcoholism in 1937, leaving the way clear for the couple to marry, Noel, consumed by guilt and self-recrimination, suffered an emotional breakdown, effectively destroying his relationship with Claire who left Four Hedges behind for a new life in the USA in 1939. 

I wonder how painful it must have to leave her beloved garden...

It's not something I could even begin to imagine at the moment, and how Claire must have felt when she heard that Noel had met and married a German refugee forty years his junior can only be guessed, but she achieved similar acclaim for her work in the US, where she settled and lived in Connecticut, remaining unmarried until her death in 1989.

It is only to be hoped that their garden at Four Hedges at least gave the couple some pleasure during their time together and I am certainly looking forward to 'armchair' gardening alongside them through this coming year.

 

 

 

 

 

Summer in February ~ Jonathan Smith

A very funny thing happened as I was reading Summer in February by Jonathan Smith... the novel about the Lamorna artists.

It was a book that had been on my shelves for a while. I coudn't remember where I had heard about it, but on the balance of probability it had to be one of you here in comments, and a quick search of my own blog came up with a comment and link to her blog from Lizzy Siddal back in 2009.

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

and sitting on those very rocks...

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

I wonder if you have preferences about this??

Book first...

Film first...

Not bothered...

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

So I started the book...twice.

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

Then the film was out there...

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

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

The beautiful Florence is nicknamed Blote.

Blote??

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Munnings painted Laura painting...

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

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

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

The whole Summer in February saga has a been a wonderfully extended reading, watching and looking trail which has unwittingly all fed nicely into my Crisis Of Brilliance Art & Literature Trail ( C.O.B.A.L.T... for short, it came to me in a flash) and has now segued into yet more Great War reading, Wilfred and Eileen, another book by Jonathan Smith to be re-published by Persephone Books in April.

More of that soon with accompanying diversions, meanwhile I would love to hear of your experiences with this book and film...

 

 

Princes in the Land ~ Joanna Cannan

Whenever I pick up a Persephone book I haven't read, almost the first thing I do is search back through the old Persephone Quarterlies, and more recently the Biannualies, for Nicola Beauman's original piece on the book. These little magazines surely one of the jewels in Persephone's crown, and free if you buy a book or visit the shop (one of the other jewels.) Each book published will have had an informative introduction, with biography, history and context woven in along with some relevant photographs, and as luck would have it No 29 was the first I laid my hand on, so how lovely that it was also one of my favourite cover pictures too. 


Remember this one??

And how appropriate that it is Girl Reading, painted in 1932 by Harold Knight (husband of Laura Knight). Lying on a chaise in front of a window, a young and very elegant woman reads a magazine, and if you are anywhere near the Harris Museum & Art Gallery in Preston then lucky you, it's on your doorstep.

I was amazed to discover that Joanna Cannan, a writer I had never heard of until Princes in the Land was published by Persephone, actually wrote a book a year for forty years from 1922 onwards. That seems like a lot of books to disappear off the radar. Of course now I know much more about cousin Gilbert but I was unwittingly very familar with Joanna Cannan's daughters Josephine, Diana and Christine Pullein-Thompson. I read my share of pony club books as a child, even though I didn't have a pony, had never actually sat on one and didn't even really like them... except everyone else did, so I thought I should try. 

The novel opens with mother and daughters enduring the train journey from hell to reach their new home, with poor Patricia being as a sick as a dog, and with no servants on hand it is all a bit much for all of them…

‘Just as cows are there to give milk, and hens to lay eggs, and dogs to retrieve game, they [servants] were there to come and clear up the mess when you rang the bell…’

Ah yes, we have far to fall I thought as I read and couldn’t wait to see how it would all unfold.

Patricia and Angela’s father Almeric, the son of Lord Waveney, has been killed in the Boer War, and their mother Blanche, falling on unaccustomed hard times, is forced to repair to the family seat in Norfolk and live off the kindness of her father-in-law. Blanche now ruing the day she married Almeric…

‘…surely in spite of her teeth there’d have been other chances…’

The childhood years pass swiftly with much horsey outdoor-ness (reflected beautifully in the Lucien Day fabric endpapers) until Patricia, much to her mother's dismay, falls for the charms of impoverished academic Hugh and agrees to marry him, from whence on it would seem her fate is sealed. She will be sentenced to a life lived far below the salt and the social status to which her mother has aspired. Witness the wedding list...

'Blanche made lists of what Patricia couldn't do without and Patricia sent them to Hugh. Hugh crossed out house parlourmaid, dinner service for twelve, champagne glasses and canteen of dessert knives..'

The exhortation of the title is thus... 

'You shall have children, whom you shall make princes in the land...'

Biblical in origin, from the Psalms (45:16) and as the years pass, and Patricia gives birth to three children becoming compeletely subsumed by them, Joanna Cannan carefully delineates a mother's every endeavour on behalf of her family.

With its themes of inheritance and marriage, the dependence of women, motherhood and sacrifice, along with social class and snobbery, how fascinating it it to watch the lowly Hugh, rising to the role of an Oxford professor and unwittingly taking on the mantle of the 'snob.' Meanwhile the children do what children are supposed to do and live their own lives and, when calamity strikes within their own brood, what a clever 'turning of the tables' Joanna Cannan executes as Hugh and Patricia try to work their way through the living nightmare. 

Powerless to intervene, and somehow stopping herself from doing so anyway, Patricia, realises that though all is naught as long as she has her children, she now has time to reflect on all those thwarted ambitions that she has held for them..

'...first August, then Giles, then Nicola had gone, further than any ship or train or aeroplane could have taken them, far over ranges you couldn't climb, seas you couldn't sail, across the intangible deserts of experiences she'd no part in, to lives and loves and hopes in which she had no share. And they'd not gone as princes...'

and the final realisation..

'The kingdoms she had won for them had been rejected.'

Surely one of the most searingly honest and powerful observations about the realities of being a mother it is possible to make.

How many of us have held those secret ambitions for our children and perhaps masked disappointments accordingly... sending the Gamekeeper to violin lessons might have been one of my more foolish ideas. My disappointment was short-lived, Young Musician of the Year was never going to happen.

Perhaps what Hugh and Patricia can't see is that, for all that they may disagree with them, their children are indeed each living their lives within the moral parameters established for them, with fidelity and integrity, with endeavour and honesty, and with a determination to be themselves.

Early in the novel Joanna Cannan suggests that...

'Patricia was, in fact, more intelligent than you would have suspected; more intelligent than she looked; too intelligent for her environment...'

and it is at her moment of realisation that an awareness of Patricia's equally well-concealed emotional intelligence is revealed with her remarkable rendering of this insight into her entrapment...

'How had it come about, this metamorphosis? Well, love's a horse thief. With oats and apples he'd lured the young wild creature. Saying it'll be oats and apples every day for you, he'd slipped on the halter, the collar, harnessed her, and then there'd been no more oats and apples but the long uphill road and the load behind.'

There will be another life-defining 'episode' before the end of the novel that reveals even more about the courage of a woman who realises...

'I didn't adapt myself... I was caught by life and shut up in a cage...'

and there will be change, because woven into the book, intentionally or otherwise, is a well-executed delineation of that inter-war period of social mobility. As the book draws to a close with Patricia's children musing over their mother's new-found wisdom and seemingly 'new' hobbies, never a truer word spoken than that stated so memorably by Penelope Mortimer in another recent Persephone read, Daddy's Gone A-Hunting... a child can't be expected to understand its mother.

The piece in the Persephone Quarterly suggest that Princes in the Land will be a book that readers will find hard to forget. I couldn't agree more, and if you have read it I would love to know your thoughts because I suspect you will remember it too. If on the other hand it sits unread on your shelf, you have a little diamond waiting.

 

 

Related articles

Reading the Cannans...

Reading the Cannans...

I have been on a slow read of A Crisis of Brilliance by David Boyd Haycock over the last month, and having turned the final page, I went back to the beginning and read this again...

“We are Earth’s best,that learnt her lesson here.
Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!” we said;
We shall go down with unreluctant tread
Rose crowned into the darkness!”

Proud we were,
And laughed, that had such brave true things to say. ‘

This quote from a poem by Rupert Brooke provides the epigraph to a book about five young British artists and the Great War, and is the first of the books I have chosen to read this year in my quest to read around the Great War whilst staying out of the trenches if I possibly can. That is not to deny or avoid the bloodshed, or the unremitting horror of it all, though if I am honest, as I get older I find it all so much more upsetting to read, but I wanted to read about some aspects of which I knew much less.

What was life like in those years before the war…

How did the war impact on the everyday..

And in the case of A Crisis of Brilliance, how did it affect the artists and their art. It is a book I can't recommend highly enough so expect some gallimaufry-type posts about it to follow. I have really enjoyed this new ground, and along the way getting to know more about the lives and work of Stanley Spencer (knew very well) Mark Gertler,(heard of but knew nothing) Paul Nash,(knew well-ish) Richard Nevinson (never heard of) and Dora Carrington (adored Lytton Strachey, shot herself, didn't know much more.)

It is one of those good books that has led me off on all sorts of reading and ‘looking up’ trails, and it was mention of Gilbert Cannan (1884 - 1955) in connection with Mark Gertler that started today’s little excursion...

The name Cannan rang all sorts of other bells too..

I had been reading Scars Upon My Heart, the war poems of the women of the Great War and came across May Wedderburn Cannan. Her poem Lamplight had stayed in my mind for its opening lines…

'We planned to shake the world together, you and I
Being young and very wise;'

Those few words seemed to sum up all the hopes and dreams shattered by unimaginable grief, and the sadness of lives torn apart by the Great War, and I couldn’t get them out of my head.

And then I remembered Princes in the Land by Joanna Cannan, a Persephone book that had been sitting unread on my shelves for several years…surely all these Cannans were related.

A quick hop on the branch line that is the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography answered all my questions (free access via library ticket number here in the UK). May and Joanna were sisters, in fact the daughters of Charles Cannan who headed up the Oxford University Press, and Gilbert Cannan was their cousin (though I can't find out through which branch of the family.)

Gilbert Cannan, a young Cambridge graduate, was a writer who, having given up reading for the Bar, became J.M.Barrie's secretary. Gilbert was madly in love with Kathleen Bruce, a young painter and sculptress and Lisa Chaney's excellent biography of J.M. Barrie, Hide and Seek With Angels, has filled in all sorts of gaps for me, not least this description of Gilbert which seems to place him squarely in the Rupert-Brooke-Adonis category...

'Gilbert Cannan was tall, slim, with a fine profile, shaggy blond hair, a 'crooked smile' and an aura of sadness that made his undoubted beauty yet more compelling; people turned when he entered a room. His looks, his immense vitality and his passionate admiration for her in turn kept Kathleen Bruce beguiled..'

Sadly not beguiled enough, and when Kathleen met the 'not very young...and not very good looking' Captain Robert Falcon Scott (soon to be 'of Antarctica) and had to make a choice, she opted for Scott's 'dignity and restraint...his proven strength of character' and the likelihood that he would father a son for her, over Gilbert's lovelorn entreaties which took the form of four poems a day.

There is evidence that Kathleen may have regretted her decision.

On the rebound Gilbert was soon crying on the shoulder of Mary, the wife of J.M Barrie. Barrie, busy himself with his 'ongoing obsession with Sylvia Llewelyn Davies and the boys, seemed unaware of the lovers and was deeply shocked when his gardener finally told him of the year-long affair. Whether Sylvia encouraged Gilbert and Mary in their relationship is uncertain, what is certain is that when cited in the Barrie’s divorce, Gilbert subsequently married Mary considering it the gentlemanly thing to do. The social stigma of all this in 1909 was profound and it would seem J.M.Barrie, now wife-less and alone, never quite recovered.

It was the newly-wed couple’s move to a converted windmill in Buckinghamshire that placed Gilbert and Mary in the midst of an artistic and cultural milieu that included Katherine Mansfield, D.H.Lawrence and socialite and all-round Bloomsbury hostess-with-the-mostest Ottoline Morrell. One of the Crisis of Brilliance artists, Mark Gertler was a friend and used the mill’s garage as a studio….there we finally arrive back where we started, and with it comes this picture, by Gertler...

Gilbert Cannan at His Mill ~ Mark Gertler 1915 (Ashmolean Museum)

Apparently the Newfoundland dog on the left was the model for the Darling's dog Nana in J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, and at Mary's insistence became hers as part of the divorce settlement.

Avoiding conscription and war service it would seem via a combination of conscientious objection and illness, for some years Gilbert Cannan's literary output was prolific, but he was in for a massive fall when he used the lives of Mark Gertler and Dora Carrington (another fascinating Crisis of Brilliance story) as the plot for his 1916 novel Mendel. Gertler's journey from poverty in Whitechapel to the Slade Art School, and his relationship with Dora Carrington...well I hate to say it but must... it was all grist to the novelist's mill. As David Boyd Haycock suggests it was a story far too good to waste.

There were ructions within the circle of friends that intimate conversations could have been used in this way and Gilbert, by now in an even deeper mess with his marriage having had affairs various and the occasional menage a trois, was ousted, all trust gone. There followed a sad and slow descent into complete mental breakdown, loneliness, and a life eventually lived in institutions, all recounted in The Release of the Soul, Gilbert's own account of his demise...

' This was a bitter winter, bitter to the senses but more bitter to the soul: 1916 when the shouting and the eager idealism had withered away and all meaning had gone out of the words of war. So bitter was the agony that physical discomfort had become a small thing and men and women were like ghosts pathectically trying to remember the sensations of their life in the Flesh.'

It was a tragic demise given that Henry James had, in 1913, heralded Gilbert Cannan as one of four promising authors, rating him ahead of D.H.Lawrence,(that didn't go down well with Lawrence) whilst established authors such as George Bernard Shaw and John Galsworthy saw him as a real threat to their own dominance.

So, having sorted Gilbert I turned my attentions to cousin Joanna, opening the first page of Princes of the Land and knowing that, as with any Persephone book I pick up, I would be enthralled to the final page. I wasn't disappointed, in fact hardly believing that I could have left such a gem unread for so long... more about sisters May and Joanna and this book soon.