dovegreyreader scribbles

The Small Mine ~ Menna Gallie

So where are we...March?
And now I'm writing about a book I read last November. These are the last of the pile that has sat patiently on that right hand table of my L shaped desk arrangement which runneth over with all manner of things.
The place where I put all the books I want to write about, snippets that have triggered blog thoughts, piles of books I might be referring to, my twirly tabletop book case, anything that is a work in progress, and slowly I've been mopping up last year's reading to make way for this year's and I'm down to the final two books of 2009.

The Small Mine by Menna Gallie and A Woman's Work Is Never Done by Elizabeth Andrews, with a foreword by Glenys Kinnock and both published by Honno Press, that independent Welsh Press publishing women's writing which I came to know and love last year.
Several times I've been tempted to shelve them unwritten about and move on, but each time I've picked them up I've known what a good read they were and what a shame it would be not to let you know that...so here we are five months on having a stab.
Born in 1882  near Aberdare, Elizabeth Andrews was the third of eleven children in a mining family, eventually marrying but remaining childless. Her father died of silicosis and it is the miner's cause that Elizabeth reveals with so much passion in A Woman's Work is Never Done, part autobiography, part memoir  which provides the most revealing social history of the coalfield communities.
Central to Elizabeth's crusade was her personal motto 'Educate, agitate, organise' and in these days of  the 'Every Child Matters' political theme it's interesting to see that we've invented nothing new. Elizabeth Andrews highlighted the needs and development of 'The Child' as central and paramount back in the 1920s.
The child's needs were indeed great.
The Chief Medical Officer of Health's Annual Reports said as much,

'...of two million toddlers between two and five years of age, 31 per cent were dull or very dull through preventable causes, and one million children became 'damaged goods' before they reached the age of five.'

Other local statistics were equally shocking.
Infant mortality, one of several indicators of a country's health status, was 105 per 1000 births in the Rhondda in the early 1920s (current figures for the UK stand at 4.8) and Elizabeth Andrews set about the authorities with determination in her campaign for pit head baths....there is a connection.
I had never quite realised the importance of pit head baths or the fact that without them the men went home in filthy, soaking wet clothes which all had to be washed and dried in an overcrowded kitchen and which 'played havoc with the health of young children.'
Elizabeth campaigned tirelessly on many other fronts... for clean milk free from TB, Diphtheria, Cholera and heaven knows what else... it must have been like drinking poison, for family allowance, nursery provision, improved sanitation and votes for women and I'm in full agreement with Glynis Kinnock,

'...a truly great Welsh woman who has sadly fallen out of our history...whose contribution as a socialist, an internationalist and a suffragist has never been given the plaudits or the acknowledgements which men, who made similar contributions to Welsh life , have received.'

I was bound to find all this fascinating and moving on next to The Small Mine written and almost certainly set in 1962, proved to be a perfect reading combination and a chance to identify how times may have changed, attitudes shifted and conditions improved. In fact Menna Gallie's book catches the whole community on the cusp of change with its themes of the Cold war, the underlying and ominous threat of a nuclear bomb and the unrest that prevailed within the mining communities after the nationalisation of the coal industry in 1947.
As Jane Aaron highlights in her introduction,

'...to desert the Coal Board job for a job in a privately-run small mine is still seen in this novel as a form of betrayal of one's community and its values.'

And this is exactly what young Joe Jenkins, village beau, has done, but he's made some enemies along the way and with less stringent safety regulations in place in the private mine...
Joe and his girlfriend Cynthia represent the new generation and the inevitable schism between tradition and progress.When tragedy occurs Menna Gallie somehow pinpoints that moment with acute precision through the different versions of  grief felt within this tiny, close-knit community and for me she encompassed it with one small act of rebellion.

'' - Drawing the curtains and trying to make me wear black, like a Victorian Miss. My life is not blighted, my heart isn't broken forever. I'm sorry I can't play up. He's dead. OK...'

Here is the new generation shaking off the old and Elizabeth Andrews has a view on that too

'The younger generation of today who are enjoying these hard won privileges and personal freedom get very impatient with their parents and older people when they relate past struggles. But it is from the ruins and sufferings of the past that we have built the present, and the future will depend on what we do now.'

Two more great reads from Honno.

Dew on the Grass by Eiluned Lewis

Dew on the Grass by Eiluned Lewis, (Welsh expertise please...Ay-loo-ned ?) and first published in 1934, has been another happy read and a gorgeous cover from Honno Press.
Unlike my last Honno foray into the writing of Margiad Evans aka Peggy Whistler from Uxbridge, Eiluned Lewis was born and bred in the Welsh countryside in 1900, the daughter of a wealthy Montgomeryshire landowner Hugh Lewis and his wife Eveline.
The family lived in comfortable circumstances at Glan Hafran and Dew on the Grass is another fictional autobiography, a child's eye view of life in Wales in the early twentieth century and offering a very different perspective to the poverty-stricken mining community accounts that I have also been reading.
There are pictures of Glan Hafran and its surroundings but also the visitors, J.M.Barrie and the Lost Boys; Michael and Nicholas Llewellyn Davies were regular guests and joined in all the theatricals of which the young Eiluned, Lucy in the book, is so fond.
Interestingly it was another Lost Boy, Peter Davies, who first published Dew on the Grass in 1934.
Nine-year old Lucy is the younger sister of Delia with six-year old brother Maurice whose measurements are all etched on the stable door along with three year old Miriam

'who ran to width rather than height and barely managed to reach the keyhole.'

What follows is an evocative, enchanting stream-of-consciousness account of a child's life through a child's eyes, a compression of childhood memory released with all those seemingly minor incidents that assume such great significance with the application of a nine-year old mind.
Between them, Lucy and Delia have sufficient imaginative resources to sustain a nation and day after day they are allowed to exercise it with play and make-believe, all occasionally interrupted by education in the shape of a visiting teacher who tries to put the girls through their paces, but largely against the odds when the freedom and adventures of Pengarth (Glan Hafran) beckon. Children's maid Louisa also has her hands full with Lucy's regular dramatic re-enactments of imaginary adventures

'Lucy would begin in a thrilling voice: 'She put her foot on the cold marble step..."
'Don't go putting your bare feet on the washstand." Louisa interrupted
"She looked at the great keep above her." the tragic tale went on; "the rushing moat below. And all around she heard the sound of war and tumult. Then a voice cried:' Mother! Mother' but she answered: 'Daughter! Daughter! What canst I do for thee?'...
'Naught! Naught! I will cast myself into the moat below.' "
"You'll break the springs of the bed if you carry on like that," remarked Louisa folding up the clothes.'

There are all those certainties of childhood, the world that seems to revolve around a child's magnificent flights of imaginative fancy and parents who are able to provide for this to happen; there's no question it's a privileged world with only occasional intrusions from the realities of the poverty of those around them. A fire in an estate cottage and we learn little of what happens to the occupants, Lucy's father much more exercised over how he will rebuild, whilst the arrival of a tramp signifies the destitution and poverty that was blighting the mining communities.

Plenty of timeless childhood moments of nostalgia too.
The counting games to choose who would be 'it' ..."Ip dip sky blue, who's it not you" in my day, Lucy has something far more interesting involving the Virgin Mary.
Then that fishpond game with the rods and lines with the magnets on the end.
What about the way the eyes always came out of a teddy bear (horrors...remember them on great long bits of lethal wire?) and the teddy had to remain eyeless ever after because putting them back in just made them look all wrong.
In fact look, I found my second-best bear, the eyeless Bimbo who would be impressed upon me when I'd been sick on the equally eyeless best bear Fred, who was a complete person with a soul and feelings and was very real let me tell you, and who would have to be mysteriously whisked off for 'laundering'.

There's just no way to make Bimbo look pretty or to convey even the merest hint of what he meant to me as a child or how I felt when he needed surgical intervention... I hope you've all got strong stomachs, I'm having to look away when I see this, I probably cried for weeks. In fact it's all reminding me that I passed it onto my own children, Offspringette was distraught for days when her beloved Marmite's head came off and I was a nervous wreck trying to stitch it back on.

There are some gloriously funny moments in Dew on the Grass too, a child's impression of hymns and the day Lucy ponders about heaven,

'I thought that everyone in heaven - Jesus and the angels and all - went to bed in a long room, and in the early morning I would get up, very quietly, and put on my cap and apron and cook breakfast and make the coffee. Then when Jesus woke up He would be very surprised and pleased and say: " Well done thou good and faithful servant!"

Lucy, the writer in the family proceeds to compose a Liturgy of her own for an all-purpose pet's funeral,

O dog of dogs, have mercy on us sinners,
Be good to us, O King, and make us joyful;
Save us from all breaking and illness... ARMEN'

So a childhood exquisitely recalled but with that growing realisation that Delia will be the first to leave this safe world of the imagination and head off for boarding school; suddenly Delia is above it all and owns a proper tennis racquet and life will never be quite the same at Pengarth / Glan Hafran again.
Katie Gramich's excellent introduction offers more unique insights into Lucy's frequent blurring of those boundaries between the real and the imaginary which for me made reading this book such a pleasure, and any mention of comparisons of this child-centred narrative to the short stories of Katherine Mansfield is always going to strike the right note too. Likened in her lifetime to a host of good authors...Jane Austen, Mrs Gaskell, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Arthur Ransome and Kenneth Grahame, I have to agree with Reginald Massey, it is indeed sad that Eiluned Lewis is almost forgotten today.
But really it's Lucy aka Eiluned herself that you love for the way that the world of the grown-up makes so little sense

'How did grown-ups manage to exist all day with so little imagination? They even dressed in the morning without imagining themselves other than they were, whereas Lucy felt that she could never bear to put on clothes at all if she were not consoled at every phase by pretending to be someone else - the Young Acrobat, the White Lady or the Innocent Child.'

The Wooden Doctor by Margiad Evans

Had I actually finished Charlotte Bronte's The Professor the last time I picked it up I might have been able to offer you some Bronte-esque comparisons to certain aspects of The Wooden Doctor by Margiad Evans, but I've been stuck on p96 of The Professor for the last four months, so I can't...well not with any certainty anyway and I'd better not speculate beyond saying I sense echoes of schools in Belgium.
But The Wooden Doctor has been another splendid read from Welsh women's press, Honno. First published in 1933 and like  Eunice Fleet by Lily Tobias, this novel also met with enthusiastic reviews,

'an astonishing story...Heavens! What characters and what a plot!...This young woman can write.'

Sales never quite met up to that enthusiastic critical reception and yet another book went the way of  lost classics.
And The Wooden Doctor is an astonishing story.
Narrated in the first person by Arabella, a tormented young girl who, emerging from a childhood blighted by a violent, alcoholic father and with veiled implications of much darker abuse, finds herself seriously ill at the age of twelve, an illness for which her mother ominously blames her father. Dr Flaherty pays a house call and Arabella develops an infatuation for him that develops into an obsession from which she can find no release. More serious illness follows and with it an exploration of the impact of Arabella's unrequited love for the doctor.
It's the first person narrative that does such a fine job here, locking the reader into Arabella's thought processes and her illness, described as a fox clawing away inside her and requiring all manner of delicate and painful investigations, hospital stays and long periods of convalescence, all requiring more of the hapless doctor's professional and often unchaperoned attention.
Margiad Evans' use of imagery is wide-ranging and frequently creates a wonderful correlation between landscape and Arabella's state of mind,

'Autumn, wild, angry, tumultuous, riotous autumn; killing. cleansing, ushering autumn, stripped of the gorgeous colours and the placid fruits, undimmed by hazy bonfire smoke, unseen but heard and felt in bitter storm alone at black midnight.'

and likewise the imagery of pain,

'In the night the pain came back. It was like a fox in a bag scratching and rending to get out. My spirits trailed in the dust. The claws penetrated my sleep; dragged me awake...I knew that I was ill.'

Pain not easy to describe and I'm reminded of my read of Mikhail Bulgakov's White Guard where the pain likewise leaped right off the page.
As the years move on, and Arabella's unchecked obsession gathers force, profound depression, that 'black dog', sets in and Arabella turns to the therapy of writing to help assuage her passion becoming compelled, driven and possessed as she commits everything to paper. Thus divested of the sharpness of her grief and having perhaps shed that obsession for Mr Wrong, might this be an opportune moment for Mr Right to come along?
If so, can Arabella's emotional state allow her to fall properly in love and can she sustain the demands of a grand affair?
Who will do a runner? 
Arabella or Mr Right?
Or will there be wedding bells?
Well, I couldn't possibly comment but I hope you can see that Margiad Evans has set the scene perfectly for yet another Honno ending that ratchets up the pressure on the reader in those final pages...yet again I have to implore you...DON'T READ THE LAST LINE until you get there.
But who was Margiad Evans, a name that lends itself to a wonderful Welsh lilt if you pronounce it Marg-y-ad ?
Well I hate to disappoint but Margiad was actually Peggy Eileen Arabella Whistler, born in Uxbridge, Middlesex in 1909, and quite possibly I might be more Welsh than Peggy with my Griffiths ancestors.
A childhood visit to Wales left a lasting impression on Peggy and eventually the family moved to Ross-on-Wye. But the clue really lies with Peggy's second middle name, Arabella, because this book is autobiographical fiction and with that knowledge emerge all those complex issues of identity which Sue Asbee's excellent introduction explores in some detail. Much of that which is recounted happened to Peggy and it is her own interesting picture that graces the cover of the book, and how revealing that is when you look closely and see that clawing fox.
I'd have sold a cat (perhaps) to have been at this one day centenary conference on Margiad Evans earlier this year, because for me books like this gain huge ground with the application of some twenty-first century evidence-based theories of attachment and bonding. Much interesting evidence now also available that reveals the potential impact of an abusive childhood on adult behaviour and Margiad / Peggy / Arabella's mental health unwittingly offers clear signs of that impact.
There is plenty to speculate over concerning Arabella's obsession with the doctor, perhaps the first gentle man she had ever known in her life

'All that I craved, all the things existence had so far denied me, I found in him and him only...'

and then fascinating to look at the original illness, seemingly genuine and excruciatingly painful and trying to identify when and whether that develops into something fabricated.
Was this attention-seeking behaviour?
Was it all a cry for help from a desperately and deeply disturbed mind?
Had Arabella been so abused that she had taken few coping strategies into adulthood and was this reflected in her inability to enter into normal relationships and the resultant recourse into serious and life-limiting obsession ?
Using those themes there is a great deal to explore and debate in The Wooden Doctor and I've had a rare old time talking it over with myself in the absence of a one-day conference.
In reality Margiad Evans' demise was a sad one, diagnosed with epilepsy in 1950, a brain tumour was discovered in 1956 and she died in 1958 at the age of forty-nine but she did leave us the legacy of this amazing book.

Eunice Fleet by Lily Tobias

So mention of Lily Tobias on Monday and Welsh publisher Honno Press, a relatively recent publishing discovery for me and probably long after everyone else had been reading them for years, but I have been very taken with the books and recently opened Eunice Fleet by Lily Tobias for its themes of the treatment of conscientious objectors during the First World War.
This in turn was coincidentally complemented by the arrival of another book, Voices Against War - A Century of Protest by Lyn Smith, also the author of Forgotten Voices of the Holocaust which I knew I had here somewhere.
I want books that will offer me some different angles on war for this year's Remembrance reading. I'm focusing on World War Two but not ruling anything out and the themes in Eunice Fleet caught my attention. I knew precious little about conscientious objectors but Lily Tobias knew a great deal because both her brothers had been just that.
The novel is divided into three, Present, Past and Present and Eunice is living with the exuberant Dorry in a flat in Maida Vale. There's money because they have a housekeeper, Mrs Johns and this is all because Eunice is big in corsetry, if you see what I mean. There is mention of a missing husband Vin, and hints of 'remorse and repentance on Eunice's part but nothing becomes clear until the book heads into Past. Slowly the tragedy unfolds, not only of Eunice's family life and quite who Dorry is but gradually Vincent's First World War pacifist stance unfolds and alongside it Eunice's feelings about it all.
The white feather, the coward's symbol, prevails and the horror, humiliation and cruelty of Vincent's incarceration and subsequent trials make for very uncomfortable reading. His letters from prison had me on he brink of tears.
This is courage of a different sort, but is it any different from a soldier facing the enemy, and who has the right to say? There were plenty of questions to ask myself as I read.
Lily Tobias presents the pacifist stance from several different angles and I crept away from this amazing book both quietly stunned and deeply enlightened, not only with what had been revealed but for the book's courageous subject matter and prescience written as it was in 1932,

'According to the signs, there was bound to be a "next war". which might really prove to be " the last war." The horrors would be greater than ever. And perhaps it wouldn't matter if objectors weren't listened to then, for everyone, militarists, pacifists, soldiers, civilians - everyone - would be swept away in the holocaust.'

To say more would be to spoil but suffice to say Eunice struggles with her own beliefs in the face of outright hostility and disdain from the local community and must decide her own position whilst Vincent must also decide how steadfastly he will keep to his, a man beyond broken in body, but not in spirit.

'It was simply that she was weary of rancour, and that there was a great gap in her heart that felt like a bottomless pit, into which everything might fall - good words and ill - without filling a fraction of space.'

As the book moves back into the present and towards its final pages, I wonder if you might have to remind yourself to breath as I did. From one page to the next, quite suddenly it hit me and with a growing sense of disbelief I realised a terrible outcome beckoned and to be honest...well DON'T READ THE LAST LINE before you get there, but when you have please come back and tell me what you think happens, because I'm still very uncertain. This book has echoed in my thoughts ever since and my thanks again to Honno Press for putting me in touch with Jasmine Donahaye because I needed to know much more about Lily Tobias once I'd read Eunice Fleet.

So the horrors of war from a very different perspective; in its own way every bit as heartbreaking as accounts of death and destruction from the front, and revealing yet again the underbelly of conflict. For an account of that century of protest and a book the Imperial War Museum are promoting as a means of understanding war in its entirety, the personal testimonies in Lyn Smith's Voices Against War make a perfect, thought-provoking and incredibly moving companion read.

'Mark Hayler, absolutist CO, HOS, Princetown, Dartmoor (First World War)

...I remember once when we went out to work on the moor, this chap said, ' isn't it odd that I'm here in Dartmoor because I won't kill anybody and my father-in-law had been here because he killed someone.'

Sweets from Morocco by Jo Verity

A steady influx of lovely books arriving here as usual and I'm working a new system which is what I do every so often when I get fed up with an old one.
When I was a real Health Visitor with a General Practice caseload, as opposed to the virtual one I am now  with a very different online remit, I used to get booking forms from the midwives telling me that a baby was due to be born and when. For thirty years I actually used the same system wherever I worked because I never got fed up with it and never thought of a better one even though a computer arrived on my desk in the meantime. I had a simple A4 folder, divided into months of the year and the booking form went in under the due month and hey presto that was me organised. The file would come out when the midwives walked in and we'd go through it every so often just to keep me in the loop, I'd check ahead on who needed a home visit before the baby was born, brilliant, foolproof, worked.
Well it occurred to me with the constant flow of books most with press releases and publication dates several months hence that I could apply the same system because they are almost like pre-book-birth announcements.
Shelve the babies books under due date and let them reach full gestation, file the booking forms press releases in an A4 folder divided into months and bingo, because books probably do feel like babies to their authors. I'd also be slightly more organised in my mood-driven slightly haphazard reading life and could if I felt so inclined read a book nearer to publication date rather than thinking I wanted and had to read everything that arrived on the day it arrived.
Well it's working like a dream but none of that was relevant to the arrival of Sweets From Morocco by Jo Verity and published by Honno Press because this book was already birthed and out there fending for itself.
I balked briefly at the nigh-on 500 pages because that's a good two weeks plus reading and, though I compartmentalise each book because I weave in about six at once, long books still need to be good to draw me back and hold my interest.
Well no word of a lie, hand on heart my soul gave a little leap when Sweets of Morocco's turn came around because I loved picking it up every single time.
It's 1954 and children Tessa and Lewis Swinburne are most unimpressed by the arrival of baby brother Gordon. So much so that Tessa hatches a magic voodoo plot to make him disappear which involves gathering together some Gordon-related items and leaving them with a plasticine replica baby in a distant telephone box (bet they pressed button B while they were in there). To their utter horror some weeks later Gordon disappears from his pram left outside the paper shop by Mr Swinburne and the family's troubles begin in earnest.
As a brief interlude and lest there be any doubt what 1950's English babies looked like in prams, here's baby dovegreyreader in hers and thankfully, to my knowledge, I wasn't snatched from it.
Understandably father Dick and mother Peggy are utterly devastated, Tessa and Lewis are wildly confused and frightened and at this point it becomes clear that life may never be the same for the Swinburnes ever again.
What follows is an exceptionally well-written book, structured around sections, thus moving from events in 1954 and catching up with the family in 1962 in Book II, 1968 in Book III, 1976 in Book IV and so on right up to 2005 in Book VII. This is a format that I find makes for hugely satisfying reading with the slow revelation and the subsequent discovery of what may have happened in the intervening years and Jo Verity handles it all with absolute precision.
The tendrils of the tragedy insinuate themselves into the lives of each member of the family as Gordon casts his lengthening shadow of absence and blights the future. Each reacts differently to this 1950s tragedy and it is the historical placement that resonates here. This was the era of post-war stoicism, no place for self-pity no matter what the circumstances, just pick yourself up, dust off, brush it under the carpet and get on with it. The days when lies, secrets and silence could pervade, because to share and acknowledge the grief would be to admit defeat, hadn't we just won a war with an armoury of stiff upper lips, defeat of any description wasn't in the 1950's psyche.
Compare to now with the plethora of counselling and revelation, our knowledge of the effects of grief and loss, the impact on children, all the sharing and talking therapies, coping strategies, resolution and closure all denied the poor Swinburnes and the desolation becomes inevitable. It is the children who are the prime focus and this works well, whilst never minimising the impact of the pain on Dick and Peggy, to have focused on it excessively would have meant 1000 pages. Jo Verity has resisted that temptation offering sufficient blue touch paper for this reader to ignite and retire to ponder from a safe distance.
I think comparisons to other books could be unhelpful because I'm mindful that as many readers here disliked Philip Hensher's The Northern Clemency as much as I lauded it, but if you did enjoy that for the portrayal and progression of ordinary lives over a period of time then I think you will love Sweets From Morocco.
As Jo Verity herself describes it,

'It's my job to help the reader appreciate how extraordinary 'ordinary' people can be; how well or badly or crazily they behave when a spanner is cast in the works.'

I'm also interested in this my first read from Honno Welsh Women's Press which I discover was established in 1986 as a community co-operative with a remit  'to develop the writing talents of women from Wales, giving them new and exciting opportunities to see their work published and often to give them their first break as a writer.'
Jo Verity already has the Richard & Judy Short Story Award on her mantlepiece and if she is writing novels like this perhaps she should keep some more mantlepiece space free, my thanks to Jo, Sweets From Morocco has been a cracking good read.