dovegreyreader scribbles

Petal Power : Floral Fashion and Women Designers at The Silver Studio 1910-1940

One of my favourite stopping-to-stare places when I am wandering around the Penlee House Museum and Gallery in Penzance is the display of Cryséde fabrics...

Designed in St Ives in the 1920s and 30s the fabrics seem suddenly timeless, and perhaps the inspiration for much of what I covet in clothing from Seasalt,  the Cornish-based company who are very much in the ascendant right now. I'm not sure I could face a winter without my Plant Hunter coat, whilst I have lived in my stripeys and skirts or my Coach House linen day dress this summer, and my Challah pinafore is already doing good service now the cooler weather is here. One piece per season is my treat and I take my time choosing it.

So with my interest in textiles and design always simmering I ordered a copy of this little book published by MODA (Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture), Petal Power : Floral Fashion and Women Designers at The Silver Studio 1910-1940, as the result of an Instagram post from Florence Knapp (aka flossieteacakes). Never let it be said social media doesn't have a place in book sales because, having spent some time on the trail of designers like Enid Marx this year, I would never have heard about this one otherwise. I am intrigued about the lives of other lesser known women using their artistic skills in the first half of the twentieth century.

Established in 1880 in Hammersmith, West London by Arthur Silver and taken over in 1901 by his son Rex, the Silver Studio employed many women as textile and wallpaper designers for clients who included Liberty & Co and Selfridges. The designers worked anonymously receiving no credit for their work and for very low wages, working for a stickler of a boss who certainly didn't mince his words when it came to demands, criticism or rejection of submitted designs.

It was fascinating to read that, at a time of limited career options for women, here was another route into work for those of artistic ability left unmarried or unsupported after the First World War. Whilst the male designers worked in the studio, the women had to work from home and were often sent a complex design brief but with no assurance of wages. Nor did the copyright belong to the artist or even the studio but to the buyer, who could then decide whether to put the design into production or not.

As Keren Protheroe elaborates, the work was very labour-intensive but not beyond the skills of the women, many of whom had received art school training and with it a sound foundation in drawing. With skills that were readily transferable to other mediums such as advertising and ceramics as well as calligraphy the women's versatility ensured ongoing work.

I was intrigued by the process of working in miniature before scaling up to a full-sized design all of which had to take into account colouring, re-colouring and pattern repeats, and the fact that scaling up could lose some of the 'prettiness' that Rex Silver was looking for. 

The book is just forty pages long but nicely illustrated with designs that evoke the era perfectly, and I saw plenty of iconic designs that I recognised. Women designers were assumed to be more in touch with the fabrics most likely to attract the female consumer and, as buyers for the large stores, were considered to have a commercial advantage over men in this respect.

Books about shops and shopping came to mind, Ladies Paradise by Emile Zola and High Wages by Dorothy Whipple,

' Shopping in department stores was central to the experience of fashionable modernity, whether it involved window shopping or actually purchasing. Swathes of fabric draped colourful shop-floor displays, and floral fabric could be bought by the yard for making up at home...Ready-to-wear clothing was readily available by the 1920s but wealthier women continued to employ designers and dressmakers.'

Mention of the department store and I wonder if you agree that you and I may be living through the era of its slow and tortuous demise. Long may John Lewis thrive, but both Plymouth and Exeter are to lose their House of Fraser stores (always known as Dingles) and Debenhams would seem to be on the ropes too. The hours my mum and I would spend in Grants and Allders in Croydon choosing fabric.

Does anyone remember Rose & Hubble in the early 1970s. I made plenty of these dresses and blouses with their floral designs...

Meanwhile Persephone Books have single-handedly increased our awareness of so many textile designs with their end papers, I even recognised this one in a tiny museum in Geraldine in New Zealand for goodness' sake...

So when I turned the page in Petal Power and saw this it immediately sent me to my shelves...

I'm not going to say which book features this design for a dress silk by Mrs McPherson, someone will know, but it was created in 1928 in the spirit of the French couturier and artistic-decorator Paul Poiret's Atelier Martine.and I recognised it as a Persephone end paper fabric instantly. And as Keren Protheroe says of these women...

'They represent the first generation of female designers to work directly with industry for large-scale textile production. Their careers helped pave the way for greater female influence in fabric design. Artistic sensibility, skilled draughtsmanship, and eye for the popular market allowed women to forge careers in the modern commercial world and become textile designers in their own right.'

And given that until now I had never heard of the Silver Studio, there was a timely coincidence as I sat down to write this...

The latest Biannually arrived from Persephone Books with news of their latest books and included the free bookmark. Mine was of the end paper for National Provincial by Lettice Cooper, of an early 1930's design for a woven cloth by John Churton for the Silver Studio.

 

 

Autumn on Dartmoor

Please do come for a virtual walk today because I am still walking out on Dartmoor each week with my Walking Friend if weather permits and I haven't taken you along for a while (though do usually put some pictures on Instagram <<<<) 

If weather permits means we can talk ourselves out of going out in the pouring rain and sit at the kitchen table and sew instead...

Can be persuaded to go if it's a bit drizzly but the seaweed promises an improvement...

And are mostly unstoppable if it's merely cold.

We had a splendid summer, even a bit of wild swimming in the River Dart, and some fabulous walks across open terrain that for once was unusually dry. Our big day-long challenge walk out to Cranmere Pool  saw the pair of us puffing up steep hills to reach the high moor before hopping over miles of bogs (these never dry up) to reach our destination. 

That little square stone box in the middle of the high moor that holds the visitors books and stamps.

Incidentally we both use these Osprey Women's 'Tempest 20' rucksacks and rate them as the most comfortable we have ever had. Even with a full load I can't really feel that I am wearing it. We both carry basic emergency equipment and first aid 'stuff', along with waterproofs, extra layers, maps and sundry items that we have deemed 'might come in useful if we were in a fix.' Plus a water bottle with a filter that can be filled from any water source. 

Last Wednesday dawned thick with mist here in the Tamar Valley but that is never a predictor of Dartmoor conditions so, as I drove towards my Walking Friend's cottage on the edge of the moor, what delight to see clear blue skies and wall-to-wall sunshine.

A few weeks ago we had planned a walk out to Grimspound along a small part of the Two Moors Way, starting up near the Warren House Inn, but we had been stymied by mist. On that day we decided if the sun was out we needed to enjoy it and so revised our plans and headed back down to the lower moor.

No such problem this time.

I'm not sure I have ever seen Dartmoor looking quite so lovely in autumn. It was heart-singing weather.

The temperature was 18 degrees, the sun actually burning faces as we strode out to Grimspound via Hookney Tor, putting the world to rights along the way, catching up on family news, debating the best place to buy some fairy lights and dissecting the Ikea experience amongst other issues of world importance. We have known each other for over forty years, are godmothers to each other's sons and just rub along happily in conversation or silence as we walk. I'm sure many of you will know and treasure these golden friendships too. We did a lot of stopping and staring because Dartmoor was breathtakingly beautiful and we never cease to be thankful that we live here and can walk it whenever we choose. 

The 'gurts', those gullies on the hillside clearly visible in the autumn shadows. These were the open-cast workings for the tin miners back in the days when Dartmoor yields were high. They would run water down the hillside and wash the ore down with it.

Grimspound is your original Bronze Age settlement, complete with the remains of twenty-four stone huts and this time we approached it from the top of Hookney Tor...

We always opt for the Chief's Hut and settle down with drink and snacks to take in the view. Looking across Headland Warren Farm and to that little white dot in the distance which is the Warren House Inn near where we have started from. 

It was here back in April that I took some video of the skylarks. Where do they go in winter we wondered and realised that neither of us really knew. Lower altitudes, coastal marshes and winter stubble, that's where. Hopefully they will be back in the spring.

Meanwhile, as if the gods hadn't been kind enough to us already it was Cauliflower Cheese soup on the menu at Fox Tor Cafe.

Next to Parsnip and Parmesan this is our absolute favourite.

Let joy be unconfined.

 

 

Peaceful reading :: A Time to Keep Silence ~ Patrick Leigh Fermor

We are now in recovery from the excitement of a couple of Ikea runs, choosing the sofa, having it delivered in sixteen boxes two days later when we thought it would take weeks, spending an entire Sunday building it, having three washers left over and not getting divorced, and now sitting (or rather reclining) on it. We bought a 'Gronlid' combination in the end with the chaise option at one end, say no more, I adore it, bring on winter, I'll cope.

And I have a little pile of peaceful, mindful reading on the chaise in progress at the moment which I thought I would share with you over the next few weeks; books to calm the nerves and realign spirits that may be feeling a little more depleted after each news bulletin.

 The first is A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor in which Patrick recounts his retreats in two monasteries capturing both the atmosphere and all its transforming qualities. 

'No automatic drains such as conversation, small talk, catching trains or the hundred anxious trivialities that poison every day life.'

That was 1957, imagine it now.

The assimilation of a strange new world creeps in gradually and not without some sense of inner panic verging on depression  at the solitude.

'The period during which normal standards recede and the strange new world becomes reality is slow, and, at first, acutely painful.'

That power to calm is quietly but powerfully wrought as Patrick Leigh Fermor feels his own life calming and slowing down in the midst of the monks and their daily round of prayer and contemplation....

'As the monks dispersed after Vespers and a few hours later after Compline, I had a sensation of the temperature of life falling to zero, the blood running thinner and slower as if the heart might in the end imperceptibly stop beating.'

Back in the middle of that hot summer we have just had I went along to an evening concert during the Exon Singers Festival, which comes to Tavistock for a week at the end of July each year. It was an evening of anthems amongst other things, Parry's I Was Glad, Handel's Halellujah Chorus, Zadok the Priest, sending shivers down my spine and lifting the roof off our ancient Parish Church. As part of the week-long church-based festival Compline is held every evening at the end of each concert. The candles are lit, the clergy and choir sing the antiphons and responses and time slips away, it could all be hundreds of years ago. As the last notes dissolve back into the ancient stonework I walked out of the church in silence into a summer's evening of complete peace. Our town's abbey, like so many, was a victim of Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, I passed the abbey ruins on the church green and it all made me wonder...had that not happened what might its fate have been.

I had been sitting in the North Aisle with a long view of the St Mary Magdalene Chapel with its William Morris window and the Fitz monument. Sir John in his armour (which he probably never wore in anger as he was a lawyer) who died in 1589 and his wife Mary.

On the wall by my pew the board with names of all the Abbots...

990 Aelfmaer
1009 - 27 Lyfing
1027 - 43 Ealdred
1043 - 82 Sihtric
1082 - 88 Geoffrey
1091 - 1102 Wymund

And so it went on, through Osbert, Robert, Walter, Godfrey, Baldwin, Herbert et al until the final name on the board 1523 - 1539 Peryn

'And on the morning of 3 March 1539 the twenty Tavistock monks gathered under their abbot in their beautiful octagonal chapter house, just as their predecessors had done for five and a half centuries. They were faced with an ultimatum to surrender to the Crown the abbey and its lands. The monks duly signed the deeds of surrender and went their ways...the finest of the abbey's ornaments and fixings were dispatched to London....'

Other sundry items were bought by the churchwardens with 'two-pennyworth of drink for anyone who volunteered to help carry the items on their short journey to the parish church' where I had just been sitting.

'The physical loss that followed the dissolution was the destruction or decay of beautiful buildings....at a level more immediate and more profound the loss was of an institution that was both civilising and supportive of the local community. Tavistock in 1539 must have been a town in which shock and disbelief gave way to alarm and foreboding.'

With their tendency to be domineering and pocket taxes there may have been some relief at the loss of the abbey, but there was much 'worried pessimism' too. The monks ran the school, healed the sick, supported the poor, conducting a whole range of social services...'the economic prospects looked equally hazardous'. The abbey employed large numbers of people...centuries of economic management were now under threat...tourism was surely destined to dive. The keynote was uncertainty, all the familiar props had been removed.

This is 1539 by the way not 2018, in case you were sensing similarities to our current predicament here in the UK, and my thanks to the late Gerry Woodcock's wonderful book Homage to St Eustachius's A History of Tavistock Parish Church for this enlightening background and the sense that plus ca change when it comes to turmoil.

Patrick Leigh Fermor considers the fate of the monasteries too, exploring their place 'as the only guardians of literature, the classics, scholarship and the humanities' for many centuries. France ultimately fared no better than Britain, the French Revolution saw to that apparently. Monks scattered, libraries split up, buildings sold or demolished, but the faith lived on as did the order, indestructible in the face of persecution and ready for reinstatement when the time was right. Patrick offers a deep and insightful reasoning for the existence of these orders in the modern world needed then and well.... many would argue still very much needed now...

'They are the anonymous well-wishers who reduce the moral overdraft of mankind.'

You have to wonder where it all leaves us in the twenty-first century and the digital age, because times have certainly a-changed since Patrick Leigh Fermor escaped from the daily round to write a book or two.

If you haven't come across digitalnun maybe check her out. Dame Catherine Wybourne is bringing the Benedictine Order right up to speed with her internet presence, forging an innovative online version of Benedictine welcome and hospitality. You can find her as a daily prayerful presence on both Twitter  (where she has twenty thousand followers) and also on Facebook.

A Time to Keep Silence is a very special little book, less than a hundred pages of intense and precious reflection which I have read often. It's a book for the spirit; to calm, to uplift and to encourage, especially when the world order at large seems slightly chaotic, and either out of anyone's control or in dubious hands.

If you don't know it I can highly recommend, and if you do I would love to know your thoughts.

 

 

 

 

Housekeeping gremlins...

I could pretend that I'm an expert in all this but I won't... and Magnus hasn't been much help either.

My apologies if the scribbles have been a bit slow to load (or not loading at all) over the last few days. Typepad have been experiencing 'issues' perhaps associated with the fact that their blog platform is now https compatible. If I knew what I was talking about I could explain it all, but the most I know is that there's now a padlock on the search bar and the site does not now flag up as 'untrusted' on google searches (maybe).

Apologies too for the muddle that is Instagram over here <<<<<. 

The old widget wasn't compatible with the https 'thing' so I am in the process of removing that and finding and embedding new codes ( can you feel my pain) when I can remember where to do that. Please don't click on it until it shows images again. Some nice Dartmoor ones from today.

And while I am about it, apologies to those who follow the blog via Facebook. Facebook have changed their somethingorothers and the automatic link is now incompatible until Typepad make it friends again.

Oh and another thing, if you receive the blog via email I am reliably informed that the posts are heading straight for the junk mail rather than the inbox. I'm not even going to try and say anything funny about this but maybe, if you do happen to read this and think I've been quiet for a while (I never am without an explanation), check your junk files and see if you can find me in amongst the emails telling you about the enormous inheritance you are party to, or 'much worse.' Maybe add filters to make sure the emails arrive where you want them to.

Normal service will be resumed once I've had a lie down.

UPDATE: Instagram now sorted

 

 

 

Ngaio Marsh - Her Life in Crime ~ Joanne Drayton

I mentioned I'd had a birthday recently. It was one of 'those' birthdays, the one that is halfway between two big ones. I had a lovely day, spoke to all my chicks and had lovely gifts from them...birdfeeders and enough fat balls to feed the village from the Gamekeeper, a bright yellow notebook (for winter cheer) and pen holder from the Kayaker, and a parcel from Offspringette in New Zealand that included Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime by Joanne Drayton. I don't know about you but if someone gives me the gift of a book, whoever it may be, it becomes a special read. It has been chosen for me, just me and I was quickly into this one...

'While Ngaio Marsh had a flamboyant public persona, she was fiercely protective of her private life. And no one knows better how to cover tracks with red herrings and remove incriminating evidence than a crime fiction writer…Marsh one of the four Queens of Golden Age detective fiction, alongside Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and Margery Allingham.'

My Women's Lives shelves are bursting with biographies about women writers (mostly), and I had recently thought I should try and read of one life each month or so and then read something they had written. As she had just arrived, and as I was pining a little because I was in New Zealand this time last year, I made a start with Ngaio and emerged a few days later really impressed with her and what a good egg she was.

Born in Christchurch on South Island in 1895, the only child of good and doting parents, Ngaio grew up in the city, her family making their home out on the Port Hills. The Port Hills one of the first places I go to when I arrive for a visitation for the fabulous perspective on the city, the view across Lyttleton to Diamond Harbour and the sheer vastness of the land where I will spend the next three weeks. 

Despite regular trips abroad it was to the family home, Marton Cottage in Cashmere, that Ngaio would always return for her entire life, never marrying but making countless cherished friends who shared her life. Ngaio's Christmas Tree party the stuff of legends apparently.

I was intrigued to read of a devastating incident in her father's life. A bank worker of the most diligent variety, imagine Henry Marsh's dismay on discovering at the end of a working day that his till, for which he was personally responsible, was £500 short. With a fair idea of who was responsible for the theft, but with no way of proving it, Henry had to pay back the money, a vast sum, from an inheritance, leaving the family short of money but, it would seem never short of love. 

Educated in Christchurch before enrolling in the city's art school I was interested to read of Ngaio's close association with many of the artists I had come to know and love during my last visit. I spent a lot of time wandering around the art gallery and then borrowing books from the library (on Offspringette's ticket) which is how I came to read biographies of both Rita Angus and Olivia Spencer Bower while I was there. Both, I now discover, friends and peers of Ngaio...

I fell madly in love with Rita Angus's painting Cass Station, going back to see it at least three times, and then going back one last time to say goodbye to it.

but also stopping at the real Cass Station just so we could say I had been there...

In fact, as Joanne Drayton points out, Ngaio and her friends were the cream of the art school..

'Collectively they represented a phenomenal blossoming of post-war female talent. Not only did they share the ambition to become professional painters, but they knew it was an unconventional role.'

Ngaio would share a studio with Viola Macmillan Brown whose painting Across the Plains I was also standing in front of this time last year. It is the view from Cashmere and might it be a fair assumption that this was painted near to Ngaio's home.... I'd like to think so, and then like to take the liberty of imagining the two of them painting plein-air together

Ngaio was indeed an expert at covering her personal tracks and traces making a biography a difficult task, but she was also a generous and sociable woman. Not only a writer and artist but also a theatre director of note, and with many excellent productions to her name, all of which has left a trail out there which Joanne Drayton has followed assiduously, making this a hugely enjoyable read. Not the least of these trails is the critical reception received by her crime fiction..

'Commentators were now consistently identifying the qualities that set Ngaio apart from the plethora of other detective writers: her characterisation, her narrative ability, her ingenuity, and especially her humour, which performs the important function of making them more palatable.'

Hugely popular in the UK and a regular visitor here, eventually being made a Dame, it was interesting  to learn that the war was no deterrent to the ascendency of the crime novel. As Joanne Drayton elaborates...

People continued to read crime fiction while bombs rained down and vast casualty lists were posted. Special pocket-sized editions of detective novels were produced for easy reading in bomb shelters and lending libraries posted crime sections close to bunker entrances. The demand for intriguing puzzle plots would soar.'

My one Ngaio Marsh book to date is an audio version of Surfeit of Lampreys which I enjoyed immensely and I have especially enjoyed discovering the background to the book and of Ngaio's friendship with the Rhodes family. Childless herself, Ngaio paid special and caring attention to the children of friends, often making financial provision for their education.

I have a very modest shelf of Ngaio Marsh's crime novels and will be interested to see if they stand the test of time given that I find Agatha Christie nigh on impossible to read. Had I read her as a teenager I think the die of a lifelong attraction would have been cast, but I didn't and I just can't make the Christie books work now. I have greater hopes for Ngaio Marsh now that I know so much more about her. A jolly good egg indeed, good to be reminded that here was a woman of many talents and an excellent book, highly recommended.

Meanwhile, I'm sure there must be plenty of Ngaio Marsh fans out there, do you have an recommendations..

And while we are on the subject of crime, any more good crime reads lately..

In fact, let's extend that to thrillers as well...

 

 

 

Year of Wonder - Classical Music for Every Day ~ Clemency Burton-Hill

’So, know this: what lies ahead is not some white girl with a posh name telling you that you ‘should’ listen to classical music every day in order to somehow become a better, smarter or more classy person. I have no interest in making you feel ashamed because you have never heard of some of these composers or their music...’

This is a promising start from musician and Radio Three presenter Clemency Burton-Hill in the introduction to her book Year of Wonder, recommended by one of you in comments recently and for which I am so grateful. I knew in an instant that this was the right book for me, and very quickly treated myself to a copy on the basis that at about 0.05479452p per day this represented exceptionally good value for a year of listening to a piece of classical music chosen for me each day. The book is sensibly square-bound so no crushing or spine-cracking required; it's a detail that matters to book-lovers like thee and me.

This in Clemency Burton-Hill’s introduction appealed to me as well...

‘What I am determined to do, though, is to extend a hand to those who feel that the world of classical music is a party to which they haven’t been invited...’

That felt just a little like me.

Despite the fact that my dad was a Royal Marine's Boy Bugler, drummer and flautist, I don’t come from a musical family or have a classical music background. If I play any instruments it’s because I have taught myself (guitar and flute, the latter poorly). We were a post-war Light Service radio family with the addition of the The New Seekers and Perry Como’s greatest hits when we finally acquired a radiogram. We were certainly exposed to classical music at Primary School, but really only Kathleen Ferrier because the headmistress worshipped her, and Peter and the Wolf because every 1950's schoolchild listened to that on the weekly school's radio programme. I didn’t really discover classical music until I left home, bought a little stereo unit for my student nurse’s room and quietly started to explore for myself with LPs for 99p. I probably began with Rodrigo’s Concerto de Aranjuez and it grew from there. Interestingly my mum and dad likewise started to extend their listening repertoire at the same time... my mum adored ballet music and my dad accumulated anything and everything he fancied. It’s as if they were making up for what their working class wartime childhoods had never provided and which there was never the money or the confidence to provide for me. 

Slowly but surely, I’ve worked my way through a great deal, whilst singing in church choirs for many years has also helped, yet I still really don’t know my Bach from my Beethoven if pressed and feel hopelessly inadequate in conversations about opera (which I loath) and the Proms (which I love). If you had any sort of education in classical music, or learned an instrument as a child how fortunate you were coming to it all at a young age. But better late than never etc. I have slowly built up my classical music repertoire over the years, and yet I still feel there is so much I must have missed, and Year of Wonder is most certainly filling in the gaps.

I was reassured that I could jump in and start listening no matter the date so I backdated a few days to September 26th, my birthday and a lovely Schubert song, and have slotted in a daily listen ever since. New composers, new pieces of music, some familiar  some completely unknown and alongside a brief written explanation from Clemency Burton-Hill. I even forgave the inclusion of Philip Glass once I read her reasons for choosing it. It is a well-recognised moment each day in our house when Radio 3 ‘goes all Cage or Glass on me’ and I creep back to Classic FM. 

I downloaded Spotify, figured out what to do next without having to ask a child, and now have the Year of Wonder playlist at the ready each day and look forward to the moment when I sit down for my listen. I warn Bookhound that I am in the world of the noise-cancelling headphones so won’t hear a thing happening in the world, and to come and get me if there’s a fire, and then I’m away.

So thank you again to the recommender, this would be an excellent one for the C*******s list, or to give as a gift.

Meanwhile I wonder if any of you recognise my experience of classical music..

Or were you raised with it all resonating around the house...

Piano lessons from an early age...

Or self-taught...

I’d love to know.

 

The Long Take ~ Robin Robertson

 

I have been a bit slothful about reading the Man Booker prize lists for the last few years but it's the announcement tonight so I'd better make an effort.

Gone are the years of the Bookerthon when I would read them all and make predictions, but nevertheless I waded into the long list with some gusto, reading Warlight by Michael Ondaatje and Sabrina by Nick Drnaso and lauding both of them for different reasons. Then The Leg happened and August was swallowed up with caring, and before I knew it the short list was out, minus Michael Ondaatje, and I'll confess to a bit of a sulk at Warlight's  omission.

However one book had caught my eye, and this in the wake of my June-long read of a book a day of The Odyssey in Emily Wilson's new translation. That experience left me in step with both the epic and the Homeric and I sensed both in  The Long Take by Robin Robertson and published by Picador..

'A noir narrative written with the intensity and power of poetry, The Long Take is one of the most remarkable – and unclassifiable – books of recent years...'

I detected many Odyssean similarities as I read of Walker, a survivor of the D Day landings, an army veteran from Nova Scotia who, after the war, pitches up in New York in 1946. The city is too much for him...

'If he stayed here
he'd end up in the East River, or Hart Island
with the stillborn, the nameless, the indigent dead.
He could feel the coal seam crackling underground.
He'd leave now. Tomorrow.
He'd try to get out.'

Walker travels west across America to Los Angeles in an attempt to shake off the traumas of the past and start a new life. Unlike Odysseus there has been no wife and family waiting patiently for him at home after the war, in fact there has been nothing to return home for, and so Walker must effectively start over but with what becomes clear is the intolerable burden of his wartime experiences. Los Angeles might be the most distant geographical shore from the beaches of France but there will be no escape from the traumas.

'As he lay in bed, he saw that
trying to forget was the same as trying to remember.
A lifetime's work and damn near impossible.'

Seemingly innocent triggers in the present ignite and inflame memories from the past, as Walker attempts to hold down a job as newspaper reporter against a backdrop of the homeless, the destitute, and the incongruous presence in its midst of Hollywood film-making. The irony of the film-makers, busy on the streets of Los Angeles creating an alternative reality for the masses, is powerful and threads through the book. The reality for many returning servicemen is unemployment, debts, gambling, addiction, loneliness, vagrancy and despair as American society also seems to fall apart around them....demolitions and earthquakes serve to emphasise this broken post-war world in desperate need of repair.

'You know something...
The war made sense at the time :
all in black and white, good and evil they said.
We came back to somewhere different
-those who came back at all -
every place full of people chasing something,
but no jobs for us, the guys who fought, 'y'know,
fought for freedom.'

The Bunker Hill slum clearances, where Walker had made his home, are referenced as is much else by Robin Robertson, so if you know Los Angeles the book will have real echoes for you.

Please don't be put off by notions of poetry combined with history, as a bit 'off the wall' and 'not my sort of thing' in latter-day fiction, as I almost was. This isn't the gimmicky Booker listing to fill the Oddball Slot, this is storytelling at its finest, taking it back to its origins and in fact might be the most profoundly genuine book on the shortlist (I haven't read the others I couldn't possibly comment). It reads as a novel minus all the extraneous wordage, distilling the experience and the meaning to its essence.

And whilst Post Traumatic Stress Disorder might not be high up the list of concerns for the collective social conscience of 2018, up against slavery or ecological disaster, this book feels just as profoundly important. Especially so given that Walker's experience was unrecognisable and largely dismissed in the 1940s and 50s and remains an invisible blight in the lives of servicemen today. This despite the lessons we should have learned from the shell shock traumas of the Great War.

'If only he could drain his eyes of all they'd seen,' thinks Walker towards the end of the book, as the memories of the traumas mount, the guilt surfaces and he makes an excruciatingly painful confession (thinking of those themes in Melmoth, these books, read in tandem spoke to each other in my mind). The final revelations are both stark, brutal and harrowing, but Robin Robertson is a safe pair of hands and has prepared his reader carefully. I had arrived at this point gradually in the previous 200 pages, I was alongside Walker and needed to know, for his sake. I won't reveal what happens next or how I felt, for fear of spoiling, but it was utterly convincing.

As I stiffen the sinews and brace myself to read The Iliad sometime this winter I realised that this book is a Homeric Iliad and and Odyssey of our time. It is an achievement of epic proportions and I would love to see a Man Booker jury brave enough to choose it as a winner, because The Long Take surely deserves a place in the pantheon of Books to Be Recognised and Remembered.

Meanwhile does anyone have any more Man Booker reading to report..

And at the risk of causing unrest (please don’t take this personally America) has interest in the literary bunfight diminished since the submission criteria was extended to include the USA....

 

 

 

 

A Trip West for the North Cornwall Book Festival

Well not that far west actually, just  across to Cornwall for a book festival held there last week.

To be honest I'm ready for winter hibernation after September and Budleigh LitFest. It marks the end of my literary forays within distance of home until the next year, having soaked up enough inspiration and new books to read to last me through the winter. I was persuaded out of the cave by author Patrick Gale, Artistic Director of the North Cornwall Book Festival, now in its sixth year, who suggested on Twitter how awful it would be for me to wake up in February and to have run out of books. 

This is true.

I booked tickets for Bookhound (plus his sketchbook) and I to hear Horatio Clare and Natalie Haynes on what turned out to be a glorious October Sunday. Passports and visas at the ready we crossed the Tamar and made our way thirty miles to the north Cornish coast and St Endellion. It's actually on the road to Port Quin which was one of my dad's favourite little haunts. There's a story (maybe myth, maybe truth) that all the men from Port Quin set off to fish and were lost at sea in a terrible storm, leaving grieving widows and children behind whose cries you can still hear on the wind. The little cove was deserted back in the 1960s (now National Trust holiday cottages) and my dad would ham it up on the beach there as he told this little tale, and we'd all try to feel the sorrow whilst struggling to keep a straight face.

I actually thought Horatio Clare was talking abut his latest book, published by Little Toller, about his walk to Lubeck in the footsteps of Bach but I'd got that wrong, we were on a Finnish icebreaker and travelling to the Arctic. Never mind. Horatio Clare (you might recall how much I enjoyed his childhood memoir Running for the Hills here) is a brilliant raconteur and his tales of the journey and the revelations and the people had everyone transfixed. Put him in a choir and I suspect he'd be the life and soul of the bass section, he has a very resonant and easy-to-listen to voice.

Bookhound sketched while Horatio talked...

 

I nipped off to the bookshop afterwards and bought The Light in the Dark - A Winter Journal and have ordered a copy of Something of His Art which is published later this month.

Just enough time for a hot drink and to look askance at the Cornish JAM FIRST ON THE SCONES when everyone knows how wrong that is, before going back to the marquee to hear Classicist and stand-up comedian Natalie Haynes.

Demystifier of the Classics, Natalie had us rolling politely in the aisles (this is Cornwall after all) whilst marvelling at her memory for all this, as she gave us the classical take on money, philosophy, town and country (the mice, rusticusmus and urbanusmus) and so much more. Leading figures were helpfully given their screen equivalents ( Jacobi, Biggins, Blessed et al) so we could all nod intelligently as if we knew exactly who they all were. With a hawk-eye on her audience (Patrick Gale may wish he hadn't been talking at the back) you really daren't move a muscle for fear of being drawn into the narrative. It was dazzling and hugely entertaining and certainly left us breathless and awestruck. Natalie Haynes must have needed a good lie down, surely at least 2000 calories used up.

And so I must now add this little book festival to my annual itinerary. I say 'little' because it is, small and intimate, with a very rural and unpretentious atmosphere (dogs were welcome and seemed to be enjoying the events) whilst punching well above its weight given we are in tent in a field in north Cornwall...

The guest speakers this year included Fiona Mozley, Wyl Menmuir, poets Andrew Macmillan and Kate Clanchy, writers Philip Hoare, Joanna Trollope, Neil Ansell, Nina Stibbe, Jill Murphy and Anne Enright travelling from her home in Dublin. The festival reaches out to local schools with workshops and events for the children, and various exhibitions and musical concerts alongside. All part of a Endelienta, a wider local arts initiative that organises a summer music festival as well as regular events throughout the year.

I'm guessing this is how other literary festivals began; small and compact with affordable tickets (£6) and then before you know it, sprawling over ten days, several acres, tickets are £15 and 'celebrities' are being flown in by helicopter. Really there's no need the B3314 is perfectly adequate. So I'm hoping that one of the key aims for this festival in the future is to thrive and remain economically viable whilst bringing literature to an out-of-the-way place away from the main centres, and to retain the intimate, uncrowded, relaxed and cosy atmosphere that we both enjoyed so much.

I'm sure I've asked you before but please do add more suggestions about these smaller festivals in comments if you know of them...we'll keep it just between ourselves and hope they don't lose that sense of small is good.

 

NB Correction made...Anne Enright was actually there, not on a video-link from Dublin... I have no idea why I thought that. 

Melmoth ~ Sarah Perry

Right...you might need a pot of tea for this one because I'm not interested in reading Melmoth at all am I.

Not one bit.

The social media hype for the book has been relentless for six months, we've definitely all known 'Melmoth is coming'. In fact I wonder about the impact of that on an author these days, I would be worrying myself sick about the burden of expectation unless I was Dame Hilary. As a reader I have to confess to some weariness in the waiting.

Can hype cancel itself out I wonder....

Gothic horror? No, not my bag, not really...

Some lacklustre reviews just cemented this pre-conditioned avoidance in my head and now I wonder about that too...

Do those sort of reviews deter or encourage a reader?  

 However I was weakening and then I read Sarah Perry's piece in the Guardian Review...

'Melmoth is not an opium novel but it is certainly on opioid one, and a gabapentin one, and a diazepam one. After writing it I have come to understand literary drug culture as being more properly a culture of pain...'

Sarah Perry goes on to describe her own experiences of pain and torment, the result of a ruptured spinal disc eventually alleviated by surgery and through it all the envisioning and writing of Melmoth. It all necessitated a shift in the author's long-held opinions about 'the cult of the drug-addled artist', previously held in contempt...

'I was in some respects a prig, I suppose, and prided myself on my priggishness, and the pride preceded a fall; for what I have on my hands now is a novel that was written while high.'

Well I felt a very slight affinity because the scribbles here were born as a result of a period of acute and excruciating pain almost thirteen years ago now. The community nurse's perk, some sort of mysterious stray virus that had lodged as a neuritis in my brachial plexus, and you might as well have been drilling through my upper arms with a Black and Decker, which would have been infinitely preferable. I was off work for months, reading like a demon in my drug-fuelled state (War & Peace through sleepless nights, the endless Battle of Borodino a welcome and happy release) and began writing here for something to keep my mind occupied, just for a few weeks you understand. It was the gabapentin that caught my attention because I was away with the fairies on it too and had to stop taking it.

And so, I was dithering about Melmoth until I woke up on publication day, Tuesday October 2nd, ordered a copy online to collect from Waterstones in Plymouth, announced to dear long-suffering Bookhound that I really needed this book today, and off we went on the forty-two mile round trip.

I started reading it in the shop.

Helen Franklin is a translator living in Prague. She is quiet, self-contained, reclusive, anti-social and not averse to some self-denial in her pursuit of an ordinary uneventful life. It is clear that Helen is atoning for something, the question is what. 

'What might commend so drab a creature to your sight, when overhead the low clouds split and the upturned bowl of a silver moon pours milk onto the river...'

Prague, at times, becomes something of a hinterland and with as powerful a sense of place as I have ever read. I've never visited but now feel as if I have.

'Look! It is winter in Prague: night is rising in the mother of cities and over her thousand spires. Look down at the darkness around your feet, in all the lanes and alleys as if it were a soft black dust swept there by a broom; look at the stone apostles on the old Charles Bridge, and at all the blue-eyed jackdaws on the shoulders of St John of Nepomuk.'

People various, both past and present, walk onto the Melmoth stage with stories to be told, fates to be revealed...

Thea and Karel Prazan, the academic couple who befriend Helen...

Josef Hoffman, the enigmatic old man in the university library...

His wartime childhood neighbours, Franz and Freddie Bayer...

Sir David Ellerby and his testament of 1637 about Alice Benet...

Albina Horakova. The landlady, malicious, unkind and malevolent, the complete obverse of her name, a sort of living jackdaw in her black dresses, the visible tangible presence of the macabre that builds as do the mysterious birds..

And, through the stories within stories, both victims and perpetrators of past evil and horrors are accompanied by the spectre of Melmoth: the woman who, having denied any sighting of the risen Christ after the resurrection is consigned to a life of barefoot wandering and eternal witness to the evils and pain of the world.

'So she was cursed not with death, but with deathlessness: to wander the earth until Christ returns - one hoped for her sake, in a forgiving frame of mind - condemned always to appear where all's most cheerless, dark and deadly.'

Sarah Perry chooses her pivotal moments of evil in world history with care, introducing Melmoth as a sort of peripatetic conscience, to bear witness and haunt those who find their sins have caught up with them. Melmoth perches on the shoulders of the guilty begging them to walk with her, jackdaws are ever-present, and therein doth madness lie. Helen Franklin will be no exception, yet when her past is revealed...well the reader must make up their own mind, but may also ask themselves 'what might I have done?'

Incidentally my search for the Perfect Bookmark led me straight to Janis Goodman's etching (please don't tell me they are actually crows) and worryingly I have now been noticing jackdaws everywhere since I turned the final page.

Melmoth had me pinned to my chair for two days, with the final chapters gripping to the very last page and the final twists cunningly concealed that had me turning back to the first page to start the book again with this newly-granted vision. It all reminded me of the total-immersion reading experience that was Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell years ago (don't be put off if that book wasn't to your liking, it's the similarity of experience I am trying to describe not a comparison of the titles) and it worked on many levels. On the surface post-modern gothic horror of The-Woman-in-Black genre, with imagination running riot and fear rippling through the pages (hairs - nape of neck etc.) though I have to admit to not feeling overly spooked or scared because, drilling beneath all that, Melmoth became a book about so much more. And I think this 'so much more' might be different for each reader.

For me this was about evil, about being punished, about shrugging it off, about acting on and living with it, about mercy and redemption but above all, for me, this was a book about guilt.

Sarah Perry says this in her article...

'The problem with describing pain, of course, is that you can no more know what I mean by torment than I can know what you mean by love...'

And it could be argued likewise about guilt and perhaps shame, both of which are writ large here. Melmoth made me think about so much more than was on the page and to ask questions of myself and try, sometimes in vain, to answer them, and in a world that can seem increasingly unconscionable and cruel. It extended to thoughts about the lesser part played in the greater evil, the complicity of silence, of guilt by association, of turning a blind eye. It seemed, at times, as if this is exactly what a reader was meant to do...to be allowed to get to know the characters on the page only so much before turning the spotlight on themselves. 

It is no good telling a guilt-ridden person that they have nothing to feel guilty about. Guilt is as relevant and personal as pain and love, and living with the consequences can be equally hard. My starting point for thinking about guilt (and as a health visitor you can have no idea how much of my day was spent counselling young mothers who felt guilty about everything)  has long been the premise that everyone did the best they could with the knowledge, information and skills at their disposal at the time. As Paul Gilbert elaborates in his book The Compassionate Mind...

'The American psychologist Martin Hoffman sees guilt as related to sympathy and empathy. Adult guilt, therefore is linked to compassion and a desire to care for others. If we don't care about others, why would we be bothered with guilt?'

We live in a world where every heartbeat seems to pump guilt our way if we are susceptible to it; it could and does bring vulnerable souls down given a foot in the door, and to watch Helen Franklin's self-imposed imprisonment is testament to this. 

Melmoth is arguably a book that will mean different things to different readers, surely the sign of a great book. Much might depend on a reader's life view and experiences, the place where they are now. Some may find it chilling and disturbing, others may find it revealing of greater depths, but one thing is for sure, you will be thinking about it long after you have finished it because it is a book that continues to unwrap its layers.

Oh and maybe something else for sure...you will see jackdaws everywhere when you might not have noticed them before, but small price to pay for reading what I thought might be a 'fail' for me, but which has been transformed into another of my best reads of 2018.

And yes, before you ask, I will now give The Essex Serpent another chance (wrong moment, wrong reader, maybe right book) as well as seeking out her first novel After Me Comes the Flood because, as Susan Hill suggests, 'Sarah Perry is the real deal.' 

If you have read any or all by Sarah Perry I would love to know your thoughts...

And does hype weary you to the point of deterrent...

And likewise, what about lacklustre book reviews... do they put you off or make you want to read a book to find out for yourself...

For anyone near Cambridge for the forthcoming Literary Festival, Sarah Perry and Sarah Moss will be in conversation with Alex Clark on November 25th at 4pm. I can't think of a more dazzling, fascinating pairing or a better chair, so if anyone is going please do report back for us.

 

 

 

 

 

The Long View ~ Elizabeth Jane Howard

Mention of The Long View by Elizabeth Jane Howard reminded me that I had read and written about the book here a couple of years ago, so I have been down to the basement to dust off that post and also to revisit my EJH shelf for some more reading...

If there is one sure-fire way to pique my curiosity in any book it is to include an introduction by Hilary Mantel. 

And so The Long View by Elizabeth Jane Howard arrived suitably adorned with the sacred words...

And I only had to read Hilary's opening gambit, quoted above, to know that here was a book I would stay with, because if there was one thing I loved about Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies it was that sense of sitting in the room as an interested observer.

I would like to say I met Elizabeth Jane Howard at an event I spoke at some years ago in celebration of the writer Elizabeth Taylor. Truth is we were in the same room and I don't think she noticed me, but I most certainly noticed her. In a wheelchair, clearly impaired with her breathing, motoring in late having got lost so Philip Hensher had been cleverly 'filling in' but he deftly stepped to one side when Jane (as she was known, thank you Hilary) arrived with a flourish. Every last ounce of her beauty and personality still very much in evidence as she spoke eloquently about her friendship with Elizabeth Taylor.

Of Jane, having outlined the stellar success of the 'Cazalet Chronicles', Hilary says this...

'It would be rewarding if the thousands of readers who enjoyed the series were drawn to the author's earlier work. There was a time when her talent was so unstoppable, that there was no predicting where it might take her. From the beginning she attracted superlatives...from the first she was a craftswoman...'

I was intrigued to discover more for myself and quickly realised that, with its attention to nuances of atmosphere, here was an object lesson in detailing the visual for the reader's imagination, as well as plenty of acerbic observation on the human condition. Every page, and I mean every page, is freighted with tangible atmosphere as the sense of place and the life and loves and foibles of the family are laid bare.

I really can't describe the power of Elizabeth Jane Howard's writing any better than Hilary..

'She feels the chilly breeze in the street and the chilly draught of misgiving in the heart. In the moment feelings are experienced, they are described: they are pinned to the page.'

The Long View is a journey back in time, starting in 1950 as the family gather to celebrate son Julian's engagement to June, each book, whilst subtracting the years, adds reasons and explanations. as it moves back through 1942, 1937 , 1927 and finally to 1926. The Antonia and Conrad Fleming and their three children first met become more knowable people...the philandering, controlling Conrad...

'He simply added, as it were, another storey to the structure of his personality, and invited the lady in question to pout herself temporarily in possession...'

The seemingly subservient Antonia...

'She had been loved and touched and fashioned; dominated, protected and ignored...'

And whilst the reader may pass judgement on Conrad's behaviour, and Antonia's acquiesence, somehow Elizabeth Jane Howard maintains an even hand (it can't have been easy) revealing remarkable insights into both the male and the female psyche. There is a breathtaking moment as Conrad reflects on his own life and the complex dilemmas of reconciling wife and mistress, the jealousy, the infatuation, the obsession, when Hilary Mantel's words in the introduction rang true and clear..

'Conrad Fleming...is a man of unblemished conceit, immaculate selfishness. Young women readers today may view him with incredulity. They should not. He is faithfully recorded. He is the voice of the day before yesterday, and also the voice of ages past...'

Here is the book that keeps on giving because the immediate impulse on reading the final chapter is to read the first one again.

I feel sure many of you will have read The Long View and doubtless the other early works of Elizabeth Jane Howard, and know of what I write. It is me who is very late to this party and now with some wonderful catching up to do. Hilary Mantel goes on to debate exactly why these books may have slipped below the radar and are so seriously underestimated, and her conclusions are riveting...

Books categorized as 'by women, for women,'

Enjoyed but disparaged...

Perfection inviting contempt...

Judgements about Elizabeth Jane Howard's personal life contaminating judgements on her work...

I can't recommend a read of this introduction highly enough, offering as it does confirmation of attitudes and assumptions that still need some shifting.

This edition of The Long View (with Hilary Mantel's twelve page introduction) is published by Picador as part of its Classics series, highlighting some of those great voices and and bringing neglected classics back into print. It is a classic in every sense, a keeper on my shelves, and how delighted I am to have discovered it eventually.

The Masterclass with Dame Hilary Mantel @BudleighLitFest

I'm still wittering on, to anyone who will listen, about the Masterclass given at Budleigh LitFest by Dame Hilary Mantel, which means Bookhound and Magnus are well-versed in all aspects of the two hours that I sat in on the four hour session. I'd only meant to stay for first ten minutes or so...

I overcame the temptation to just sit and be over-awed and took copious notes which are now like gold-dust to me, and as a few of you have asked for more details I will share a few nuggets. I won't flesh them out with too many of my own words so this may all seem a bit disjointed, but it wasn't it flowed so I hope you can get a sense of the wealth of information that was shared.

The premise of the class, in Hilary's words (I'm dropping the 'Dame' and the 'Mantel' which I hope is OK) was to address the fact that so many of the questions she is asked at the end of any talk are about process, and there is never enough time to answer them. This leads to a sense of short-changing people about this long and never-ending road to becoming a writer and wanted to offer more, explaining, with apologies to any experienced writers in the room, that she would treat everyone as a beginner because 'I am one too, every time I sit at my desk to write.'

What followed was an extraordinary thing...

An incredibly generous thing from a modest and self-effacing writer who displays no over-weaning sense of her own importance whatsoever.

Because there we all were, sitting in the room with this country's Greatest Writer (let's not mess about with 'One of...') and we were privy to everything Hilary had wished she'd known when she started out...

All the things that didn't go well...

The first twelve years when she published one short story and earned £100 in total...

The trajectory of A Place of Greater Safety, written over a five year period from 1974 at the age of twenty-two, 300,000 words that nobody wanted; demanding historical fiction was out of fashion. The book would eventually be published in 1993 (and I'm on page 400...now listening to the audio version while I sew or knit, which feels highly appropriate.)

Patience and self-belief were the watchwords because there is no such thing as 'overnight success', this takes a lifetime.

It was encouraging to hear that nothing is wasted, not even the most unproductive day because 'everything remains in potential.' And also to hear that it is common to get stuck at some point in a book.

And don't believe that every good idea is a novel. Don't assume and experiment with different mediums. 

We were all very amused to hear that Hilary has returned to nursery school, using coloured pens, drawing, and much cutting-out, gluing and sticking as she works.

The advice around using your own experience was invaluable and backed up by some interesting encounters in Hilary's life whilst teaching a writing class. Don't write off your own experiences as dull, 'everyone has a pot of gold in their possession.' You are the sum of your own experience, it's where your voice is.

Live with the incomplete. You don't have to resolve everything for your reader. Arouse their need and mobilise their own sense of possibility.

A good writer has to be a good reader. It is where you absorb templates and build resources.

I was fascinated by the suggestion about each person's life paths not taken, and how feasible (and permissible) it is to 'imagine' these into your writing...let those inner people out for some exercise on the paper, nurture an openness to these lives and the ideas will come.

There were several book recommendations along the way, namely

Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande. Published in 1934 you need no other book about writing. It is universally true and helpful.

Except you also need How to Write Like Tolstoy by Richard Cohen which also received much praise, 'it provokes an overwhelming urge to read and write.' 

Likewise The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron which, for all its 'California-ness' was a good friend in times of trouble.' (And of course now kicking myself because my copy went to the charity shop.) Please don't be offended by that any readers in California, it was a way of explaining that a book might work to slightly different parameters to UK expectations.

Onwards, and the advice not to judge your ideas too quickly ,'they could be angels in disguise.'

There was further elaboration on the mechanics of plot, structure and character with advice about what makes a good story...it must hold the attention and the reader must want to know what happens next. Identify the big turning points in the lives of the characters and don't trap your story before it has revealed its potential. 

Much about the difficulties of split narratives too, as Hilary outlined with reference to a book that caused her the 'more trouble than any other' A Change of Climate, 1950s Africa and 1980s Norfolk. Of greatest imperative ' get your reader thoroughly engaged with one of them before introducing the other and the writer who Hilary feels achieve this brilliantly is Elizabeth Jane Howard, (not the Cazelets, though they have merits in their own right) read The Long View to see how it should be done. 

There were various questions from the participants before the break for lunch, all answered in detail and with examples...

How do you deal with historical uncertainty....don't shut things down, look for maximum opportunity and ambiguity. The reported version of history is a simplification of what may have occurred. Assimilate all the contradictions. You can't have truth but you can have verisimilitude...

What about writing in accents or archaic language ...don't write phonetically, suggest through syntax, give flavour with word order, not what they say it's what they think, get inside the system of thought.

And then it was off for lunch and me to other events whilst the 60-strong group reconvened for the afternoon session.

I doubt anyone will forget this amazing day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Handywoman ~ Kate Davies

Firstly thank you to those of you out there who suggested that I must read Handywoman by Kate Davies. I have been following Kate Davies for several years, saw all the pre-publication publicity but had wondered whether I really wanted to read it. Well of course I did, I have and am filled to the brim with admiration and much-to-think-about since I turned the final page.

Now the non-knitters amongst you, and even the knitters amongst you who don’t move in online knitting circles like Ravelry might be wondering who Kate Davies is. 

In fact some of you might now be wondering what on earth Ravelry is...

To explain. Ravelry is a splendid online knitting community inhabited by many of us as a source of patterns and advice on all things woolly, and by gazillions more for camaraderie and a shared love of knitting. If you haven’t discovered it you might want to check it out; thousands of free or paid for patterns to download. You'll find me on there as Tamarsocks.

Kate Davies is an academic with a PhD in 18th century history which adds depth and insight to all of her writing. The knitting pattern books she has published come with thoughtful essays on things like lighthouses, and landscape, and the history of a garment and I always find them fascinating and informative. It was whilst walking to catch a train in Edinburgh seven years ago, that Kate felt the gun go off in her head before collapsing and finding her left side paralysed. After a traumatic misdiagnosis of stress-induced paralysis, Kate was eventually found to have suffered a stroke and spent the next six months in hospital re-learning much that she had previously taken for granted. There will be loss and grief, humility and elation, despair and exhaustion, revelation and determination, perception and discovery as Kate battles and confronts the demons of her post-stroke life, but she writes about it all with a narrative that both engaged and challenged me. 

Not least as a retired (thankfully) health professional and how disturbed I was to read of the differing attitudes of the staff and others involved when it was finally discovered that Kate's paralysis was not 'psychological' in origin, but a manifestation of an acute and life-threatening cerebral bleed caused by an un-diagnosed hole in her heart through which rogue clots had passed en route to her brain. Brusqueness and off hand irritation became attentive sympathetic caring. 

'Yesterday...I had been an over-achieving, attention-seeking hysteric. But today I was a tragic 36-year-old stroke victim... the right kind of patient.'

I can think back to situations I have been in as a nurse when those challenges have arisen. Working with mothers with post-natal depression was a big part of my working day and how well I remember one farming family who paid for a private brain scan for their daughter-in-law in the hope of finding that she had a brain tumour rather than a mental illness. Attitudes remain seriously entrenched and judgemental and Kate dissects and analyses her own experience with candour.

We say 'suffered a stroke', the words acknowledging the degree of seriousness, but I wonder how carefully anyone thinks about this sort of thing unless they, or someone they know has experienced it. It's a bit like us (but ultimately nothing like) and the recent Broken Leg experience. It took all our combined ingenuity and support to sort out the day-to-day needs of the Gamekeeper and his immobility. Kate and those around her had to figure out how best to support her in her recovery, and shining like a beacon throughout the book is her husband Tom. Patient, loving and supportive, and let's not forget Bruce the labrador...those of you who have followed Kate's blog will feel as if you already know them.

In the aftermath of this experience and the salvation and recovery that knitting facilitated, Kate has established a hugely successful knitting design business, published a selection of highly sought-after books and patterns and is now venturing into supplying wool and knitted garments. She has forged strong links within the knitting community who she praises to the hilt for their support and encouragement in recent years. 

Handywoman is a multi-faceted book with a useful guide at the beginning directing readers to chapters that they may find of most relevance depending on their interests and reasons for reading. Me, I've just read it cover to cover and been both humbled and amazed, neither of which, I suspect Kate will be impressed by given her claim that she has no wish to be 'an inspiration to others'. It is inevitable, like any book published and sent on its way into the world, that reader reactions are safely out of her hands, and we can all be inspired as much as we like, and I was.

Inspired to make the most of what I have been given...

Inspired to understand and work with limitations rather than fight them...

Inspired to be sheer bloody-minded should the need arise...

Inspired to reign in fear when it feels overwhelming...

Oh and so much more...

But above all inspired to get that flippin' Rams and Yowes blanket out of mothballs, overcome the Terror of the Steek and finish it. It's five years since I cast on the flock, it's almost at the halfway point, this whole unfinished thing is a disgrace and I must sort it...

 

I feel I have barely touched the sides of Handywoman (the book has a dedicated website here) and the depths it fathoms in this blog post, but I can commend it to the house unreservedly. There is wisdom, learning and encouragement herein and I for one will be dipping back into it on a regular basis.

Meanwhile...do you think it would an unforgivable sin of commission if I were to turn the Rams & Yowes into a really lovely cushion...

I mean just look, it's about the right size isn't it...

Wouldn't it look lovely...

Somehow I think I know what you're all going to say.

 

 

 

We need to talk about...

...IKEA.

Do you love it or hate it?

Is it world domination yet?

I wonder if West country homes are fast filling up with all-things Ikea since the latest store finally opened its doors in Exeter in May. Until now we've all had to drive up to Bristol and that really sorts the stalwarts from the can't-be-bothereds. Offspringette and I went about twenty years ago and ended up buying so much 'stuff' that we hadn't really given much thought to how we'd get it all in the car. It was a long-wheelbase Shogun which possibly demonstrates just how much I mean by 'so much'.

Bookhound then spent three days 'compiling' a set of bedroom furniture whilst declaring that 'IKEA', screamed very loudly, was actually a Swedish death wish plea for deliverance. In fact the furniture has stood the test of time, bar two drawer knobs falling off. Its white Nordic lines and plain wood tops still please me no end.

Anyway, we decided to give it three months for the crowds to dwindle before setting foot in Exeter, but in the end we couldn't resist. Well I couldn't, and Bookhound came along for the meatballs and just to restrain the hand that was reaching for all the things I didn't know we needed just because they were 50p each. He said he'd had enough after half an hour with little clue that he actually had about another three hours to go.

'Never mind,' I said, ' we'll be in Lighting soon and you know how much you like it there.'

We are, of course still miles away from 'Lighting' so I keep him engaged with the Billy bookcases because we'll be needing a couple of those soon.

In the end I would suggest that this was a bit of a lightweight visit...set of new glasses for 50p each as we were down to our last two, new bath mat because I liked the colour, a few other bits and pieces which I didn't even know existed but of course we needed. Oh yes, and a new desk chair for Bookhound (at my insistence) which he hasn't had a minute to 'compile' yet, but you'll hear him when he does. It was also quite comforting to look around the shop and see the Ikea staples, the things that Offspringette and I had bought on that last trip, still being sold unchanged and still going strong on our house... the floor lamps, the plain white mugs, the steel grid that sits by the kitchen hob, the steel container with holes that sits in the sink, the wastepaper baskets. Less said about the shoe cupboard the better maybe, but generally things have lasted and we have kitted out many a student room and flat accordingly.

And so we went back again last week, because on this return to the Ikea fold we were in search of a sofa. We sat on them all (even the ones on shelves that you are probably not supposed to), before making our final choice and then placing the order. 'Yes please,' we'd like it delivered.' we said, thinking it would be weeks and weeks, but no, 'Is Sunday morning alright?' said the assistant. In fact as you read this it could well be that Bookhound is laying out all the bits in readiness (because even sofas come flat-packed) and is about to enter the seventh circle of hell where screaming will follow.

So are you 'in' or 'out' on the whole Ikea thing...

 

 

 

Can we help Andrea in Canada?

I often receive emails like this and my first thought is 'Ask the blog'...

'Greetings from Winnipeg in central Canada,

I live in the middle of the bald and frosty prairie where we have, '9 months of winter and 3 months of poor sledding' ... honestly September isn't even gone and there's been snow already.

For survival I do many of the things YOU do ... needlepoint, knit socks and READ A LOT.  My local bookclub is calling for members to suggest titles ... we're a mixed lot in terms of age and occupation but you seem like an optimist and I was wondering if you could suggest a book that would leave one FEELING GOOD afterwards?  Gloomy reading and gloomy weather are NOT a good combination ... so the ideal book would be rich, well written but still (on the whole) positive.'

I said to Andrea I know just the people to ask, and I think we could all probably do with a list like this for the months ahead. I read somewhere we are forecast 4 MONTHS OF ICE AND SNOW here in the U.K. I’m just hoping it was the usual alarmist autumn talk, but past experience suggests when we’ve had one extreme winter we often have another one in quick succession before the return to damp and muggy. And the omens aren’t good because we’ve had our first frost here in the South West, in September which is unheard of, and there was me planning to enjoy the dahlias into November.

Meanwhile Magnus is rehearsing for the trials ahead too...laps, desks, sleep etc.

But back to Andrea and her book group in Winnipeg ...'rich', 'well-written', 'not gloomy', and 'leaves you feeling good'... any reading suggestions?

Walking the coastal path with Katherine May & Raynor Winn @Budleighlitfest

It was real coastal path weather in Budleigh Salterton yesterday; fitting as the path passes through the town and the perfect weather for a battalion of Seasalt macs to gather in one place. I’m not sure there shouldn’t be a name for them, honestly every which way I looked (including me) there we were testing out the guaranteed waterproof macs we’ve hardly needed all summer. Checked linings and rope toggles everywhere, though to be honest I really could have done with being dressed for High Dartmoor as I dashed through the downpour from one venue to the next.

We were gathered to hear Raynor Winn talking about The Salt Path and Katherine May talking about The Electricity of a Every Living Thing. Both books included a tramp around the south west coast and both lead to revelations and re-evaluations of life. Whilst Raynor and her husband Moth (I’ve now met Moth as well as Raynor) wild camped Katherine May quickly fessed up to just doing the walking bit, in instalments made all the more difficult given that she lives in Whitstable (Kent).

Given my love for The Salt Path and that I knew very little about Katherine May’s book, I had wondered how this event would pan out.

Would my mind unintentionally privilege one book over the other...

In fact Meg Sanders was scrupulously fair in her chairing of this event, drawing out both authors equally, allowing the audience to compare and contrast their experiences and creating a level playing field of interest in each book.

Katherine May took to the path in search of solitude and the opportunity to get physically tired after an episode of post-natal depression had left her feeling depleted and with a 'head like porridge.' It's true, motherhood and all it entails can leave you feeling exhausted whilst wondering what you have done all day, and the urge to be properly tired after physical exercise led to a clear mind and a feeling of connection with wide open space and the natural world. Along the way a diagnosis of autism (for herself) gave Katherine much more to think about as she re-evaluated her own place in the world and amongst her friends and family.

I've written about The Salt Path here and heard Raynor Winn talk earlier in the summer, but she is so engaging and in this slightly different context is was fascinating to listen as chair Meg Sanders drew out all the different strands (sorry) fostering the idea of the coast path as a metaphor for personal challenges, given that the only way out is ahead and through one step at a time, on this narrow path that skirts 635 miles around the South West Peninsula.

There were plenty of wide-ranging questions at the end too. Budleigh LitFest is famed for its perceptive and probing questions and this event was no exception. I think local people feel a sense of pride and an attachment to the coast path, and a surprising number of hands were raised when Meg asked if anyone in the audience had walked it.

But there was an unexpected moment during the talk too...

Meg had asked if I would take along my quilted journal entry of the cover of The Salt Path for her to see...

I had been thinking for some time that the book had given me so much pleasure I would really like to give this piece to Raynor and Moth, so if I could catch them discreetly at Budleigh that would be ideal. It's been seen on social media, exhibited and much-loved by a lot of people (including Raynor) so I hadn't told anyone of this but planned to slip it their way very unobtrusively after the book signing.

I hadn't reckoned on Meg calling me up to the platform for a Show-and-Tell. 

Well the moment was right to give the gift so I did.

This piece is now with the people it belongs to and there was much delight and surprise all round.

 

@BudleighLitFest ~. Friday afternoon with Sarah Winman, Vanessa Nicolson & Michael Rosen

A day so replete with words, books, wisdom, inspiration, laughter and all in the company of friendly, like-minded people; this is what turns a good literary festival experience into a great and memorable one, and I know I will be thinking about my first of two days at Budleigh for a long time.

Having caught my breath (just) after Dame Hilary Mantel’s generous and thought-provoking Masterclass I went along to hear writers Sarah Winman ( When God Was a Rabbit and recently Tin Man) and Vanessa Nicholson ( Have You Been Good & recently The Truth Game) talking respectively about their books and writing lives. Fresh on the heels of the Masterclass I listened with interest as each author outlined the trials and tribulations and challenges overcome in the writing of their books. For Vanessa Nicolson in particular, being the granddaughter of Vita, it was the millstone of the Sackville-West genealogy. ‘Everything the Sackville-Wests touch turns to text,’ is a quip regularly levelled about a family history clearly difficult to shake off but endlessly fascinating to those of us who didn’t have to live it. 

By this time I was in need of a pot of tea and cake. A wander along Budleigh High Street yielded a selection of tea rooms and shop windows dressed overall for the festival. Every shop had conjured up a bookish display, even the gent’s outfitters, making it clear that the town embraces the festival and hopefully benefits from it. It was the equivalent of hot desking in the tea room but I triumphed with a deft sidestep and was in and seated.

 

Suitably sustained I headed off to hear writer, performer, broadcaster and academic, Michael Rosen deliver the afternoon Memorial Talk ‘ Is Date Collection the Death of Reading?’ in honour of Festival Founder Susan Ward. I wasn’t really sure what to expect if I’m honest, but whatever it was I wasn’t disappointed. 

Gosh did we roll up in the pews as Michael Rosen eviscerated a school work sheet on the myth of Perseus and the Gorgons and (‘the snakes ‘writhing venomously’) whilst dissecting the problem of ‘teaching to the test’ which is causing so much discontent and distress in the U.K. education system at the moment. There was a very serious message in all this, cleverly and humorously conveyed and leaving none of us in any doubt that change is required if education is to fulfil its brief to equip children for life, not necessarily for parsing a sentence.

Incidentally we now all want a copy of The Orchard Book of Greek Myths by Geraldine McCaughrean, way better than the SATS version, we were gripped. Michael Rosen is a performer par excellence. I doubt there was a person in the audience who wouldn’t have sat and listened for another hour, and the lengthy (and more) applause reflected just how much we had enjoyed this event.

Onwards to the evening session with Patrick Gale. More dreckly.

Dame Hilary Mantel @BudleighLitFest

The sun never fails to shine on the Budleigh Literary Festival, this year celebrating its tenth birthday and going from strength to strength year on year. And so, despite last night’s horrendous storm (we have now made up for that dry summer) I skirted around floods and downed branches early this morning to drive across from the Tamar Valley for a couple of days of literary magic. I’ll be writing a few blog posts on the hoof (with apologies for typos) so you can enjoy the festival from wherever you are too, or even head over this way...it’s on until Sunday.

My first bout of enchantment was to be allowed to ‘sit in’ on the morning session of Dame Hilary Mantel’s Masterclass.

As the room filled up and the buzz grew I chatted to one of the few men in the room. ‘Have you noticed how few men there are here?’ he asked, and we pondered the whole idea of women and writing versus men and writing...maybe the chaps don’t feel they need any help...or maybe they feel too daunted to come we suggested.

The morning session for sixty people, led by Hilary and chaired by Meg Sanders, examined her experiences as a writer, teasing out the things she wished she had known from the start. Billed as an event ‘for the curious reader’ as well as for ‘writers across all genres and with all levels of experience,’ I found it hard not to sit there and think ‘Well maybe I do have a book in me after all,’ having repeatedly told myself I didn’t and I’d rather have teeth pulled. It would seem forty years of health visiting life and the plots it may have given me, is not to be ignored. Indeed, it would seem the process can be arduous as Hilary pointed out the fears, the anxieties, the frustrations, the sinking feeling whilst leavening with masses of encouragement and anecdotes from her own experience.

I have eight pages of notes, so expect more when I get home, but several quotes from the morning will resonate with me for a long time...

’Every day that I sit down to write I am a beginner too...’

’The process can be torrent or treacle...’

’Nothing is ever wasted, even the days when the waste-paper bin is full of paper are valuable...’

’Not every good idea is a novel...’

’Don’t write off your own experiences as dull...’

’Everyone has a pot of gold in their possession...’

along there way there were some excellent book recommendations from Dame Hilary (more soon) and I have emerged feeling energised and enthused after a truly excellent session. What a privilege...

Oh yes, and in case you were wondering, we were put out of our misery before anyone asked...

’About four more months of writing...hopefully next year...’

 

 

 

The Odyssey ~ Homer (translated by Emily Wilson)

It is a while since I went on this journey, and in the meantime summer has happened, but I can't let the voyage end without mentioning those wonderful twenty-four days through June when I read a book of The Odyssey, in Emily Wilson's translation, each day.

You might ask what is so different about this first translation of Homer by a woman, and to be honest I can't tell you because I have never read Homer properly and seriously before, in any translation. I do know, however that I fell into step with the rhythm of the iambic pentameter with ease, and that this version had me gripped and really looking forward to the daily adventure as I sailed alongside Odysseus on his journey home to Ithaca.

As 'early-born rosy fingered Dawn appeared' each day here in the Tamar Valley, there I was reading of all those places I knew of from a lifetime of hearing about them.

Hades...

Scylla and Charybdis...

The Island of the Cyclops..

and the characters...

Penelope weaving and unravelling until her husband's return...

Telemachus questing after his long-lost father...

Helen whose abduction started the bother in the first place...

Paris who stole her...

and then the Gods and Goddesses...

Zeus...

Athena...

Calypso...

Poseidon...

Homer's repetition stitching together a quilt of poetic narrative out of already existing cloth.

There were moments of revelation and recognition too..

The Sirens...

The Games at Phaecia, with sprinting, wrestling, jumping, discus-throwing and boxing...

The story within a story as Demodocus tells of the Wooden Horse.

The Lotus Eaters and the escape from the Cyclops strapped to the bellies of sheep...

The welcome Odysseus received in strange lands, people espousing sentiments that should still hold true today

'Any man of sense will treat a guest in need like his own brother.' says Alcinous to Odysseus.

The libations for the dead which I happened to reach on June 17th, Father's Day

Meanwhile, I was reading of other journeys alongside..

A Single Swallow by Horatio Clare following the birds as they flew from South Africa via Namibia and Zambia and across Africa to arrive in the Tamar Valley.

Jonathan Raban's voyage around Britain in Coasting, as good a-sailing book as I have ever read and at times hopelessly and haplessly funny. A writer who drew me into his world, welcomed me and put me at my ease with the willing admissions of his own foibles and failures, timeless and in many ways so reassuring. We think of our own era as the messiest and the most chaotic, or the most violent, whilst forgetting that which has gone before was equally so.

And zipping through the waves in the background was Odysseus.

It would be a dangerous journey and Odysseus would need much help to find his way home but by the time he arrived I was surprisingly on the edge of my seat with the suspense of the Big Reveal. What is that makes the return in disguise so compelling; the garnering of truth from the unsuspecting...

'But I grieve less for my own family
than for Odysseus,I miss him so,
I hesitate to call him by his name,
stranger: I would prefer to call him 'brother'.
even when he is far away, because
he loved and cared for me with so much kindness.'

At this point, as Odysseus, heavily disguised, talks to Eumaeus the loyal slave, I had to stop myself from breaking the Book a Day rule, but with it all came this sense of light shining on darkness. It sounds a bit over-dramatic I know, but it was as if all my reading to date had been in the shadow of this book I had never read, but which is both overtly and covertly referenced by so many others. I even read Ulysses by James Joyce without knowing any of this for goodness' sake.

And learning more about Odysseus the man. Complicated, stubborn, shrewd, a strategist, sly and crafty, ruthless and often friendless (mostly I thought because he's killed them all) devious and cunning, lying artful and scheming, battle-scarred and care-worn; traits that have undoubtedly kept him alive until he finally arrives home

I kept notes each day in my reading journal, and just revisiting them to write this has rekindled the excitement of the read, as well as reminding me of everything else bookish that was happening along the way. By June 29th I was on the pen-ultimate book and we were in peek heatwave and a succession of mesmerising sunsets after long hot days...

The Olive Tree Bed, Book Twenty-Three might have been the best book yet, as Penelope tests Odysseus with facts that only he will be able to answer correctly before Athena 'pours attractiveness from head to toe' transforming Odysseus into the man recognisable to all, including his hair 'curly as a hyacinth.' And there we all were at the end of the journey. 

So, what a memorable reading experience The Odyssey has been, through twenty-four days of flaming June. I can't recommend the voyage highly enough. Do embark if, like me, you have never done it before, I don't think you will be disappointed.

And if you know the journey well please do add your thoughts too...

I have The Iliad ready, in the Robert Fagles translation (recommended by some of you I think) and will choose a winter month for that, all advice and suggestions about how best to gird the reading loins for the conflagration, and any associated reading most gratefully received.

I have the new novel by Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls, ready and waiting, and also Circe by Madeline Miller which I know some of you have loved...

Any others...

 

 

 

 

 

The Letters of Sylvia Plath - Volume II : 1956-1963

I’m not ashamed to admit that, having met and been beguiled by the poetry of both Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath whilst studying for that English Literature degree, I joined the ranks of the Lady Lazarus ‘peanut crunching crowd’ who read all there was to read, by and about each of them and both of them. In fact I have so many books I am a 'peanut crunching crowd' of one, the Ted & Sylvia shelves bulging with the evidence; every biography, every expose of yet another aspect of their private lives made public, every new book, until suddenly I felt sated, over-fed and slightly guilty, maybe even a little obsessed.

Dragged Bookhound along on the pilgrimage to the grave in Heptonstall (2004)...

Collected the borage seeds which have since colonised in our garden...

But I finally closed the glass doors on the cabinet and haven’t looked at the books for several years, and I doubt I will ever read those books again. Every so often I think I'll ring The Poetry Bookshop in Hay and ask if they want to buy the lot, or stack them up on eBay to go to someone else embarking on the pathway, because I doubt the public interest will ever die, but mine, in all the commentaries by others, has certainly been laid to rest. I will keep everything I have written by them, the rest can go.

So when I heard about the publication of a new volume of Sylvia Plath’s letters I wasn’t sure how enamoured I might be.  Did I really want to revive the interest because I certainly didn't want to revive the obsession. Nevertheless I asked Faber very nicely if they would send a copy which they did.

In excess of 1000 pages (Sylvia was a prolific letter-writer) this is a weighty tome, and after a busy week it was Sunday morning before I had a chance to open the book.

I hadn’t really been following the news about the discovery of Sylvia Plath’s final letters to her psychologist in the months before her suicide, or the fact that documents which should have remained bound by patient confidentiality had suddenly come onto the open auction market and caused quite a furore, because the one person who deserved to read them, Sylvia and Ted’s daughter Frieda Hughes, was, for a long time, denied access to them. 

It is Frieda’s courageous and very moving foreword to this volume that has somehow finally set all those years of obsessive reading and wondering into what feels like the right and best context in my mind. I have always been of the opinion (usually against the tide of public opinion) that this was a six-of-one-half-a-dozen-of the-other situations, both parties having their flaws but doing they best they could at any given time given what they had to deal with, and Frieda Hughes shares her own feelings on this...

'Whilst my father does not come out of these letters as a saint, neither does my mother; in my view, they are both flawed, impassioned human beings and I love them more for this. They both suffered, they both made mistakes, they were going through the hell that literally thousands of other couples go through every day...'

The book is huge and I will be many many months dipping in and out of these letters. I am only a few pages in and there is joy and excitement about the forthcoming wedding and setting up home. Sylvia fancies 'pale blue-gray walls and bright red & white accents in curtains, pillows, etc' to match the faded old couch they have just bought. 

Browsing ahead I can see that the letters do, as Frieda elaborates, share much of the...

'goodness and generosity, and the kind of love that some of us never find in our lifetimes... There was nothing they would not do for one another; they existed to be together, and their mutual work ethic bound them even more tightly.'

I would certainly be interested to know your thoughts too, and did anyone else see the recent TV documentary, Life Inside the Bell Jar, it was on back in August

Sylvia Plath’s iconic novel The Bell Jar exploded the myth that women were content and life was sweet. It shone a light on 1950s gender politics, sexual identity and mental health at a time when women struggled to find a voice.

Life Inside The Bell Jar is the first documentary about Plath’s classic semi-autobiographical novel. In it Frieda Hughes talks about her mother in depth for the first time on camera, and has unprecedented access to people who knew Sylvia Plath, many of whom are talking publicly for the first time.

Blending beautifully shot interviews, impressionistic reconstruction, unpublished letters and photographs and a wealth of period archive that takes us back to the summer of 1953. This film is the story of an age, a person and a novel like no other.

 

I have decided that the Rest of the World can carry on picking over the traces but to my mind I am very happy to let Frieda Hughes have the definitive final say, the last word on all this, and I am so pleased (and grateful from my own point of view) that she has finally had the opportunity to do so. These letters made it into this volume at the very last minute and, from what I can gather, it was Frieda's decision to allow this in order to let people make up their own minds...

'...and hopefully find the kind of understanding that my mother was working towards near the end, despite the return of the 'madness' that took her away.'

 

 

 

 

 

Your summer reads...

Thank you for all the inspiring reading choices you have suggested today...what a great summer of reading we have all had. I've compiled a list of your suggestions so far just in case anyone is at a loss for what to read next and needs some ideas, or to add to your list of books to look out for. Please do keep adding summer reads in comments and I will add them here dreckly.

Quite a few books on the list I have read, or listened to, and really enjoyed ( My Antonia, The Trick to Time,The Pigeon Tunnel, Some Luck, Balzac and the Little Seamstress, Loitering With Intent, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine) 

Several that I have struggled to get into and you encourage me to try again ( A Man Called Ove, and dare I say Circe) 

A few that I have been meaning to read ( After the Party, Our Place, A Perfect Spy, The Runaways)

Some really unusual ones that I haven't heard of and now want to read ( Who is Martha, Gone; A Girl, A Violin, A Life Unstrung)

One in particular that I am really looking forward to ( The River in the Sky)

And a book that I haven't read but heard the author speak and I think I might agree with you Lesley ( The Life of Stuff)

 

 

Earth and Heaven ~ Sue Gee

The Runaways ~ Tim Pears

A Man Called Ove ~ Fredrick Backman

Magpie Murders ~ Anthony Horowitz

A Perfect Spy ~ John le Carre

The Pigeon Tunnel ~ John le Carre

Some Luck ~ Jane Smiley

My Antonia ~ Willa Cather

The Trick to Time ~ Kit de Waal

Eye Can Write ~ Jonathan Bryan

It's the Hate U Give ~ Angie Thomas

Balzac and the Little Seamstress ~  Dai Sijie

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine ~ Gail Honeyman

The River in the Sky ~ Clive James

Fools and Mortals ~ Bernard Cornwell

Married Love & Other Stories ~ Tessa Hadley

Who is Martha ~ Marjana Gaponenko

The Siege ~ Ismail Kadare

The Siege of Krishnapur ~ J.G. Farrell

Tin Man ~ Sarah Winman

History of Wolves ~ Emily Fridlund

Circe ~ Madeline Miller

The Music Shop ~ Rachel Joyce

Gone; A Girl, A Violin, A Life Unstrung ~ Min Kym

Our Place ~ Mark Cocker

Orchid Summer ~ Jon Dunn

Dinner With Persephone ~ Patricia Storace

The Making of the British Landscape ~ Nicholas Crane

After the Party ~ Cressida Connelly

Loitering With Intent ~ Muriel Spark

The Cost of Living ~ Rachel Ward

Force of Nature ~ Jane Harper

Jackson Lamb series (1-5) ~ Mick Herron

The Life of Stuff ~ Susannah Walker

All That Remains ~ Sue Black

The Hidden Landscape ~ Richard Fortey

 

 

 

Reading gallimaufry...

A gallimaufry (still my most favourite word next to 'haberdashery') of recent reads, short posts about good books various...

In a Land of Plenty ~ Tim Pears

'In a small town in the middle of England, the aftermath of the Second World War brings change. For ambitious industrialist Charles Freeman, it offers new opportunities and marriage to Mary. He buys the big house on the hill and nails his aspirations to the future.

In quick succession, three sons and a daughter bring life to the big house and, with it, the seeds of family joy and tragedy. As the children grow and struggle with the hazards of adulthood, Charles' business expands in direct proportion to his girth and becomes a symbol of the town's fortunes as Britain claws its way back from the grey austerity of wartime Britain. 

As times change, so do the family's fortunes. Their stories create a generous epic, an extraordinarily rich and plangent hymn to the transformation of middle England over the past fifty years. At its heart is a diverse and persuasive cast of loveable and odious characters attempting to contend with the restrictions of their generation. This 'is the story of our lives.'

A long read at 670 pages that saw me through quite a few of those hot days lounging behind the summer house, and a very enjoyable one too. The book had several interruptions and there is too much detail to elaborate, but each time I came back to it with no problem...a bit like meeting up with friends again after a long gap, you don't forget them or what has happened to them. I knew the characters well and slotted back into their lives with ease. This was the England I grew up in, post-war, with all its seeming simplicity by today's standards, yet as complex as ever for those living through it. A really excellent summer-long read and I have more by Tim Pears lined up.

Travelling in the Dark ~ Emma Timpany

The first of two novellas sent to me by Fairlight Press. New Zealand so I was bound to enjoy this one, and I did with the past oozing into the present as Sarah returns to New Zealand with her eight-year-old son after a devastating earthquake and the break-up of her marriage. A slow unfolding of secrets, the crumpled dirty washng of her life, stuffed in the suitcase, the lid sat on for years, is slowly bursting open. A deep sense of needing to know propelled me through this one along with its sense of place. It was as good as going on a visit to South Island which I was preparing to do this time last year.

 

Inside the Bone Box ~ Anthony Ferner  

The second of the novellas from Fairlight and the story of Nicholas Anderton, a morbidly obese neurosurgeon who is starting to lose his touch and his confidence in the operating theatre. The previously cavalier maverick is suffering and everyone, including his rivals sense it. As Nick starts to consider gastric band surgery to halt the potential disintegration of both his professional and personal life, events of the past slowly emerge. Nick's disastrous failure and is impact on his life is insidious. I was particularly interested in the ideas about false belief...errors that drive a person along the wrong path even when they know they are wrong; utterly fatal for a neurosurgeon and not much better for the patient either. This is a little book that packs a huge punch and left me with much to think about afterwards and I learned a new word too...

'aequanimitas' that quality of serenity amid the storm, of imperturbability, the touchstone of the neurosurgeon...

The Rings of Saturn ~ W.G.Sebald

I joined in Robert Macfarlane's shared read of The Rings of Saturn over on Twitter through July and enjoyed it hugely. I have read the book at least twice  before but this was like discovering the book anew; both stimulating and engaging to read all the comments that would follow Robert's question or observation each day. From first impressions, ways of seeing, landscapes, echoes and shadows to the prose style, guilt, walking, silk, sound and music,  the topics ranged far and wide.Then to have access to the thinking of the hive mind and be part of some fascinating discussions was all a bit like attending a very enjoyable little summer school from my armchair. My reading journal is chock full of scribbles which, reading back again to write this, remind me that I have a vade mecum the next time I read the book, which I surely will.

 And now over to you...you must all have read some good books this summer too...

The Goosey Quilters Exhibition 2018

If you are anywhere near the Shire this weekend then please do stop by in Tavistock for the Goosey Quilters exhibition. 

Thursday lunchtime to Saturday afternoon, nice quilts, nice cakes, nice things to buy (I think I'm helping to woman the sales table and will probably do some sink/ door/raffle/stewarding duty too).

Having set up the group with two friends back in 1986, before work and life got in the way, it was good to find the group was still there when I found the time to rejoin a couple of years ago, and am really enjoying the inspiration and the quilting chat again.

I have even made some book bags (or anything bags really) for the sales table...

The Kayaker bought me one of these back from Strand Bookshop in New York, and it has been the most useful thing ever (after the Dyson and Bookhound of course). It sits in my bag all the time, with notebook and pen safely stowed. So I ran up a prototype, and then ran up eight more calico-lined, zip-top book/notebook bags (6-7" x 9-10" approx.) and there is some hand-dyed and vintage kimono fabric in the mix. They will fit a paperback book and/ or a notebook happily.

Actually I don't know why I'm telling you all this because I love these so much I really don't want to sell them. Please don't buy one, but do say hello if you stop by.

 

 

 

 

 

The Village Show..

With apologies to anyone who has seen this over on Instagram (or Facebook...or Twitter) but it was the village show this weekend, and after a couple of seasons off for good behaviour I have been very much involved in the organising again this year.

We have been trying to discover how long our village show has been running; people certainly remember it in the 1930s, but last year entries plummeted and we were in danger of losing it, so we have worked really hard this year, with publicity in the local press, knocking door-to-door around the village and handing people a programme and encouraging them to enter, and it seemed to work...entries up almost double, and the village hall looking splendid as everyone called in and staged their produce. Cars heading in from all corners of the parish and beyond with exhibits various, plants, cakes and lego models and rainbow desserts (children's classes) being walked through the village and then, at midday the judges arrive, everyone leaves, the doors close and the exciting bit begins.

Having vowed off the cake baking classes since the Victoria Sponge humiliation I can't think what possessed me to decide to make the Set Recipe Apple Cake for the cookery classes the day before the show. I followed the instructions, tin size and cooking times to the letter. Even rigged up the grater on the Kitchen Aid for the first time ever to grate the apples, and I think it looks quite harmless and benign on the outside doesn't it...

Maybe even looks baked.

Inside it turned out to be a very different story.

Really the less said about this the better. I hadn't done a trial run, which I think the judge probably regretted as much as I did, because of course I had no idea what it might look like inside either. Suffice to say I'm going to stick to dahlias in future.

Oh except I did get a first for Lady Churchill's Marmalade which I made a couple of weeks ago, and a jar of chutney which I made two years ago, Frankly I'm just hoping the judge hasn't gone down with botulism, but they do say chutney improves with age don't they

I had a very good run with the flower classes though (either Bookhound or I enter each year, not both of us) with the Tinker's dahlia bed sending up prizewinners again. We had lost all but one of his plants last winter so we had replaced with some new varieties from Peter Nyssen and were delighted to get firsts for Wine-Eyed Jill (pom pom) Dutch Explosion (Cactus) and Lavender Perfection (Decorative) which also won Best Exhibit in the Flower Classes.

Then my Arrangement of Flowers came good out of nowhere, because you look around the garden and think there's absolutely nothing to pick when in fact there's plenty...

and the only flower left on the Olivia Rose Austin won a first in the Scented Rose class against some highly perfumed opposition...

So what with all that and a second for a geranium in the Houseplant class, well it was all enough to win some silverware which I now have to polish for the next year. 

It was a busy day, and just took inject some reality into all this, once the doors opened to the public at 3.30 I spent the next couple of hours here, because the village turned out and the tea and cakes were going down a storm..

And Bookhound, who also did the raffle, could be found vacuuming acres of floor at the end (with a Henry).

But now that I am majoring in dahlias all growing tips welcome (I'm never quite sure about pinching out) and also suggestions for some good varieties would be very well-received. I put in six new varieties this year, two of which failed (Downham Market and Gallery La Tour, and thank you to Peter Nyssen for the refund). Arbatex has been my favourite, though sadly none of those blooms at the right stage for exhibiting...Wednesday yes, Saturday no.

It really is the most perfect and exquisite thing I have ever grown and for minimal effort bar feeding, watering and keeping slugs at bay in the early days. They are now all staked ready for some stormy weather but hopefully will keep on flowering to first frosts.

The other dilemma is then whether to lift the dahlias before the winter or leave them in the ground.

We have never lifted them before but the Beast from the East took its toll and I would hate that to happen again...

Would a good layer of mulch do the trick...

And how about growing dahlias from seed. I did manage some Bishop of Llandaff with some seed I was given, and they are now thriving, but I haven't collected it from our own dahlias before. I feel I should try...

And after seeing this picture on Twitter yesterday I'm toying with the notion of chrysanthemums again too, another of the Tinker's specialities sadly also lost to frost. Because whilst dahlias are very lovely they have no scent, and there is something very special about the scent of a bunch of chrysanthemums in the autumn

Preston Corporation Chrysanthemum House by Albert Woods 1921

Meanwhile I hope those of you who do grow have had a happy growing summer too, and those of you who prefer looking at everyone else's growing have enjoyed that just as much as well. And for those down South, I hope spring is springing.

 

The Alarming Palsy of James Orr ~ Tom Lee

Granta have come to my rescue with a couple of short novels recently that have been both engrossing and readable in a long afternoon, or two sittings, and one of them, The Alarming Palsy of James Orr by Tom Lee had me invested in the outcome from the first page and it slots into the medical reading category too.

'When James Orr woke up, a little later than usual, he had the sense that there was something not quite right, some indefinable shift in the normal order of things, but it was not until he bumped into his wife on the landing - James had been sleeping in the spare room for several weeks - that he had a clue as to what it might be.

    'Oh,' said Sarah Orr, and put her hand to her mouth in genuine alarm.

    James continued to the bathroom and there, in the mirror, he saw the cause of her dismay - and such dismay did not seem unreasonable...'

James has woken up with a severe case of Bell's Palsy. One side of his face seems to have slipped away from the other and with it will come a complete slipping away of the comfortable ordered life that James has known. I was reminded of tectonic plates in an earthquake for some reason, and it will be no less of an earthquake that shakes James's life out of its settled ways

The couple live on a private housing estate built in the 1960s and New Glades allows for a very controlled and ordered way of life surrounded as it is by woodland and well-managed green space for the children to play. There is a sense of veiled snobbery and controlled freedom with everyone conforming to the norms whilst attempting to distance themselves from any hint of elitism; the management committee devising ways to repel all non-resident invaders and constantly debating the installation of CCTV cameras to catch the interlopers who leave rubbish (and worse) in their wake. Fortress New Glades.

With an obvious facial deformity, difficulty speaking and an eye that won't blink, James is beset by difficulties he could never have imagined, and Tom Lee perfectly illustrates the sapping away of confidence and the loss of self-esteem that can manifest itself through illness and disability. When the affliction is facial and highly visible the effects are even more acute, and the powerlessness that pervades James's previously ordered and successful life is both profound and debilitating. His family life, his work life, his circadian rhythms, his moods, his status and his authority all insidiously eroded as the control decreases by the day.

It really is a case of reading on, not only because the book is so well-written, but because something is bound to happen, the question is what...

Of course now I can't say another word, but if you are in need of something a bit different and a book that will stay with you and give you much to think about after the final page, then I can highly recommend The Alarming Palsy of James Orr.

And it has really made me think about the impact of illness and disability in all its forms...

How readily it can strip away who a person is in the eyes of others, and how they view themselves...

And there must be plenty more fiction suggestions that demonstrate this too...

 

 

 

 

And the winners are....

Thank you for all the entries, a copy of All Among the Barley by Melissa Harrison will be going to...

Sandra Barlow

Karen Clarke

Sarah Nichols

You should all have received an email.

Please send addresses to me at dovegreysales at gmail.com and a nice book parcel will arrive.

 

 

Marvellous medicine....

Unsurprisingly I still have a leaning towards the occasional ‘medical’ read, even though it is a time of my life that feels increasingly past and distant, and a world I was quite pleased to let go when the right time came. My shelves are heaving with books on the subject, the Plague & Pestilence shelf is particularly over-burdened and the Nursing shelf too, but I am always happy to hear of any more, so please do add your 'medical' reading suggestions in comments...

Thank you to whoever sent me the email urging me to read All That Remains - A Life in Death by Sue Black. I ordered it immediately on the strength of your enthusiasm and, though reading progress has been slow recently, I am enjoying it immensely. And yes, that seems strange given the subject matter...

'Sue Black confronts death every day. As Professor of Anatomy and Forensic Anthropology, she focuses on mortal remains in her lab, at burial sites, at scenes of violence, murder and criminal dismemberment, and when investigating mass fatalities due to war, accident or natural disaster. In All That Remains she reveals the many faces of death she has come to know, using key cases to explore how forensic science has developed, and what her work has taught her.

Do we expect a book about death to be sad? Macabre? Sue’s book is neither. There is tragedy, but there is also humour in stories as gripping as the best crime novel. Our own death will remain a great unknown. But as an expert witness from the final frontier, Sue Black is the wisest, most reassuring, most compelling of guides.'

I heard Professor Dame Sue Black on Desert Island Discs a while ago and it is one of the episodes that has stuck in my mind. Down to earth, unassuming and pragmatic and well...normal, and All That Remains is likewise, accessible and revealing.

'As we near our allotted three score years and ten, life seems to speed up and we begin to become aware of how much we still have left to achieve...'

This is a re-framing of death from feared demon to something else...the beginning of a new existence perhaps. It involves a suspension of preconceptions as well as the accompanying possibilities of fear, distrust and loathing. Thus far I have learned that anatomy and cadaver dissection teach far more than where everything is...humanity and altruism, respect and dignity, teamwork, attention to detail, patience, calmness and manual dexterity to name but a few. Oh yes, and every single minute 300 million of our cells will die, thankfully many are simply replaced.

 

The Language of Kindness - A Nurse’s Story by Christie Watson is another book that has been calling me, also for obvious reasons. I’m guessing Christie Watson and I  share that RSCN (Registered Sick Children’s Nurse) qualification because we also share the training alma mater that is Great Ormond Street, though I left the year that Christie was born, which is a bit of a sobering thought...

'Christie Watson was a nurse for twenty years. Taking us from birth to death and from A&E to the mortuary, The Language of Kindness is an astounding account of a profession defined by acts of care, compassion and kindness.

We watch Christie as she nurses a premature baby who has miraculously made it through the night, we stand by her side during her patient’s agonising heart-lung transplant, and we hold our breath as she washes the hair of a child fatally injured in a fire, attempting to remove the toxic smell of smoke before the grieving family arrive.

In our most extreme moments, when life is lived most intensely, Christie is with us. She is a guide, mentor and friend. And in these dark days of division and isolationism, she encourages us all to stretch out a hand.'

Care, compassion and kindness were the fundamental nursing attributes instilled in us at Great Ormond Street, and once learned they are never un-learned (if that makes sense). Christie will be doing an event at the Budleigh Literary Festival this year and I will be there too, so I am hoping our paths will cross.

 

This is Going to Hurt by Adam Kay. I have definitely missed the party on this one, top of the best sellers for months but I have to confess that I put it down after a few chapters, in the wrong mood for the relentless wry humour. One of those right-book-wrong-reader moments, but I will come back to it...

'Welcome to the life of a junior doctor: 97-hour weeks, life and death decisions, a constant tsunami of bodily fluids, and the hospital parking meter earns more than you.

Scribbled in secret after endless days, sleepless nights and missed weekends, Adam Kay's This is Going to Hurt provides a no-holds-barred account of his time on the NHS front line. Hilarious, horrifying and heartbreaking, this diary is everything you wanted to know – and more than a few things you didn't – about life on and off the hospital ward.'

 

And I might as well add in a book that has only just arrived (thank you Granta) and will be published in October, but it looks like a must read so maybe get your library on the case if it is of interest...

Nine Pints - A Journey Through the Mysterious Miraculous World of Blood by Rose George

'Most humans contain between nine and twelve pints of blood. Here Rose George, who probably contains nine pints, tells nine different stories about the liquid that sustains us, discovering what it reveals about who we are. In Nepal, she meets girls challenging the taboos surrounding menstruation; in the Canadian prairies, she visits a controversial plasma clinic; in Wales she gets a tour of the UK's only leech farm to learn about the vital role the creatures still play in modern surgery; and in a London hospital she accompanies a medical team revolutionising the way we treat trauma. Nine Pints reveals the richness and wonder of the potent red fluid that courses around our bodies, unseen but miraculous.'

I have a bit of a duck-and-avoid relationship with all things haematological after losing my only brother to leukaemia during my student nurse years. Until his diagnosis it had  been one of my most interesting and enjoyable ward placements at Great Ormond Street, (3AB and Sister Beech...it's all recounted here and particularly here) but then, when it happened, I knew far too much about leukaemia and what the likely outcome would be, and my enthusiasm dissipated. But I still have a fascination for it all too, so we shall see.

And on the subject of medical reads, has anyone read Henry Marsh... I started Do No Harm just before my dad became ill and haven’t been able to pick it up since...maybe I could go back to it now.

 

Prize draw copies of All Among the Barley by Melissa Harrison

Forgive me, my intentions regarding this book were so good.

I would read All Among the Barley, the new novel by Melissa Harrison, in time for this prize draw post so that I could tell you all about it.

In the event the Gamekeeper’s broken leg stymied any plans for lazing August away in a gravity recliner behind the summer house, and instead I have been motoring the ten miles across to his cottage high above the Tavy and Tamar estuary most days with lunch and to keep him company for an hour or so (the days are long when you are not used to sitting still). We sit and enjoy the spectacular view and the birds flocking into his feeders. We admire the air cast boot and imagine the bambi leg that will be revealed after eight weeks of this, we think ahead to the days of weight bearing to come...only a week until the stitches come out....only a few more days until the first physio appointment, that sort of thing. We’ve all made a bit more time to talk, and to sit and stare, at a time of year when he is usually so busy that we may not have seen him for weeks on end, and it’s done none of us any harm. 

But I’ve hardly had any reading time, and of course I went and started A Place of a Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel, and that along with Force of Nature by Jane Harper have been my only bookish companions of late along with a gripping audiobook while I sew, Borrowed Time by Robert Goddard.

So the upshot is I must rely on the blurb about All Among the Barley alongside its great reviews, and in the knowledge that, having read all she has written to date, I’m convinced it’s impossible for Melissa Harrison to write a turkey.

'The autumn of 1933 is the most beautiful Edie Mather can remember, although the Great War still casts its shadow over the fields and villages around her beloved home, Wych Farm.

Constance FitzAllen arrives from London to document fading rural traditions and beliefs. For Edie, who must soon face the unsettling pressures of adulthood, the glamorous and worldly outsider appears to be a godsend. But there is more to the older woman than meets the eye.

As harvest time approaches and pressures mount on the entire community, Edie must find a way to trust her instincts and save herself from disaster.'

Once life settles back into its old routine I will be onto All Among the Barley pronto, but meanwhile three copies are up for winning in this prize draw (UK addresses only)  so please do leave a comment on this post if you would like to be in the mix and we will do the draw dreckly as usual.

Magnus sends best regards but the wheat fields have been harvested so he is very preoccupied.

Update - Thursday September 6th : Please note comments are now closed for this prize draw.

We need to talk about...

...vacuum cleaners, I hope you don't mind.

Invented in the 1860s apparently, with the first motorised version appearing by the turn of the century.  I can remember us having a Goblin, and then an upright Hoover with a sort of cloth bag that inflated rather ominously and concealed a paper bag which would regularly split. I can hear the deep throaty noise it would make even now and the fact it weighed a ton.

We have been through that many vacuum cleaners in our time too. Old hand-me-down Hoovers and then a succession of Mieles which sadly (and embarrassingly given that Bookhound had the local dealership) fell apart. When the bag split one day that was me and Miele vacuums finished. There is nothing to compare with happily vacuuming a room whilst blissfully unaware that behind you is a gathering dust cloud of volcanic proportions.

We migrated to the Land of Henry and had been there ever since.

Henry’s happy smiling work-horse face greeting us whenever we started the mammoth task of dragging him all over the house, up and down and in and out. Swapping this tool for that tool, getting him jammed on corners and then trying to balance him as we do the stairs, tripping over the hose, twisting the hose, getting the cable jammed under doors, running out of cable, feeling him putting on weight solidly as the bag fills...and fills, and he gets heavier and more cumbersome. To say nothing of the blocked pipe episodes. I’d suddenly realise it wasn’t sucking up like it should and it would be time for the bent knitting needle. Out would tumble about a foot of impacted ‘stuff’ and the offending twig or something. But there is no denying he was a workhorse. You wouldn’t be without Henry on chimney-sweeping day after all. 

But in the end I could hear myself thinking ‘Wish I had a Dyson...’ every time I approached Henry’s stable. And I was starting to dread the whole thing. My back was creaking from all the lugging and the push-pull of leaning over, and 'housework' seemed to be taking longer and longer. None of this felt quite right for the 21st century.

My criteria for replacement were simple...cordless, light and efficient.

Deciding to buy a new vacuum cleaner turned out to be quite complicated because once you start looking where do you stop...Vax, Shark, Gtech, Bosch, Hoover, Dyson. In the end it was a discussion with my Walking Friend, with her very furry Border Collie alongside, that sold me on the Dyson. I can’t get excited about choosing things like this...just get one and bring it home is my philosophy, but Bookhound did the research and off he went, tested them all out in the shop (which is now very clean) before settling on a slimline Dyson something-or-other in a very fetching colourway of magenta and purple.It is truly the Twiggy of the vacuuming world.

Honestly, I thought the house was reasonably clean until this thing arrived and of course your sins of dereliction gather before your very eyes as the transparent cylinder in your hand fills up...VERY FAST. It sort of swirls in and actually starts to look like a beautiful geological formation, if not a really nice quilting design, until you realise it’s just dirt and detritus. 

Six minutes on maximum in my sewing room and the pair of us stood there with our flabber very much ghasted. It’s a chirpy little thing but you could see it thinking ‘Hmm, I’m going to have my work cut out here.’ ...three woodburning stoves and rural life, where the outside seems to find its way effortlessly inside plus one cat. 

Anyway I was off on my Dysoning adventures to the point where I think I might have given myself Dyson Arm and have a Dyson blister on my hand, but you could eat your dinner off our floors, no mistake. On normal setting it lasts for about twenty minutes which is enough to do all the main bits of the house. Cylinder after cylinder filling up with ....well with what. Currently I’m a bit obsessive but I know that will wear off. It’s just that you do it one day, empty the cylinder (it’s a very simple but natty mechanism), do the same  the next day...and the cylinder FILLS UP AGAIN. Who knew that two people and a cat walked or shed that much muck and dust into our house in 24 hours.

‘Wait until you Dyson the mattress and the pillows,’ someone said.

I’m just going to gloss over that moment of incredulity, best forgotten, move on.

So now I am intrigued...has everyone else migrated long ago to The Land of Dyson or similar...

Or are you still loyal to the Old Faithful...

 

 

The 1718 Coverlet

 All this talk of vintage quilts with the papers intact had me ordering a new book I have just heard about ( An American Quilt - Unfolding a Story of Family and Slavery by Rachel May, more of which soon) and sent me rummaging in the basement to revisit this post written three years ago. I’ve trimmed it down and updated it a bit....

The 1718 coverlet was bought at auction by The Quilter's Guild in 2000 having been 'in the possession of the Brown family of Aldbourne in Wiltshire until the time of its sale.' The Guild immediately embarked on a two year research and conservation project, the detailed results of which are recounted in a series of papers in the Quilt Studies Journal Issue 4/5 2002/3.

I didn't realise I had all that background available until the book arrived so it has been good marrying up and reading the two.

Susan Briscoe's book is a British 'Dear Jane' equivalent which is why I bought it, with patterns for the blocks arranged in a similar mosaic formation. 

The coverlet is the earliest known British pieced quilt with a date worked into the piece, and as well as detailed analysis of provenance, design, construction, fabrics, silks, cottons, dyes, stitching and the papers, there has been the intricate conservation project too. At 66 x 73 inches (169 cm x 185 cms) the coverlet is smaller than you might think given the intricacy of the 182 blocks from 69 designs (click on the picture to enlarge) 



The quilt was surface-cleaned with a low-powered vacuum, creased areas were re-shaped and relaxed and the entire surface was covered with a very fine mesh stitched into place around existing stitch lines.. imagine following in the stitches of the original maker. The 1718 Coverlet is now stored on a roll with a layer of acid-free tissue paper and kept in carefully monitored conditions.

Apparently conservationists estimate the amount of light an object like this can be exposed to annually at 150,000 lux hours (amount of light x time of exposure) and then carefully calibrate the time that is used up in photography and exhibiting. Clever stuff of which I knew nothing.

Quilts can be notoriously hard to date because we aren't the only people who have stashed fabrics for years before using them, or have cut up some old paper to use for the piecing, so there can be no assumptions. This 1718 quilt comes signed with the initials E H and is dated, along with papers still in place though sadly the name of the maker also remains elusive despite much combing of available local records.

More recent research dates the papers as a published speech on the subject of the Union of Scotland with England delivered to Parliament in 1707 ( Quilt Studies Journal Issue 9 - 2008) The social context of that alone is fascinating given recent referendums on Scottish Independence, but also that England, with a population of six million most of whom lived in rural areas, was recovering from the aftermath of the Civil War, the beheading of a king and the abolition of the Divine Right of Kings to rule.

By the time this quilt was dated George I was on the throne, Robert Walpole was the first Prime Minister, Parliament and democracy were finding their first feet, and an era of prosperity and stability was beckoning. The Industrial Revolution was sixty years away and life still centred on the village with its cluster of surrounding farms, and where travel was restricted by poor roads. Interestingly 1718 also the year that Britain decided on the transportation of criminals as an alternative to the death penalty.

It's not hard to look out of the window here in the Tamar Valley and begin to imagine the life.

How often must the researchers have wished the 1718 coverlet could talk...imagine the stories and the history stitched into this, but how well they have done to extract and piece together historically accurate details and possibilities. It all gives credence to the growth of quilt scholarship worldwide and in particular the history surrounding both the making and the textile production at a time of impending change.

The conclusions are that the coverlet was competently made by someone with the time and the ability to draft, cut and stitch, and with the inclination and the moderate wealth to do so, using silks, damasks and brocades as well as papers, all valuable and expensive commodities. Research reveals design marks, folding of paper to create shapes, numbering of the pieces and with the inclusion of some larger blocks there must have been careful pre-planning of the lay-out (been there, done it, found it doesn't fit) . Fabrics have been deciphered and analysed in the minutest detail, the dyes too. It is thought the blue could from locally grown woad given the lightness of shade, and remembering my indigo ramblings a while back that it is blue which will hold its colour best with age



Given the limited amount of time that this quilt can be handled and exhibited it was a canny move by the Quilter's Guild to create a replica that would reflect the original colours, and it is the results of that project that are available in this book.

Patterns for sixty-nine blocks numbered, drafted and ready to use, with helpful hints about fabric choices and construction methods whilst a modern technique sits alongside instructions for the original method.

It is all a huge achievement and this book an incredibly informative and useful addition to my shelves,

If you were lucky enough to see the 1718 coverlet at the recent Festival of Quilts in Birmingham, or have ever seen it, and before it heads into deep storage for ten years, I would love to know your impressions...

That and this...

Firstly a huge thank you for all the good wishes for the Gamekeeper and his broken leg (and us...me feeling like an emotional mother with a wounded chick and Bookhound walking eight gun dogs twice a day). You are always so generous with consolation and good advice. The surgery is done, the plaster stage by-passed for an air cast boot for the next eight weeks or so, and they are hoping to slowly increase the weight-bearing in that time.

Meanwhile I was delighted to manage a day out on Dartmoor with my Walking Friend last week. After ten days of Broken Leg I was up for some fresh air and space. We had opted for a gentle stroll out to Nun’s Cross Farm after considering and dismissing  the Staple Tors because neither of us fancied hills. We are supposed to be in ‘training’ for the annual walk out to Cranmere Pool next week, but at least we were moving.

Out we trekked, sat and had our snack at the farm and put the world to rights as usual, but on the way my mobile phone must have come into signal and it bleeped. I have it all set up with different sounds for different updates (text messages, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are the ways various this family keeps in touch with each other around the world) but I can never remember which sound means what. Anyway it was a text message from Bookhound.

Now I’m sure Bookhound would be the first to admit that smartphone mobile phone technology is not really his thing, he yearns for an old Nokia and I have no doubt will revert to one soon.  ‘OK’ is about the limit of any reply to anything I send him, and a text message from him to me is about as rare as hen’s teeth, so of course when one arrives I’m immediately thinking ‘oh dear’. And then thinking there has been Another Disaster of some description, or a relapse in the one that has already happened, so it was with some trepidation that I stopped, rummaged in my rucksack for my glasses and opened the message.

Here it is...

 

 By a country mile it has to be the longest text message he’s ever sent.

He was full of it when I got home because, poor man, he’s heard of nothing else for weeks here, so to know that others are enthusing and addicted in equal measure helps no end. 

For those who might not know what fussy cutting is...well it's all about wasting vast amounts of fabric  cutting the same patterned section from the fabric for each piece to create another pattern, like this...

The variations are endless and quite exciting, and indeed Naomi Clarke was talking to Jenni Murray about the #fussycuttingsewalong that she had started on Instagram some time ago. I had already found it and was watching with huge interest, whilst marvelling at the power of social media to join up the seams and bring people together. When I think of the unimaginable trajectory of the internet since the early days of starting dovegreyreader in 2006, and how it feels more  important than ever to have calm oases of respite from the relentless nasty stuff that is out there, so my Instagram patchwork and quilting connections have become a daily source of inspiration.

All this talk of fussy cutting took me right back to the vintage quilt that Bookhound found in Tavistock Market back in the 1980s and bought for £10, so I’ve had a close look at it yet again this week.

We have no idea of the date or the provenance, but someone with the time, the paper and the fabric has worked incredibly hard on this and with the patience of Job. Each piece is ‘fussy cut’ which is an extremely extravagant use of precious fabric so they had access to plenty.

The papers are still in place and reveal intriguing copperplate writing practice and accounts...

The dilemma with a ‘possession’ like this is whether to hang it on the wall or keep it stored away because I somehow feel as though I am its current curator and have a duty of care towards it. It has done both, though currently stored in the blanket box. I was intrigued to hear that the 1718 coverlet, on display at Festival of Quilts and the oldest known English Paper pieced quilt in existence, is now going into deep storage for ten years to protect it from light. 

It has certainly been good to get my vintage hexagons out again and have yet another closer look, at the fabrics, the stitches, the papers, the design, because as if you couldn’t guess, of course I have made a start on the 'Moncarapacho' millefiori quilt that has been calling to me..

In the end I caved and translated a bit of eBay selling good fortune into a complete set of the pre-cut papers and templates from the US.

My first rosette is pieced with its fussy cut middle and I have a few more ready to go...

It’s addictive and it needs to be if I'm to achieve this...

Summer reading...

So many fantastic books to choose from and so much indecision, with a lot of starting and stopping and setting books aside as ‘not quite right’ or ‘right book, wrong moment’ until I eventually settled on some contenders.

I’ve had a small nibble at the Man Booker longlist but in the end I wasn’t in the mood for that either, so I plumped for dedicating my endless and relaxed August reading days to a real chunkster. Before I knew it I was on my third attempt at A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel. I have it in book, Kindle and audio so no excuses, if I’m sewing I can put my headphones on, if I’m out I’ve got my Kindle, if I’m home I can settle down with the plump paperback.

Things were going swimmingly well, better, much much better than previous attempts until a phone call from the Gamekeeper at 8am last Sunday...

’I don’t want to worry you but I think I’ve broken my leg...and I’m in the middle of the woods...on my own ...miles from anywhere...’

I didn’t hear this bit, all I could hear was Bookhound saying, 

’Right...now stay calm.... where exactly are you... you’re going to need an ambulance...nobody must move you...’

And in that moment I could have been sick. I’m sure some of you will have been through something similar and know this feeling.

We talked to him on the phone while the rescue was rallying knowing he’d be going into shock.

Ambulance control were excellent and very calming. ‘Help is on its way’ is what you need to hear isn’t it.

We must be thankful for many other things on Sunday not least a mobile phone signal, because that is never guaranteed around here, and also for his team who went out and found him and the four-wheel drive ambulance that got as near as it could, and very quickly too, so that the paramedics could walk out.

It was a mercifully swift passage through A&E and an anaesthetic to at least get his ankle looking more normal, but needless to say it’s been a round of hospital appointments and plaster and X rays for the dislocated ankle and broken bone, and decisions ever since. Hopefully screws and plate and a couple of months of immobility will see him on his way to mending, and his lovely GF is on the case. It happens to others every day and could have been much much worse so we are all very thankful.

But I still feel a bit sick if I’m honest...

Do you feel your children’s pain even more acutely the older they and you get I wonder.

I think so because all you can do is offer consolation, food and support when required. We’ve been nipping over each day with lunch and to walk his dogs (eight of them...that’s Bookhound’s department) and keep spirits up and extra pillows for leg-propping and things, because really this son of ours won’t have spent this much time sitting indoors since he learned to crawl.

Anyway, I fully expected A Place of Greater Safety to fall by the wayside. I’ve had long gaps, short bursts of reading and felt sure confusion would beckon as it has twice before, but no, to my surprise the book is working. The French Revolution is a marvellous distraction from all things orthopaedic and I’m hopeful of progress at last. I’m involved and relishing Hilary Mantel’s superb writing.

So that’s me and my disorganised August (the August that was going to be so calm and quiet) and my reading, how about you...

I hope you are all enjoying a restful time if that is what you had planned, and please do share your summer (or winter for those in the Southern Hemisphere) reads, we might all get a list of good books out of it if you do.

 

And the winners are....

Apologies for the delay and thank you to everyone for entering this draw, Bookhound and Magnus supervised the draw and a copy of The Pebbles on the Beach will be going to...

Biochemist

Readerlane

Margaret Moss

Debbie Smith

Ruth Sandall

If you could email your addresses to me at dovegreysales@gmail dot com that would be excellent.

 

 

PRIZE DRAW : The Pebbles on the Beach - A Spotter's Guide ~ Clarence Ellis

More summer bounty.

This sumptuous reprint of The Pebbles on the Beach by Clarence Ellis has to be this year's Must Have beach accessory, the fold-out cover offering an extended pictorial guide to help you discern your  schist from your chert...

It's a gem of a read, a timeless book I wish I'd had as a child, but I can't lay claim to that. It only discovered me in recent years, though in the original version, and it sits in our Cabinet of Curiosities, brim-full with stones and their stories from around the world brought back by the travellers in our family.

It was only a matter of time before I did this...

This new edition of The Pebbles on the Beach, published this week by original publisher Faber, has a foreword by Robert Macfarlane...

'So pebbles became the book that we took as a family when we went pebble-hunting, on the coasts of Britain, wandering waist-bent along the beach, eyes peeled for rough orbs of agate, quartz prisms, purple jasper and elusive amber...it was also the book that accompanied thousands of other families to the beach, lodged on glove boxes, stuffed in rucksacks.'

Our last beach 'pebbling' expedition was to Sandymouth on the north coast of Cornwall in February. It's only thirty miles away but as is always the way we leave home in fine weather and arrive at the coast to grey mist and rain, plus we'd forgotten to check the tide times and it was high tide. Neither of us felt like missing out on the beach walk and it proved to be a revelation in the rain; every other pebble seemed magical and bejewelled and soon our pockets were stuffed with bounty for the outside windowsills.

We have borrowed one whopper (we'll take it back one day) which has the most exquisite ring of Fool's Gold that really did fool us (and would probably have fooled Ross Poldark too) on that wet day.

It now sits on the veranda, outside the kitchen window and glistens and gleams its mother-lode at us on the darkest of grey rainy days. I have now decided that beach pebbling on a wet day in February really is the best thing for cheering spirits dulled by winter.

But now to the real treasure. Five copies of The Pebbles on the Beach are up for winning today and these CAN GO WORLDWIDE. To be in with a chance please do leave a comment here and we'll do the choosing dreckly (as in eventually) as usual.

 

Entries are now closed on this prize draw.

 

Baltimore Beauties and Beyond...

Since the day I first set eyes on Ellie Sienkiewicz's book, Baltimore Beauties and Beyond, I have been at one with Baltimore quilts. The trouble is every one I have started has ended up as a wall-hanging, gifts or cushions so I still have nothing remotely quilt-sized to show for the love.

But we have been in quilting clover down here in the south west in recent weeks, culminating in a stunning exhibition of Baltimore quilts at Cowslip Workshops over the last ten days which ended with a very special day on Saturday. American quilter Pat Cox, had loaned her quilts for the exhibition along with others, and the Quilter's Guild held a day of celebration for Pat's outstanding contribution to quilting. Pat, now in her eighties, is a regular trans-Atlantic traveller having taught classes and workshops here in the UK for the last twenty years, and many of the quilts made by those who had been taught be her were also exhibited. There was so much love and gratitude for Pat in the exhibition barn at Cowslip...it was all very emotional for many.

The quilts were breathtaking, little wonder that Bookhound and I visited the exhibition twice to get a really close look, and then a closer look, especially at this...

Pat Cox's tribute to Quaker quilt maker Mary Brown. Here some details about the original..

Often the impact of a quilt from a distance can be greater than up close, but not in this case. I'm not sure I have ever seen such hand-stitched perfection...

Pat also gave a demonstration of her needle-turned applique technique which was sensibly projected onto a screen so we could all see...

There was a lovely moment at the end when Pat, and her good friend UK quilter Barbara Chainey, stood by her quilt for photographs...'Point at a flower,' someone said to Pat...

There was another lovely moment for me too because during our first visit Bookhound and I had spotted this quilt...

It was so striking we took a closer look...beautifully pieced and hand-quilted, as was so much else in this exhibition.

As many of you will remember the Tinker (my dad) was on the Arctic Convoys, so I was delighted to meet Kathleen on Saturday and had a fascinating chat with her. Sadly her husband, an Anglican priest, didn't live long enough to receive his Arctic Convoy medals, but he and Kathleen did travel to Russia in the 1980s where they were formally thanked by the Russian government and people.

Kathleen showed me the label on the back of her quilt (quilt labels are so important) and with the No Touch rule, as at all quilt exhibitions, it is something I would otherwise have missed. Such a wonderful tribute to her husband and to all who served.

I come home from events like this with my Inspiration Batteries topped up and raring to go, so, following a couple more bookish posts this week it will be a bit quiet for books etc on here through August  I'll save them for September when you are all back from your summer holidays and expect September to be busy on here too...

The Village Show (8th) 

The Goosey Quilter's Exhibition in Tavistock Town Hall ( 13th - 15th)

And I will be posting from the Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival (19th-23rd) who have a splendid and very exciting line up this year including a workshop with Hilary Mantel.

So expect the occasional gallimaufry with pictures of Works in Progress etc. This from she who says she is absolutely not going to start anything new, and is absolutely going to finish off all the unfinished projects by the end of the year....

To that end I have already been working on this..

And please talk me out of even thinking about embarking on an English paper-pieced Millefiori wall-hanging because I have fallen hopelessly in love with Willyne Hammerstein's book and I'm on the brink I tell you...right on the edge... peak tipping point...

 

 

 

 

 

And the winner is....

Thank you for entering everyone, we have done the draw, names in the hat (124 of them, thank you Bookhound & Magnus) and the winner of the Wainwright Prize shortlist is...

Congratulations to Carol, and keep an eye out because another lovely prize draw coming up next week and this one can go worldwide.

PRIZE DRAW ~ Win the Wainwright Prize 2018 shortlist...

July has run away with me this year, all that fine talk about quilts and notebooks, plus painfully slow rural broadband (is it the heat?) have all slowed down my computer endeavours, so I am behind with a heads up about the 2018 Wainwright Prize shortlist, but it is here and the winner will be announced on August 2nd so we must get a wriggle on because I have a huge treat for one of you...

Outskirts by John Grindrod (Sceptre)

The Dun Cow Rib by John Lister-Kaye (Canongate)

The Salt Path by Raynor Winn (Michael Joseph)

The Seabird’s Cry by Adam Nicolson (William Collins, HarperCollins)

The Last Wilderness by Neil Ansell (Tinder Press)

The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris (Hamish Hamilton)

Hidden Nature by Alys Fowler (Hodder & Stoughton)

I have linked to those I have shared my thoughts on over the past year and I have four titles to catch up on.

But here's the thing, if you would like to be in with a chance of winning ALL these titles (UK ADDRESSES ONLY)

That is ALL of them (sorry to be shouty, but this is always an annual treat), look here they are again...

...just leave a comment on this post and who knows, it could be you.

Comments have now closed for this prize draw.

Port Eliot Festival 2018

The literary festival weather has been a bonus this year, and with Port Eliot coming up this weekend we are still set fair. It's going to be a Factor 50 sunhat sort of weekend I think.

But I can't mention Port Eliot Festival without mentioning the sad news of the death last week of Michael Howells, who for many years headed up the design team at the festival. He was a unique and gifted person and we all benefited from his fabulous set creations over the festival weekend and tableau various during the annual opening of the house to the public. I doubt I will ever forget my first sight of those, a Daphne du Maurier weekend many years ago now.

It was Michael Howells who had the brilliant idea of running a Flower Show alongside the festival, thus creating something at which everyone could have a go and let rip with their own creative juices. Team dovegreyreader were no exception, and thrilled with what turned into a completely over-the-top installation in the inaugural year. We then scooped a First Prize for our take on The Sound of Music in 2011, and with it come many happy memories of all of us sitting at the kitchen table making a flock of nuns the day before the festival started (note also the 'brown paper packages tied up with string')

I see the Flower Show now seems to have disappeared from the festival programme, times they are -a changing, which makes those few years of taking part, doing crazy things with stuff from the loft and scooping our much-loved rosettes even more special.

And if you watched Victoria on television then it is Michael Howells you have to thank for those sumptuous sets and that entire reconstruction of Buckingham Palace. Cathy St Germans (who, along with her original team, is no longer involved with the Festival) has written a wonderful tribute to him here.

For anyone who will be at St Germans this year, I will be doing an event with Chris Chapman on Friday July 27th  at 3.45pm in the Tiddy Tent which is located (where the dovegreyreader tent used to be) in the Walled Garden. 

Last year I was in conversation with Chris and Peter Beacham on James Ravilious, this year Chris and I will be talking about Hope Bourne...

I had lunch with Chris last week and we spent several hours in his Dartmoor studio talking about Hope, her life, and some of the mysteries that Chris has unravelled over many years of meticulous and thorough research. I was absolutely riveted as we shot down rabbit holes various, piecing together Hope's life and background and am really looking forward to the event. As well as talking and sharing his archive of photographs, Chris will also be showing the shortened, ten minute, version of his longer video on Hope Bourne and her life. Much is not as it seems and Chris will be exploring some fascinating perspectives in his talk.

We are in for a treat and if you are there please do stop me and say hello.

Meanwhile for anyone interested in reading about Hope I can heartily recommend either or both these books...

 

 

A Postcard to Myself...

There was a small story behind this...

It was several months ago that the quilt group announced this year's Summer Challenge, to Make a Postcard, and I knew instantly where I was going to look for my fabrics and what I wanted to do...

When I take the lid off the Liberty box (that Bookhound found in a charity shop), it's all a bit of a muddle and a mess. No tidily folded pieces in here, I dive in and out on a whim and always find the right thing because that's Tana Lawn for you...

And I knew exactly what I wanted to make.... 

In 1988 or so I bailed out of the NHS for a few years when the children were small. My emotional teflon coating was far too permeable. I had been Paediatric Liaison Health Visitor for Plymouth Hospitals, keeping the health visitors in the community informed about the children in hospital, providing support to parents during admission, liaising with the various medical teams and facilitating discharge home if it was complicated (you have no idea what was involved in getting a baby home on oxygen in 1988). Having left I had to think of something to do in the meantime...

Bookhound was busy with the interior design business and had lovely premises in Church Lane in Tavistock and there was this really nice room upstairs...

'I think I'll open a quilt shop' I declared one day, with the courage and bravado that it would work and anything was better than the NHS at that time in my life, so we set about decorating and stocking The Quilt Loft, advertising beginners and intermediate patchwork classes that I would teach alongside the friend who is now my Walking Friend, and off we went on this incredible frolic of fabric, notions and stitching joy.

Quilting was just beginning to go mainstream, but it was early pre-internet days and sourcing books and fabrics was still a challenge, so we bought a great deal direct from the US. An American friend opened an account for us at G Street Fabrics in Maryland and would buy us short runs of beautiful fabrics not available elsewhere in the UK. I also had a wonderful rapport with 'That Patchwork Place' who published some of the best quilting books back in the early days and huge boxes would arrive from the US. We soon had sixty people a week coming to classes with a goodly percentage of them NHS friends in need of a relaxing hobby and a bit of respite, and for a few years it was a wonderful adventure before I felt ready to pick up the reins of my career again.

I'd drop children off at school and nursery, open the shop, put my board out on the lane and we'd be off...

One of the highlights of The Quilt Loft was the Liberty of London account. These were not handed out readily so it was an interview with the rep first before approval, and then the bolts of Tana Lawn arrived.

Can you imagine what this was like..

Surely I wouldn't have to sell these...couldn't I keep them.

In the end I did keep odds and ends of those first fabrics, and it is those I decided to use in the Make a Postcard challenge. Making that little piece has been like sending a postcard to myself from a previous life; each fabric design etched in my memory along with memories of busy contentment and very happy times.

For the quilty-techs among you I used 1/2 inch hexagons pieced over pre-cut hexaform shapes from Devon-based Ashmead Designs . I bought some to try and love them, especially for the fact that you leave them in place. Whilst the finished result is slightly stiffer than papers they do stitch very easily and very exactly. Not right for every project but perfect for this one.

But who sends a postcard to themselves, and so, as is the life of these things, a friend saw this under construction on my table and I thought she quite liked it...so in the end the Postcard to Myself became a Birthday Card For a Friend, and it found a new forever home because I think there is as much pleasure as giving these things as there is in the making of them.

And for anyone coming to Tavistock now, if you sit upstairs in Cafe Liaison at 3 Church Lane, don't forget that a lot of very beautiful quilts were made up there, and I have an amazing Long-Arm-Of-Coincidence story about one of them coming up soon.

 

 

English Paper Piecing ~ Florence Knapp

It is a long time since I fell in love with English paper piecing, indeed for a long time I thought it was the only form of patchwork in existence. Hand stitch the fabrics over papers, stitch the papers together, five years later a cot quilt still isn't ready for the baby who is now about to start school and dare I say, this one still isn't finished for the baby who is now thirty-five....

But I have at least finished this tiny postcard-sized piece (each hexagon not much bigger than a 5p piece) which has gone to a lovely friend for her birthday today.

It is rare that I write about a patchwork book here. I have hundreds of them, accumulated over years of stitching and the years of running a quilt shop, when Bookhound suggested I keep one copy of every book we stocked. Surprisingly (for me) I couldn’t see the point at the time, but I did keep them and how grateful I am for the idea, because I now have a wonderful archive of patterns and inspiration from the 1980s when patchwork and quilting was finding its place in people’s hearts again after an extended sojourn out on the margins.

I buy very few patchwork books now (apart from those by Di Ford, Yoko Saito ) so it was a lovely surprise when an advanced copy of English Paper Piecing by Florence Knapp (who blogs as Flossie Teacakes) arrived. It had actually been sent to the Kayaker because he had given permission for one of his images to be used; this one of Tracy Chevalier during our conversation at Port Eliot Festival a few years ago.

Needless to say the book rapidly found its way into the right hands...mine.

To my knowledge, books on English paper piecing have been in the minority, though a few have surfaced in recent years thanks to a resurgence in what many have always considered a bit of a time-consuming route to a quilt when you can knock one up on a sewing machine in a day. But Florence Knapp’s book is in the minority in other ways too. English Paper Piecing is not just a ‘How-to’ book, it is something far better than that, it is an intelligent, fully referenced, evidence-based examination of the benefits of mindful sewing. It is a ‘Why-to’ book too and one I have read and re-read, cover-to-cover, several times already.

Now, those of us that do it are fully aware of the benefits. We’ve known it since the day we started sewing. That it is calming and soothing, that we can disappear into a project for hours, forget the world and emerge blinking into the daylight, hours later, barely remembering what day it is, but it it is still fascinating to discover that research now backs up those experiences.

Florence Knapp, in a series of essays, presents and examines the evidence cogently and convincingly.  I was fascinated by the research on Flow. This is the total involvement in a project that leaves few if any of the brain’s resources free to worry about other things,  Evidence shows that hand sewing, of all the crafts, reduces blood pressure and heart rate and increases serotonin levels the most. Flow can be the key to human happiness, creating order in chaos and providing comfort at difficult times. And an interesting quote from psychologist Loretta Breuning resonated...

’We are hard-wired to care about the legacy we leave and that doing so increases our happiness.’

I have summarised briefly, but Florence offers deeper insights in her series of essays, as well as addressing, in some detail, the struggles, the self-criticism, finding motivation and embracing imperfections that many of us may have faced up to in our stitching lives. There are essays on Fine Cell Work, Tracy Chevalier, Lucy Boston (remembering my trip to meet Diana Boston at Hemingford Grey) along with interviews with a series of quilters, before the ‘How to’ section of the book which I walked into feeling calm and ready to learn. The fact that I have been English paper piecing all my sewing life made no difference, there are always new things to discover and I had immediately ordered the recommended Clover Dome Needle Case, which you load with ten needles, ready-threaded for stitching on the move (don't ask me how it works but it does) and which seems like a genius invention to me. 

Safe storage of needles, making what Florence calls the 'inherent portability' of English paper piecing a much easier prospect. I can't be the only one who has tried to thread a needle in a moving car/train and given up.

I have also been delighted with the Straw (Milliner's) needles recommended for EPP, and then there’s the polyester thread...

POLYESTER THREAD!! ME??

How can this be...

Where did my aversion for it come from?

Was cotton an entrenched state of mind, something about being an old-fashioned purist...

Weren’t dire warnings issued about polyester thread making mincemeat of the fabric over the course of time...

About never using it in your sewing machine because the machine would die a slow, tortuous and painful death and be irretrievably damaged...

Didn’t it used to dissolve at the mere sight of a hot iron for pressing...

Truthfully, polyester thread was the spawn of the devil, but times and attitudes, and the thread itself, have changed. I can still hardly believe that I have crossed to the dark side and bought a reel of grey Superior Threads ‘Bottom Line’ for hand-Piecing because Florence said to.

I’ve had my moments with it I can tell you. I’ve had to adjust the way I hold thread in tension because it cuts into my little finger, and I was grateful for Florence’s nifty idea about knotting it at the eye of the needle to stop it slipping and un-threading. But I have to confess that it sews like a dream...small stitches that sink invisibly into the seam and it never ever knots, and these John James straw (milliners) needles, just slightly longer than the average are a revelation.

Is anyone else still doing English paper piecing...

Does the theory of Flow resonate with you...

Has anyone else still not finished something thirty-five years later...

 

 

We Need to Talk About...

...Notebooks.

I might be a bit tardy about many things in life (unblocking drains, ironing, picking up spiders) but never let it be said that I shirk my responsibilities when it comes to the investigation and sampling of notebooks.

For years I have been a Moleskine diehard; embellishing my book journals with a picture of my choosing, the notebook of the moment is never far from my hand and my pen. Then I migrated to Muji for a while and that was fine too.

Occasionally I found myself going astray with a Ryman copy  or a Paperchase gimmick, but eventually finding my way back to the notebooks made famous by Bruce Chatwin, because it was his picture of them that first set me on the path.

But in recent times there has been some serious Moleskine wavering chez dovegrey. 

Is the paper getting thinner or is it me?

Suddenly they soak up ink like a sponge making the reverse of the page unusable. 

'Use biro or pencil,' I hear you say.

'Absolutely not.'  I reply.

I happened to be in Waterstones a few months ago and noticed a wondrous display of new-to-me notebooks in sizes and colours various made by Legami in Milan.

A soft leather-like cover in petrol blue caught my eye (petrol blue, mmm...is there a lovelier colour), elastic fastener, rounded corners, a ribbon bookmark, a nifty little page marker that doubles as a pen holder, 192 numbered pages, a monthly planner in the front along with a world map and a pocket at the back, and with this mission statement on the final page...

Obviously this notebook isn't really meant for me is it...

I'd be mutton dressed as lamb writing in this wouldn't I...

It did make me think twice before deciding you're only a old as you feel and why should all the Bright Young Things have all the nice notebooks, so I bought one, 5" x 7". It's the size that tempted me as much as anything. Roughly that of my Kindle and fits perfectly in the little book bag that the Kayaker bought for me while he was in The Strand Book Store in New York (he had very kindly sent me a message asking if there was anywhere I wanted him to go).

Oh if only he had been able to carry more home from this little shop in India...

To my joy the smooth Legami 90gm ivory paper accepts ink properly like a good notebook should, so I dashed back to Waterstones to stockpile another one, only to find they had sold out and they weren't at all sure they would be stocking any more.

Sold out...I obviously wasn't the only person to have fallen in love with the Petrol Blue Legami Milano.

In deep despair (sorry this will only be making any sort of coherent sense if you have an empathy and affinity with notebooks) I looked online and ended up in Milan . Less than a week later enough Petrol Blue Small Legami notebooks arrived by UPS to see me through about another year or so. 

On an interesting note, I've ditched the lines. I have transferred my allegiance, probably in place since primary school, from lined paper to plain, and can't quite believe the freedom of unrestrained writing it encourages.

I had huge fun with The Odyssey. A book a day of Emily Wilson's translation for twenty-four days through June, and finally I have untangled my confusion based on a lifetime of Homeric odds and ends and made sense of it all. If you are still wondering whether to give this one a try I can highly recommend.

I am really enjoying the freedom that plain pages offer and which lines seem to preclude, and can't think why I haven't explored this before. I have also gone over to the dark side with Uniball Eye pens which is another new departure for me. They suit my hand and are comfortable to hold, the colours are very pleasing and they seem to last forever.

 

So over to you.

Fallen in love with any nice stationery lately...

Found something new that we should all know about...

Old favourites still going strong...

 

Michael & Max... Ondaatje & Sebald

Our heatwave continues. I know for plenty of you it must be really uncomfortable but ne'er a moan will pass my lips after all that winter misery. I'm busy stocking up on Vitamin D and we are mostly living outside...

I hope you are all able to enjoy it in a way that suits you too.

Meanwhile two writers have had my full attention this last few weeks.

Firstly Michael Ondaatje, to whom congratulations for winning the Golden Man Booker 50th for The English Patient, and whose latest novel Warlight proved to be such a wonder that my Reading Friend and I both agree it should be on the Booker longlist, or we'll go without toasted teacakes at our next meeting.

This is a young man's attempt to shed light on the turmoil of war and its impact on his life, and that of his sister, both suddenly and inexplicably separated from their parents, to be left in London in the care of semi-strangers. As Nathaniel looks back on those years from the vantage point of his twenty-eight-year old self the themes of memory, its reliability (or lack of) and loss, permeate what for me was a spell-binder of a novel.

'You return to that earlier time armed with the present and no matter how dark that world was, you do not leave it unlit. You take your adult self with you. It is not to be a reliving, but a rewitnessing.'

Explanations emerge along with Michael Ondaatje's astute and perceptive, and I felt honest (there is no deceit of the reader here) examination of memory. The camouflage and deception rests with the plot and the characters; theirs is the evasion of truth and reality, the distortion of identity...

'We order our lives with barely held stories - as if we have been lost in a confusing landscape, gathering what was visible and unspoken, sewing it all together in order to survive.'

The book is shot through with a form of grief and melancholy, and with it finding a moment to let go.

But I also realised two things...

Firstly that I am an unwitting Michael Ondaatje completist.

I have read and loved each of his books over several decades now. There aren't many authors that can lay claim to that on my shelves, and over the years I have shared thoughts on several of them here. (Anil's Ghost In the Skin of a Lion The Cat's Table Divisadero). 

Secondly, how Warlight is arcing across to the shared read of The Rings of Saturn by W.G.Sebald, facilitated by Robert Macfarlane on Twitter through July. There are similar themes among many to consider, especially surrounding war, memory and fallibility, along with the shared landscape of Suffolk (in the second part of Warlight) all adding up to a memorable reading experience. 

My notebook is my best friend and filling up with ideas and 'moments' ...

Which reminds me we are long overdue a stationery conversation because I have found the Notebook of My Dreams (more soon) so I'm in reading clover right now.

If you are joining in on Twitter with the Sebald read I would love to know your thoughts...

And how about completist reading, are there any authors that fit that bill for you...

I can certainly add Hilary Mantel and Margaret Atwood to my list.

 

 

 

 

It’s the taking part that counts...

Listen up...it’s only a game, it’s the taking part that counts. Football will come home another year.
Couldn’t bear to watch in the end.
Hung the washing out...
Washed the cat’s bowls...
Collected some aquilegia seeds....
Watered the dahlias....

Waited for the shout of GOAL that never came.

But what a treat to see a new young England football team playing with so much promise for the future, and do we love Gareth Southgate, or do we adore Gareth Southgate.

How about you... did you get your washing hung out too...

The Gallows Pole ~ Benjamin Myers

Honestly, I've had a right old tussle with The Gallows Pole by Benjamin Myers (published by Blue Moose Books) before it finally won the day and kept me pinned to my gravity recliner for an entire weekend. 

Saw the social media buzz about it last year...

Interested given that I admire the writing of those creating the buzz but still avoided...

Picked it up in Waterstones... spotted a cover-likeness to the old Penguin Crime novels, put it down again.

More buzz getting louder...

Ordered it on my Kindle.

Started, stopped, started, not my sort of thing, got a refund.

The Gallows Pole wins the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

Buzz now incessant, even from Royal Mail who frank umpteen tens of thousands of envelopes with news of the award. I now want a franked envelope to arrive in the post  thinking I'd take it as a sign. I have to settle for Dog Awareness Week 2018.

Happened to be in the library  a few days later and there was a brand new copy of The Gallows Pole on the shelf.

Now I don't know about you but I do love a brand new library book. No dead-fly-or-worse surprises when I turn the page, so I decided to try again.

Drove home, sat in gravity recliner, opened book, barely moved for an hour except to order my own copy (as an actual book rather than a virtual one) as it was clear this was a book that I would need for my Best Books Shelf.

And that chums is the story of how I was finally sort of hoisted by the petard of my own reluctance, and The Gallows Pole has become the book which I am now flaunting to all and sundry as one of my Books of the Year a year after everyone else.

Set in and around the Yorkshire town of Hebden Bridge in the 1760s, and based on a series of  true events, The Gallows Pole tells the story of The Cragg Vale Coiners, a band of weavers and land-workers who make counterfeit money by clipping gold off existing coins and smelting it into forged currency.

The book gets off to a fairly visceral start and it may have been this, coupled with the semi-literate prison cell narrative of the gang leader David Hartley, that I initially found off-putting. Silly me because of course it is Hartley's narrative, alongside the telling of the main story, that brings this book, the time and the place to life. 

There is so much to pay attention to and Benjamin Myers achieves this with seemingly effortless ease, which must surely belie what was involved in writing the book. This is a pivotal moment in British history; cloth is still woven in homes but it won't be long before the arrival of Hargreaves's Spinning Jenny (thank you Miss Spencer, history teacher) the mechanisation of weaving, and the establishment of the industrial mills. Life will be changing and fast, and there is threat, treachery and treason around every corner.

The class differences and inequalities of the time are self-evident...

' They have five fires blazing, while we burn green wood...'

 Benjamin Myers asks in these pages, what is that motivates a man?

Greed, violence, power, class, superiority, lust, wealth, a sense of injustice, and the book certainly made me feel the burning injustices, the distortions of power and the quest for control as those wealth and riches are so cleverly juxtaposed with the poverty. It is the rivers and the landscape that Benjamin Myers litters with the riches of the poor, but poetry in rivers bejewelled with diamonds and frost like sequins are no sop to the ever-present cosh of starvation. That beauty is regularly and perfectly contrasted with the hardships of the landscape.

There is a form of poetry in the names too. An episode when the Coiners walk from far and wide to hear of their leader's plan ...

Isaac Dewhurst, John Wilcox, Absalom Butts, Abraham Lumb, James Crabtree, Nathan Horsfall. Matthew Hepworth, Jonas Tilotson. Eli Hoyle, Crispin Crowther...

The rhythm of the footfall as the men gather 

'From across the moors; from all horizons.
They walked through bogs dried and cracked; they came through whin and gorse and lakes of wild sedge hung heavy with gobs of cuckoo-spittle....'

'Poor men, proud men. Desperate souls of the valley'

'Men of stone and soil.'

The Coiners, led by the iron-fist rule of charismatic David Hartley, set up an operation that provides what the poor of the valley need, money; but this is a peasant life from which ultimately there can be no respite, and only false promises of reprieve. When the Powers That Be and the excise men assert their authority it will be by any means and with no mercy. That said, with stench, rot and decay prevalent in their lives the working community punishes its own in fairly unthinkable ways too. 

The Gallows Pole is a book that had me taking sides, swapping sides, feeling unexpected sympathies and feeling no sympathy, and despite some fairly gory moments it never felt gratuitous. This is the 1760s after all. Surprisingly I didn't recoil in horror and nor did I have nightmares about ...well I won't spoil it for you.

Very occasionally a book makes me set it aside thirty pages or so from the end. Not only because I don't want it to end, or to face up to how I think it must be going to end, but also so that I can savour those final pages properly. I usually make an announcement and disappear off and that's what I did.

I really, really don't want to spoil it for anyone who decides to read it but there is a pleasing redemption at the end for the women, or one of them. As was common in 1760's life, the women are marginalised and possessed, mistreated and misused, and generally the heir-bearing and food-supplying support act to the requirements of the men, but there is a single small moment in the book that I doubt you will miss either. An action that lodges in the reader memory and you just wonder...

Being a map person, and with the area so beautifully described by Benjamin Myers, I quickly ordered a copy of a map, The Cragg Vale Coiners' Walk illustrated by Christopher Goddard and with quotes from the book that had me walking the paths from my recliner.

I'll walk it for real one day. It's been a while. It would seem a lot of the Coiners buried their booty and I'm assuming the metal detectorists have already been out in force, but you can still visit the grave of David Hartley in the churchyard at Heptonstall.

Here I am visiting that 'other' grave in Heptonstall churchyard many years ago now..

So there you have it. All in all The Gallows Pole has been a right jolly good read, and I have more books by Benjamin Myers lined up. Under the Rock The Poetry of a Place seems a natural progression.

If you have read The Gallows Pole or think you might, please do share your thoughts...

You have to admire the tenacity of a book to win my reading day in this way and I'm wondering if there are other books you can think of that eventually made it through your defences and came out as winners...

And is there anyone out there around Mytholmroyd and Hebden Bridge who might be walking it...

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Rings of Saturn ....

For anyone who may have missed this and is interested, Robert Macfarlane is starting a shared read of The Rings of Saturn by W.G.Sebald  on Twitter this week.  

I have cut and pasted some of Robert's twitter thread here for your information...

'On Monday 9 July at 9am, a global Twitter reading group of WG Sebald's great & haunting book, The Rings of Saturn, begins - running until 2 August. Join us!'

Each day or two at 9am, I'll post questions or reflections about the book; its style, landscapes, strange form, found photographs, histories, ethics; about its many influences & legacies; about pilgrimage, atrocity, analogy, nature, moths, stars, exile & memory's patterns...

People can join these conversations, and/or begin their own, and/or join other conversations, using the hashtags. In this way a loose constellation of discussions should find its own shifting form over the course of the weeks of the group.

.there is, needless to say, no obligation to 'like' the book. It confronts & challenges readers with its indirections & obliquities, its greyscale, the darkness of the history encountered during this 'Englische Wallfahrt" (English Pilgrimage; the book's German subtitle)...

.I will be reading (& quoting from) the book in English, in Michael Hulse's translation from the original German, with which Sebald (1944-2001) was much involved. Others in the group will be reading in other languages. Translation is inevitably one of our subjects...

There is no obligation to have read the book in advance, or to 'keep up' with the group. It is a digressive, recursive work, and responses to it will often be of that nature also. My own questions will wander vaguely through the book's course over the weeks' course

 

I should probably make plain now that I am running this group because I find The Rings of Saturn deeply, unsettlingly powerful, and wish to examine that power as part of a community of readers. There is zero pecuniary gain for me, nor any hidden motive...

 

just a pleasure taken in thinking with and learning from others, and bringing new readers to a book that has been part of my life as a writer, teacher & walker for nearly twenty years. In 2006 I followed on foot the book's route, from Somerleyton Hall to Orford Ness...

 

.So - do join. There is no qualification or enrolment necessary. It will be a pleasure to walk these pages & places with you. “Perhaps there is something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer." 

 

I will definitely be joining this because, having read The Rings of Saturn several times, I feel sure I have a great deal more to discover about the book, and this feels like a wonderful and generous opportunity to learn more.

 

My copy is off the shelf and ready.

 

 

Happy 70th birthday...

I couldn't possibly let the day pass without celebrating that big birthday today. Seventy years since the birth of the National Health Service, and with my favourite image from the James Ravilious archive...

Nurse Mary Woods weighing a new baby, Addisford, Dolton, Devon. 1980

It seems hard to believe that the NHS had only been in existence little more than five years when I was born, because it's been there all my life both personally and professionally.

Been there whenever I needed it. Kept me alive with all those things that we take for granted will be sorted now, but which in days gone by would have meant doom.

Trained me in a profession that has served me well and for which I am profoundly grateful.

The NHS has made me the person I am today, so my thanks to it and to all who maintain it now.

The Trick to Time ~ Kit de Waal

*SPOILER ALERT*

In order to say what I want to say about The Trick to Time by Kit de Waal I have had to reveal the 'tragedy' mentioned in the book's cover details. 

 

In my last job before finally hanging up my RGN RSCN RHV qualifications and my registration to practice I worked for four years, from home, as a Health Visitor Parent Supporter for an online parenting website. I had special responsibility for three of their forum boards, Loss and Bereavement, Cancer and Serious Illness and Miscarriage and Stillbirth as well as doing the occasional shift in the online drop-in clinic and the Post-Natal Depression forum. I don't mind telling you it was one of the hardest jobs I have ever done. I only had words to work with, working from home alone, no face to face contact, no off-loading over cake and tea with the team, no body language to read, and bucket-loads of grief and sorrow from around the country to read through and reply to every day. The busiest board by far was Miscarriage and Stillbirth and I shared the work with a wonderful midwife, and thank goodness I did because the mutual support we offered each other was essential and invaluable. 

In the olden days we wouldn't really know we were pregnant for weeks; nowadays people seem to know after about six hours, and have bonded with their baby within seven hours, making early miscarriages equally as harrowing for them as at any other time. We paid attention to each and every person who posted, gave them space to grieve and a place to come and write it all out and know someone was listening, because that early loss is a grief little understood.

Alongside were the parents who had suffered a stillbirth and goodness me, all you really wanted to do was jump out of the screen and give them a hug. Care has improved enormously in recent years but there is still much work to be done to change public perceptions. 'You can always have another one' is not what is required, permission to grieve is what is, and I would now add a recommendation to eventually read The Trick to Time as well.

Stillbirth and its lifelong impact is such a rare subject for fiction, let alone a book that could make recommended reading for anyone who suffered the tragedy of the loss of a baby. The impact on a young Irish married couple, recently moved to Birmingham, Mona and William, is clear to see and exquisitely and sensitively handled by Kit de Waal.

The narrative weaves back and forth in time, filling in the past alongside the present in a very satisfying story-telling way. Mona eventually makes a life for herself using the services of a local carpenter to make wooden dolls, 'babies' of the exact birth weight (because for many women in the past birth weight was the only tangible memory that they had) which she than dresses. Her sessions with those who have lost a baby, where she imagines a future life for the children, are moving beyond words. She gives a voice to dashed hopes and dreams allowing them to flourish in the imaginations of the mothers, and in a way that they had never dared or been allowed to contemplate before. It's that moment when you hold your baby and wonder what it holds for them...and where does all that go when confronted with a stillbirth.

This was a deeply moving read with a twist that I didn't see coming. A quiet, gentle, astute and life-affirming book that deserved its place on the Women's Prize long list, and how I would have loved to have seen it make the short list and win the prize too. I'm guessing the judges saw more pressing 'issues' among their choices but  hopefully word of mouth and a lot of love will get this book into the right hands at the right time.

 

Halcyon Days

Just in case anyone elsewhere hasn't heard, the UK is currently reliving the hot summer of 1976 alongside the summer of 1966 and the World Cup. Whether football really will 'come home' is another matter, but we have had weeks of unbroken 1976-like weather here in the West Country, though with perhaps some rain forecast for today and tomorrow.

In case you missed it over on Instagram <<<<< we have enjoyed night after night of fabulous 'Flaming June sunsets...

This one really did have the look of Frederic Leighton's 'Flaming June' about it...

While Teasel Corner has been flaunting itself too...

And in other news, as it was the hottest day of the year I decided to make jam.

Well I didn't mean to, but Tesco's were almost paying people to take the cherries off their hands so I bought a tray for £1.60. No repetition of the strawberry debacle where to my shame I added jelly at 11pm, because this time I happened to have some jam sugar in house...

It is weather like this that has us blessing the Patron Saint of Spring Water as we hose around the garden several times a day. I know this might seem profligate and wasteful to many of you, but if we don't use it that beautifully cool fresh water only runs out of the overflow from the holding tank four fields away and into a ditch, so we feel we owe it to the ancient rites to a private water supply, granted on our deeds, to be grateful.

My sweet peas have taken an age but I'm finally picking first flowers...

And the windowsill geraniums have thrived thanks to the sun, but I think also in part due to the addition of a handful of plant food pellets (from Poundland) into each pot as I transplanted them.

My only mistake has been to use undersized pots because they seem to need watering every twenty minutes.

Meanwhile out on the veranda the first brood of swallows have fledged six weeks or so after the late arrival. We have had so much pleasure watching them being fed by the parents, and then finally the day when the grown-ups transform into the Red Arrows Swallows and do fly pasts and acrobatics to coax the babies out on the wing.

The poor babies watched with incredulity verging on terror at what was expected of them...

Before voicing their concerns...

A minute later they had taken the plunge and were soaring. 

But that's enough of me, how about you...

I hope you are all keeping cool /warm depending on your hemisphere and how are your gardens...

Despite a lot of water ours is still looking parched.

And are the birds fledging...

 

 

And the winners are...

Many thanks as always for all your entries and to Hutchison for the books.

A copy of The Race to Save the Romanovs by Helen Rappaport will be winging its way to...

You should all have received an email from me by now and just to clarify; to avoid confusion, there were two Rebeccas so we numbered you 1 & 2 in order of your comment. Rebecca 1's name came out.

Happy reading everyone.

The Last Hours of Father Nicholas Gibbes , English tutor to the Romanov Children ~ Helen Rappaport

A longer blog post today which I hope you will enjoy reading, so maybe get the kettle on (or pour a long cold drink), and with thanks to Helen Rappaport for this. Helen's latest book (and she tells me her final one on the Romanovs) fits in the final pieces of the jigsaw on the fate of the Tsar and his family. The Race to Save the Romanovs: The Truth behind the Secret Plans to Rescue the Russian Imperial Family, is published by Hutchinson in the UK 28 June and St Martin’s Press in the USA 26 June.

If you would like to leave a comment or a question for Helen she will, as always, happily reply.

 

 

 

 

The winter of 1962/3 was one of the coldest ever experienced in Britain. Bitter freezing conditions and a bone chilling easterly wind had brought heavy snow over Christmas, that had been accompanied by terrible, dense fog that had persisted well into the New Year. The now historic fog of 1963 took a terrible toll on the old, the frail and the vulnerable. At St Pancras Hospital in London (then part of University College Hospital) the nurses were overwhelmed with sick patients that dreadful winter. One such nurse who spent three months on the geriatric ward caring for the many elderly who had succumbed to the fog and the cold was Anne Scupholme. The death rate was very high: Anne, who, then aged 22, was the senior night nurse on her ward, recalled there was at least one death every night and on one occasion, three in a single night.  

St Pancras Hospital, London

Fifty-five years later there is one death that still sticks in her mind.  His name was Charles Sydney Gibbes, but since 1934, when he had taken his vows as a Russian Orthodox priest, he had been known as Father Nicholas. Under his real name he had been English tutor to the five children of Russia’s last Tsar and Tsaritsa – Nicholas and Alexandra – and during that time had developed a very close relationship with the young tsarevich, Alexey.

Sydney Gibbes second right, with Alexey at Army HQ in 1916. French tutor Pierre Gilliard is on the left

From 1908 until the revolution of 1917 brought the Russian throne crashing down, Gibbes had lived with the Imperial Family at their palace at Tsarskoe Selo, 15 miles south of St Petersburg. He had shared holidays with the family in Crimea and on board the Imperial yacht, sailing round the Finnish skerries. During World War I he had accompanied the young tsarevich to Army HQ when he joined his father there in 1916, in order to ensure he did not miss out on his studies. Left behind in St Petersburg when the Romanov family was taken to Tobolsk in Siberia in August 1917, Gibbes managed to join them there later, and followed them to their final place of arrest – in Ekaterinburg, Western Siberia – in May 1918.

But this time the Bolsheviks would not let Gibbes enter the house where the Romanovs were held captive. After the family were murdered there on 17 July 1918, he managed to retrieve a few precious mementos from the Ipatiev House. Then, like many others who had been closely connected to the Imperial Family, he fled the Bolsheviks on the Trans- Siberian Railway to China.

After living and working in Beijing as a secretary at the British Embassy, Gibbes eventually settled in Harbin, where he lived for the next 20 years working as a customs official. In 1934 he converted to Russian Orthodoxy and became a priest. During his time in China, Gibbes had visited England on occasion but did not return permanently until 1937. Now known as Archimandrite Nicholas, with snow-white hair and a long and venerable white beard, he was attached to the Russian Orthodox Church of St Philip on Buckingham Palace Road, but moved out of London during the Blitz and settled in Oxford. In 1949, he sunk most of his savings into buying a house in Marston Street where he created a chapel cum shrine to the Romanov family on the ground floor. Here he displayed the Romanov mementos he had managed to preserve and bring home from China in a collection of trunks and boxes, many of them personal gifts from the family. The chapel became a base for Gibbes’s own Russian Orthodox community of St Nicholas the Wonderworker. 

Gibbes’s chapel in Oxford with the Murano glass chandelier from the Ipatiev House and other Romanov memorabilia

In 1959 and now in rapidly failing health, Gibbes had finally retired from the priesthood to live in a house he owned at 17 Robert Street in London, making only occasional visits back to Oxford.  The house was one of a row of seedy and dilapidated Regency houses off Camden Road (now demolished) that had seen better days. Here Gibbes occupied a tiny bed sitting room, sharing the rest of the house with a succession of students, most of them studying at the nearby Slade School of Art or University College London. Gibbes’s own room was extremely Spartan: divided into two by some hardboard nailed to battens, an opening from the outer section which measured a tiny 8’ x 4’, revealed an even smaller space containing his bed of hard planks, covered by coarse blankets. The outer space was dominated by a large stove, on which – as one of the student tenants, Jeremy Hornsby, recalled – a huge saucepan of cabbage soup was forever on the boil. In memory of his many years in Russia, Gibbes had also improvised a sauna for himself in a tiny cubicle with an electric heater perilously poised above him.

Archimandrite Gibbes

The students were often late with their rent, but Gibbes could happily be mollified by a couple of hours of chat, recalled Hornsby. He vividly remembers the thin, hunched old man in his flowing beard and his soiled black robes, who often sat happily typing away – probably at memoirs of his time with the Romanov family. On the wall behind him hung six magnificent icons. Gibbes told him that they were ‘the last presents that the Russian Royal Family gave him’ before they left for Ekaterinburg.  Hornsby noticed that on each of the icons, ‘long slivers of black oil had run down to deface the remarkable artistry’. No doubt this was from years of having small oil icon-lamps burning in front of them. But to Gibbes they were a powerful spiritual reminder of his time in Russia: they were ‘the spirits of the Tsar and his family making their presence known through the icons’.

It was here in this small and rather squalid refuge that Gibbes was found in March 1963, alone and having suffered a stroke that was soon followed by pneumonia. The walls of his self-created monk’s cell were covered with old blankets and furs against the cold, but that had not prevented him from succumbing to the terrible winter conditions. He was brought to St Pancras Hospital not far away and placed under the care of nurse Anne Scupholme. From the first she noticed how very eccentric he was. Strangely – having been highly reluctant for most of his life to talk about his time with the Romanovs – as he lay there sick and suffering Gibbes finally opened up about this life in Russia in some detail. Perhaps in her presence and that of the young students at Robert Street he had finally felt a need to let go of things long suppressed.  As Anne Scupholme recalls – ‘he was confused but shared many tales from the Russian Court with me, although I had difficulty believing them at the time.’  It was only after he died on Anne’s shift, that she discovered, from an obituary in The Times the next day for ‘Archimandrite Gibbes, Tutor to the Russian Royal Children’, that the stories were true.

More than half a century later, Anne vividly recalls that Gibbes’s first and foremost dislike was of Rasputin, whom he ‘blamed for Alexandra’s ill health and therefore that of Alexey’. He had ‘rather liked living at the Russian court and had seemed oblivious to the unrest outside.’ His bitterness toward the Russian peasant was intense: he thought all peasants were ‘uneducated, ungrateful and should have remained subservient in gratitude.’ These, according to Anne, were ‘clear and consistent themes in his night-time ramblings’. But what she was not so clear about was ‘why he would suddenly turn on me in a rampage about how it was me, and my kind, who had killed the tsar and Alexey’. Gibbes repeatedly, and bitterly, blamed the British royals for not rescuing the Romanovs. Anne adds that he never talked about women except the tsaritsa, and only in terms of her relationship with Rasputin. She sensed that he had little interest in the women in his story - ‘but whether this was a product of his upbringing or a general dislike of women’, she did not know; passing suggestions about Gibbes’s private sexual preferences have never been substantiated. What sticks in her mind is that although Gibbes could be difficult and at times became exasperated with her and all the other nurses, he was clearly suffering the mental confusion of a dying man. There were times when he reached out to her: 'he was always very reluctant to let go of my hand’, she remembers, and it was a hand with a remarkably strong grip for someone so sick.

Sidney Gibbes in the schoolroom at the Alexander Palace with Anastasia, whom he found a difficult and disruptive pupil

At some point shortly before Gibbes died, a Russian Orthodox priest came to give him the last rites. He also insisted that the nurses should do nothing to his body when the moment came. ‘This all happened a long time ago but I can still see the bed and its position in the ward very clearly,’ recalls Anne. ‘The detailed instructions for laying out his body after death had clued me in to the fact that he belonged to someone, somewhere and that some of his conversation was based on fact.’ But she herself never saw any visitors; ‘he seemed to be alone, with no family’. (He did in fact have an adopted son living in Oxford).

Charles Sydney Gibbes died at the age of 87 at around 5.30 am on 24 March 1963, Anne Scupholme’s shift had ended at 8, so she was not there when  his body was laid out according to Russian Orthodox practice. Gibbes’s funeral was held on 28 March at the Russian Orthodox Church at Ennismore Gardens in Knightsbridge; his coffin was then taken back to Oxford where he was buried in Headington Cemetery, the simple gravestone marked by a traditional Russian Orthodox cross.

Sydney Gibbes’s grave in Headington, Oxford

In 2010, Gibbes’s community of St Nicholas the Wonderworker, which for years had been meeting in a church hall, finally acquired its own premises – in a disused Anglican church in Headington Oxford. This is located not far from Gibbes’s original chapel, and now has a thriving community of worshippers. The collection of precious Romanov artifacts that Gibbes brought back with him from Russia – including an icon from the Tsaritsa, a pair of Nicholas II’s felt boots, the Tsarevich’s pencil case and exercise books belonging to his sisters Maria and Anastasia, and the beautiful Italian Murano glass chandelier of red and white lilies that he retrieved from the Grand Duchesses’ room of the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg were once on display at his chapel in Oxford. They have since disappeared into storage and their whereabouts are uncertain. In 1986, Gibbes’s adopted son George Paveliev Gibbes, sold off two of the most important Romanov pieces in his father’s collection made by Fabergé: a pair of monogrammed cufflinks given to Gibbes by the tsar’s eldest daughter, Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna, and a miniature gold Easter egg pendant with a diamond in the A note, that belonged to Anastasia.  The latter was bought by film maker Steven Spielberg as a gift for his then wife, Amy Irving, when she finished filming at TV mini series starring as Anastasia.

The two Romanov Fabergé pieces owned by Gibbes

The rest of the Sydney Gibbes collection was, for a while, part of the Wernher Collection at Luton Hoo. But when the house was sold for redevelopment as a country spa hotel, the Gibbes artifacts were moved to storage at Ranger’s House Greenwich. They have sadly so far not resurfaced; nor have they been placed on display anywhere. Indeed, their precise whereabouts is uncertain.

In the most poignant of codas to this story, nurse Anne Scupholme is now herself a priest – an Episcopalian minister in rural Virginia USA. This change of vocation came after having worked for many years as a nurse-midwife in an innercity community in Miami dedicated to helping the underprivileged. Today, 55 years since witnessing that lonely deathbed in St Pancras hospital on 24 March 1963, Anne says that the last hours of Father Nicholas, devoted tutor to the Romanov children, continue to have a lasting impression on her.

The Russian Orthodox church of St Nicholas the Wonderworker Oxford 

© Helen Rappaport

June 2018

 

Prize Draw copies of The Race to Save the Romanovs ~ Helen Rappaport

Helen Rappaport's fourteenth book is published today, her third on the Romanov family ( follow the links for my thoughts on Ekaterinburg and Four Sisters) and to celebrate the day there are three prize draw copies (UK postal addresses only)  of The Race to Save the Romanovs - The Truth Behind the Secret Plans to Rescue Russia's Imperial Family...

'On 17 July 1918, the whole of the Russian Imperial Family was murdered. There were no miraculous escapes. The former Tsar Nicholas, his wife Alexandra, and their children – Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and Alexey – were all tragically gunned down in a blaze of bullets. 

On the 100-year-anniversary of these brutal murders, historian Helen Rappaport set out to uncover why the Romanovs’ European royal relatives and the Allied governments failed to save them. It was not, ever, a simple case of one British King’s loss of nerve. In this race against time, many other nations and individuals were facing political and personal challenges of the highest order.

In this incredible detective story, Rappaport draws on an unprecedented range of unseen sources, tracking down missing documents, destroyed papers and covert plots to liberate the family by land, sea and even sky. Through countless twists and turns, this revelatory work unpicks many false claims and conspiracies, revealing the fiercest loyalty, bitter rivalries and devastating betrayals as the Romanovs, imprisoned, awaited their fate.'

It is the centenary year of the death of the Romanov family so the book is perfectly timed. I know how hard Helen works on all her books, and how thorough and diligent her research is in order to create a scholarly yet very readable account of her subject, so I am looking forward to reading this one.

Just to repeat, these copies are available to UK postal addresses only, but please don't worry Rest of the World because coming up on here tomorrow an exclusive piece by Helen Rappaport, a fascinating story, about a connection to the Romanov family, that hasn't yet been told.

Meanwhile please do leave a comment here if you would like to be included in the prize draw and we will do the usuals dreckly.