dovegreyreader scribbles

Rose Macaulay

Well, dear blog, it is my birthday today (I don't often let on, they seem to come round too frequently for this Coronation year baby) and this, by the way, is me at my christening days before my first Christmas, and I like to think I still have that gaze in my subconscious memory somewhere

But I have a birthday gift for you thanks to Handheld Press.

Handheld Press often run a special offer when it is one of their birthdays. or an author's birthday, or an anniversary, and when they knew I was planning a bit of a Rose Macaulay reading spree on here they very kindly offered a discount code for any of you who might like to buy any of their four books by the wonderful Rose. I decided today would be a good day to share it because I have enjoyed quite a few Handheld books in recent months and would like to keep doing my bit to support them. 

Business as Usual ~ Jane Oliver

Desire ~ Una Silberrad

I was completely new to Rose Macaulay but enjoyed  The Towers of Trebizond so much that it led me to Potterism and thence to Crewe Junction and I will be sharing my thoughts on those three in the weeks ahead. I have also been delving into Rose's life via several biographies too and am finding her a unique and very individual writer with a wicked sense of humour as well as an astute and gimlet eye for the foibles of life in the 1920s.

Handheld Press publish four books by Rose Macaulay and with the code they are offering a discount of £2.99 which means the books will be £10 each (inc. postage) here in the UK. The code will be available until October 25th so make a note of EMILIE because that is what you will need to enter in the appropriate box if you order. The books are a joy to hold and read and arrive beautifully wrapped in tissue and brown paper, it's a treat for the postman too I think in these days of far too many plastic jiffy bags.

These links should take you directly to the Handheld ordering page.

Potterism

What Not - A Prophetic Comedy

Non-Combatants and Others

Personal Pleasures - Essays on Enjoying Life

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I should point out that Personal Pleasures isn't due for publication until September 2021 but Handheld do send out copies about a month before. I think it is the book of Rose Macaulay's that I am most looking forward to. By this time next year I think we'll all be ready to read about things like...

• Bed (Getting Into It)
• Booksellers Catalogues
• Christmas Morning
• Driving a Car
• Flattery
• Heresies
• Not Going to Parties
• Shopping Abroad
• Writing

 

If you are a Rose Macaulay fan please do declare yourself, and finally I couldn't end without sharing the wonderful Mary Azarian wood cut of that Rose Macaulay quote, and the moment in the day that I suspect we all understand very well...

 

 

And meanwhile Bookhound is busy living his best life out here...

 

 

Pleasings...

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

And one final Pleasing.

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

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

We have enough to see us into the next millenium.

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

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

Legacy ~ Thomas Harding

I wouldn't be in the least surprised to meet a descendant of the Salmon-Gluckstein- Lyons family empire one day. Coming from a tiny family as I do I always think huge families must be so exciting. All those cousins to grow up with. Plenty of scope for feuds and disagreements too, but mahoosive family gatherings to remember and new additions and departures to deal with. A full time job.

I suspect some of you are going to relieve me of the illusion...

Having enjoyed Hadley Freeman's House of Glass so much, the search was on for more Jewish family history memoirs and, as if by magic, the paperback edition of Legacy by Thomas Harding has just been published.

'A panoramic new history of modern Britain, as told through the story of one extraordinary family, and one groundbreaking company.

This is the story of how a family transformed themselves from penniless immigrants to build a company that revolutionised the way we eat, drink and are entertained. For over a century, Lyons was everywhere. Its restaurants and corner houses were on every high street, its coffee and tea in every cup, its products in every home. But it was a victory that was not easily won.

Told through the lives of five generations, Legacy is at once intimate and sweeping, charting the tragedy and unimaginable success of one of Britain's most famous families. It is also an illuminating new exploration of Britain and its place in the world...'

The book was all of this and more and at 600 pages has kept me busy for several weeks.

Thomas Harding, himself a member of the family (as are Nigella Lawson and George Monbiot) , traces his ancestors back as far as Lehmann and Helena Gluckstein and the turn of the nineteenth century. The Glucksteins will be driven out of one home after another by successive pogroms, their journeys various bringing them closer and closer to the North Sea coast of Europe before their son Samuel eventually arrives in Whitechapel in London in 1843. This will have involved, at one point, his father Lehmann faking his own death as the danger increases. 

Samuel quickly identifies tobacco and the manufacture of cigars as a potential source of income, and by sheer determination, good business sense and incredible hard work the family have fifteen shops by 1881. Marriages various increase the size of the family, Samuel's daughter Lena  will have thirteen children (six of whom will die) and with it comes the establishment of The Fund.

The Fund is an agreement, a form of family co-operative that will offer security, solidarity and a fair sharing of assets regardless of personal circumstances or input, but above all it offers a safety net for a family only too well aware of the potential precariousness of their lives in the face of any changing political situation.

This is a family with huge entrepreneurial capabilities and, when it becomes clear that tobacco might have its limitations for expansion, it is decided by The Fund that they will move into catering. Monte (son of Lena) has spotted a niche market and finds the family a trusted front man who will become the acceptable face and name of the new business...enter Joseph Lyons. Joseph has the gift of the gab, he's a showman, a raconteur and a humourist in contrast to the more serious members of the family and how impressive that they recognised this lack in themselves and were prepared to find it elsewhere. There is also the matter of the name. The family are constantly aware of their Jewish heritage and how their name may become prejudicial.

The first Lyons enterprise in 1889 is to cater for everyone visiting Barnum & Bailey's Circus at Olympia through the year that the circus performs.

I was reeling at the sheer scale of it all...three million visitors to be fed and watered but it is a triumph or organisation and implementation, paving the way for the first Lyons Teashop in 1894.

The family grows, the empire grows and will embrace the Trocadero in Piccadilly as well as a growing number of teashops and Corner Houses. Hotels will follow including the Tower Hotel which became one of London's swishest venues. I was taken there for dinner once in 1972, by a boyfriend desperate to impress (not Bookhound, he didn’t need to) it was pink napkins and very posh and I think I probably wore my pink gingham hot pants which shows how unposh I was.

The historical context offered by Thomas Harding throughout adds to the interest...the Boer War, Jack the Ripper in the East End, both World Wars and from it emerges a family wholly justified (were it needed) for their sense of family cohesion. They would throw themselves willingly into any national effort including setting up an ammunition factory during the war.

The saddest thing is that I knew what was to come though not the 'how'. There are no Lyons Teashops or Corner Houses anymore, the Troc has been boarded up for years (or was last time I saw it) and gone are the tea, the ice cream and all the famous brands I grew up with. I won't spoil the next bit because it makes for fascinating reading, but suffice to say this is one heck of a good read and I turned the final page knowing I'd met a family I loved and about whom I'd learned so much.

Bookhound has learned a lot as well, more ‘Did you know....’ than you’d ever think possible, so I think he might be quite relieved I have turned the final page too.

If you’ve read Legacy please do share your thoughts as always...

And what about Lyons Tea Shops...does anyone else remember them...

And the Nippys, as the waitresses were called...

As a child I would often come home from a long Saturday shopping expedition and be ill. My mum decided this was because I’d gone too long without food so she instituted the half-way-round-tea-and-cake routine and ever after I was fine thanks to the Lyons Tea Shop and an iced bun.

And hot pants...go on...own up, it definitely wasn’t just me...

 

A Chelsea Concerto ~ Frances Faviell

Knock me down with a feather, how on earth have I ended up here?

Who knew I would even walk past the wartime shelf, let alone want to read about London in the Blitz of 1940. But one of you (thank you) mentioned Furrowed Middlebrow in comments, and in my quest in recent years to try and keep up with current fiction I had completely forgotten about them and their imprint Dean Street Press. In the blogendipitous way that often happens, I then had an email from them with news of the publication of a new series of crime fiction and that sent me to the war shelf where I found A Chelsea Concerto by Frances Faviell, and to the shelves in the holiday cottage where I found A Footman for the Peacock by Rachel Ferguson. 

In that other long arm of coincidental reading that often happens, I had also bought House of Glass by Hadley Freeman. I felt sure some aspects of ‘the story and secrets of a twentieth-century Jewish family’ were going to hold sorrow beyond all imagining so I had set the book aside for a moment when I had the emotional energy to bear and contain it, which I eventually (and thankfully) did, and my thoughts about it are here.

Meanwhile I ventured into the streets of Chelsea mid-Blitz with Frances Faviell and discovered one of the best accounts I have read of life in war-ravaged London. This is no sugar-coated, one-sided description of war, this is attrition as experienced on the ground.

Born in 1905, Frances Faviell, the pen name of Olivia Flaviell Lucas, was a painter, and trained at the Slade under the auspicious eye of Henry Tonks who had originally qualified as a surgeon at the London Hospital before studying art. Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer, Augustus John and Rex Whistler et al would also benefit from his infamously withering tutorial eye. The painting on the cover of A Chelsea Concerto is by Frances, and the cat (not a real one) is beautifully significant in the book; something of a talisman, placed in the window, visible to those walking past and watching precariously over the carnage on the streets outside.

These days I often sense the seriousness of the bombing in World War Two, and its consequences, is sometimes lost in the mythology along with the fiction of bravery and fortitude. I'm thinking about Few Eggs and No Oranges, Vere Hodgson's diary, which though wonderful and I love it, certainly seems sanitised alongside this. Bless Vere, but she spares us the nitty gritty details. There is resilience and humour in A Chelsea Concerto, but there is also plenty of exhaustion, fear, stress and anxiety. All so tangible that the book offered  a really useful perspective on the now, as well being very engrossing and frequently very moving.

An early account of the King's address to the nation at Christmas 1939 brought a bit of a tear to me eye if I'm honest...

'I always admired the King's determination to overcome his trouble with public speaking...his last words were typical of the man, as distinct from the King, and in the simplicity and sincerity of their delivery left no doubt of their speaker's own faith.

'I would like to say to you :"I said to the man who stood at the Gate of the Year, 'Give me light that I may tread safely into the unknown.' And he replied,'Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be better to you than the light, and safer than a known way.'

I can still hear the voice of King George as he quoted those words. They carried more weight for me than many long sermons from the pulpit.'

I now discover those words had been written by British poet Minnie Louise Haskins and had been given to the King by a young Princess Elizabeth.

I could feel myself trotting alongside Frances as she went on duty to her Red Cross volunteer post. Walking through the unlit, blackout streets reminded me of my dad's assertion that he always felt far safer as a boy bugler on board a battleship than he did when home on leave, and finding his way through the streets of South London during the Blitz. He would walk to Balham from Euston in the pitch dark. It's six miles and would take two hours now with a fair wind and sail, but imagine it during the blackout.

On that note it was a pleasant surprise to read about the boy buglers on board the ships...

'On the 19th the news of the loss of the Courageous was published...only 681 of the 1260 she carried survived, and of these one was a bugler of only fifteen. I found this shocking - few of us had any idea that such young boys - mere children - would be allowed on warships.  

And I always love mentions of Anderson shelters too because my granddad famously put his up in the sitting room in front of the open fire on the principle that if he was going to take a direct hit at least he'd die warm.

And mentions of other things conjured up other visions. Say the words 'barrage balloon' and I'm here with Dame Laura Knight helping to deal with this one...

There are interesting and sometimes uncomfortable observations here too...

'In Warsaw they were eating horses. EATING HORSES. Here in England we were still able to ride them.'

The refugees are argumentative and demanding, and less than grateful..

Many foreigners stayed and joined the war effort while plenty of Brits were fleeing to the U.S....

There is palpable anger towards Chamberlain, and equally alarm at Churchill's bluntness..

The scale of accumulated defeats is laid bare and is frankly terrifying in its desperation. As Europe topples, Britain, despite the onslaught, becomes the safest haven...

And then there is the night time bombing and the indescribable destruction visible the morning after. I'm not sure I've read a more graphic account and yet, to my surprise, it was bearable because Frances Faviell made it so. They had to cope, I had to cope, and I felt I was in the safe hands of a reliable primary source narrator 

Comparing it with the now, there is a wonderfully poignant moment when everyone crowds into a concert at the National Gallery.

CROWDS IN...

Imagine that.

I've moved on to The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen and if Frances Faviell has written one of the best first-hand accounts of the Blitz that I have read, then surely Elizabeth Bowen (alongside Penelope Fitzgerald for Human Voices) wins the prize for one of the best fictional accounts. ...

'Sleeplessness disembodied the lookers-on...fatigue was the one reality...she had the sensation of being on furlough from her own life...'

More congruence with the now.

'Furlough' a word I've only ever associated with missionaries taking a break from the field (this might just be me). They'd come home and talk to us at Sunday School, and we'd all renew our determination (for about a week) to put a bit more of our pocket money in that little concertina collecting box we'd been given. And now 'furlough' resurfaces as an everyday word. The difference being that times might be tough, and we might not be able to party again for a while, but we are safe and we are sheltered and we will be able to do all those things again dreckly. 

It always takes me an age to read anything by Elizabeth Bowen, she demands my supreme concentration so my thoughts on here eventually.

Meanwhile, if you have read this I would love to know your thoughts, and though I can completely understand this might not be everyone's current first choice of reading matter, I'm sure you have some more suggestions up your sleeves...

Women writing about war...

First hand accounts that you would recommend...

And any more good books from Furrowed Middlebrow..

And what about Sunday School...did you go too, and collect the stamps for your album each week.

Budleigh Literary Festival & other Pleasings

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

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

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

You can check out the programme here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Perilous times...

Dearest book lovers, we are in great peril.

For the book-buyers amongst us we are entering turbulent times as the backlog of new books suddenly bursts onto the shelves. Six hundred books published this week, and as I walked into Waterstones for my weekly browse I think every single one must have been on display. I'm currently working on the principle that we have had nigh on six months of going nowhere, spending nothing. No petrol money, no coffee and cake, no excursions,  and therefore my book account tally should be nicely in credit.

But can anything withstand the onslaught.

I'm only buying non-fiction for now...hardback fiction will be from the library, but even then there were at least six books that jumped right off the shelf at me. I came home with three because I had actually bought 'a few' last week and the table is filling fast. 

Vesper Flights ~ Helen Macdonald

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

'Bonding with a hawk seems, in many ways, similar to bonding with a newborn baby  (and not in a lot of other ways...don't feed a baby day old chicks and rabbit legs etc and maybe don't expect it to sit on a perch) There are anxieties to be assuaged on both sides; food to be offered; a cycle of sleep to be established; paths of recognition and acceptance to be mapped; responses to cues and moods to be learned, even facial expressions and body language to be interpreted and recognised. To say nothing of the regular weighing, and the caring and the nurturing and the concern....'

That was a fraction of my thoughts about the book and I enjoyed revisiting that post on the scribbles as a reminder of how many different tangents of thought H is For Hawk sent me along.

And this is from You Know Where, on Vesper Flights...

From the bestselling author of H is for Hawk comes Vesper Flights, a transcendent collection of essays about the human relationship to the natural world.

Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best-loved writing along with new pieces covering a thrilling range of subjects. There are essays here on headaches, on catching swans, on hunting mushrooms, on twentieth-century spies, on numinous experiences and high-rise buildings; on nests and wild pigs and the tribulations of farming ostriches.

Vesper Flights is a book about observation, fascination, time, memory, love and loss and how we make the world around us. Moving and frank, personal and political, it confirms Helen Macdonald as one of this century's greatest nature writers.

 

Featherhood ~ Charlie Gilmour

Now I'm all for forgiveness, and Charlie Gilmour has served his time courtesy of HMP for that ill-placed swing off the cenotaph back in 2011. I doubt I'll ever forget the day I popped in for a cup of tea with my dad and he was watching it on the news. He was utterly crestfallen and deflated, and I'd have given my right arm to sit young Charlie down with my primary source to find out why. There were occasions through my dad's ninety years(not many, and fewer in later life) when he wondered whether anyone really appreciated the sacrifice of his generation. For years it seemed not, but as the big anniversaries came along suddenly with it came a new national consciousness, and I'm forever grateful that he experienced that respect before he died.

So I am intrigued to see how Charlie has dealt with this, and the other traumas in his life...and of course there is a local Port Eliot connection of which I know a little...

This is a story about birds and fathers.

About the young magpie that fell from its nest in a Bermondsey junkyard into Charlie Gilmour's life - and swiftly changed it. Demanding worms around the clock, riffling through his wallet, sharing his baths and roosting in his hair...

About the jackdaw kept at a Cornish stately home by Heathcote Williams, anarchist, poet, magician, stealer of Christmas, and Charlie's biological father who vanished from his life in the dead of night.

It is a story about repetition across generations and birds that run in the blood; about a terror of repeating the sins of the father and a desire to build a nest of one's own.

It is a story about change - from wild to tame; from sanity to madness; from life to death to birth; from freedom to captivity and back again, via an insane asylum, a prison and a magpie's nest.

And ultimately, it is the story of a love affair between a man and a magpie.

Rummage ~ A History of the Things We Have Reused, Recycle and Refused to Let Go

Emily Cockayne

And this was an entirely impulse purchase which involved me putting another book back on the shelf until my next visit. I picked it up thinking absolutely 'not me', only to find, with its potted histories and fascinating stories, that it is exactly me...

Rummage tells the overlooked story of our throwaway past. Emily Cockayne extracts glittering gems from the rubbish pile of centuries past and introduces us to the visionaries, crooks and everyday do-gooders who have shaped the material world we live in today - like the fancy ladies of the First World War who turned dog hair into yarn, or the Victorian gentlemen selling pianofortes made from papier-mâché, or the hapless public servants coaxing people into giving up their railings for the greater good.

In this original and fascinating new history, Cockayne illuminates our relationship to our rubbish: from the simple question of how we reuse and recycle things (and which is better), to all the weird and wonderful ways it's been done in the past. She exposes the hidden work (often done by women) that has gone into shaping the world for each future generation, and she shows what lessons can be drawn from the past to address urgent questions of our waste today.

There's so much 'Did you know...'  herein that Bookhound is going to mesmerised by my revelations for months ahead, and this can only be a good thing because this little stockpiling of books for the winter feels akin to getting the logs in this year.

Brain food for the long winter ahead...

Time to action the library reservations , and I'm wondering if there are any more of the Six Hundred that you are looking forward to...

 

 

House of Glass ~ Hadley Freeman

Well I’ve had a wonderful August sabbatical with lots of reading, and I hope you have too, but it’s time we returned to talking about good books and today’s the day.

'If you don't know the past, you can't understand the present and plan properly for the future...'

Chaim Potok ( Davita's Harp)

 

It is years since I read Chaim Potok, but how well I remember My Name is Asher Lev, so I felt at least a mild connection with this quote from Hadley Freeman in her family memoir House of Glass.

I find anti-Semitism incomprehensible on a personal level...really so.

David, one of my closest friends, and also rivals, at my 1950's-into-the-1960's primary school was Jewish and I feel sure the competition between us was the making of us.

David and I shared a two-seater wooden table. We drew a line down the middle and the other person's elbow wasn't allowed to cross it. On the last day of term we all had to scrub our tables with Ajax ready for the next term. We'd draw the line again on day one and so we'd continue the Battle of the Elbows. David would sit in the classroom on his own while we all trooped in for our ultra-Christian assembly, explaining to me that Jewish people believed in God but just not the Jesus bit. That seemed to me like missing the best bits so I still sent him a Christmas card, yet to define him by even that small sign of difference was incomprehensible to us as children. His father was a GP; we, by comparison, were a very working class family, but there was never any sense of class or religious difference between us as children. We all just played together, learned together and were happy together.

Looking back I'm wondering if that was all about our respective parents forging a new life in post-war suburban Britain, but whatever the reason that lack of prejudice as a child has stayed with me into adulthood. Incidentally, David went on to become a consultant paediatrician, easily contactable online these days. I haven't, but one day maybe I might...it's the fear of the reply that says 'I don't remember you at all' isn't it, when your memories of them are so vivid.

Or perhaps that they remember it differently.

This is all by way of an introduction to my family memoir read of the year so far, because House of Glass is a book that made me willingly examine my own thinking and its origins, for which I think I owe my mum and dad and huge thank you.

The story and secrets of a twentieth century Jewish family was bound to yield some disturbing moments and I'll be honest, I usually find these accounts harder and harder to read the older I get. 

Do we get more sensitive as we age...

Protect ourselves a little more from it all...

I know my capacity for reading or hearing about violence or torture is seriously limited these days.

But I had heard such good things about House of Glass that I decided to brave it and maybe long summer days, full of light, are the best time to read books like this. I sometimes think books like this are an absolute privilege to read. To be invited into the life of someone's family.

In any case I needn't have worried. Things do happen but Hadley Freeman doesn't need to describe in detail. She knows we know. 

Sala, thin, quiet, melancholic and always immaculately dressed in the French chic style accompanies her five-year-old granddaughter Hadley, and her son and his wife, on a family holiday from their home in America to Deauville in France. The purpose has been to meet Sala’s family. But Hadley Freeman's exploration of her family history begins in earnest many years later on the discovery of a box of disparate objects, papers and photographs found in her grandmother's wardrobe after her death. 

Originally from Poland, the Glass family had fled their native country in the aftermath of  World War One, when their comfortable life amongst a solid Jewish community in Chrzanow was decimated by rising anti-semitism and the nation’s need for a scapegoat. The family wisely left for Paris in 1920; had they stayed in Poland they would inevitably have been among the 15,000 Jews in the town who were eventually rounded up and sent to Auschwitz. Sala and her brothers Henri and Alex settle into a new life in France, and yet their safety is far from assured with the rise of Nazism and all that followed.

Much here is utterly heart-breaking...

The sense of trust that the Glass family placed in their fellow countrymen, first in Poland and then in France. They belonged, they worked hard, they contributed and yet that trust would be broken, betrayals would be manifold and in the midst of it all there is Sala, Hadley's grandmother. Whilst her brothers forged successful careers, the options for Sala were far more limited. Henri would invent a prototype photocopying machine much sought-after during the war and Alex would found his own haute couture fashion house.

Alex's story is fascinating, and in many ways as central to the book as Sala's, and if you enjoy the world of fashion history then you will certainly enjoy the details that Hadley Freeman has unearthed about her great uncle's work with an upcoming Christian Dior, and his life among the upper echelons of French society. Alex Maguy has an interesting war (to say the least) and when the world of haute couture starts to decline with the arrival of pret-a-porter fashion, he transfers his entrepreneurial skills into the world of art and makes even more of a success of that. Counting Picasso amongst his close friends the man himself would design a poster for one of Alex's select gallery exhibitions.

But weaving her way quietly throughout the book is Sala, and Hadley Freeman's exploration of the grandmother she always saw as someone concealing loss and anguish, but why. And here I don't want to give a single thing away beyond the fact that Sala will make what emerged for me as the single biggest sacrifice in the book. She is a woman, her choices are limited and ultimately barely her own to make...

The analysis of photographs long after the event reminded me of On Chapel Sands by Laura Cummings and another book I read at about the same time The Photographer at Sixteen by George Szirtes.. I didn't share thoughts on it at the time because I was so affected by it I honestly didn't think I could do it justice.  That doesn't usually stop me trying but somehow did.

I now have to read it again.

'Photographs are moments of noticing. They are isolated acts, usually of awareness on the part of both photographer and photographed. It is a moment's contract. The space between photographer and photographed is sacred space. Others must not, will not walk across it...'

suggests George Szirtes...

'The time between old photographs shrinks. Soon there is nothing but photograph.'

Thinking now about Rings of Saturn, and its random photographs...W.G.Sebald would have liked that quote.

And it is the old photographs, and her analysis of them, that adds much to Hadley Freeman's book, which in turn made me wonder what people will use in fifty year's time...

Is anyone printing family photographs any more...

Goodness, who knew that a single book would not only keep me welded to the gravity recliner in the garden for three days, or give me so much to think about, but this one is a worthy permanent addition to the family memoir shelf and I most certainly commend it to the house.

I’m now reading Legacy by Thomas Harding, the story of the Lyons family empire, and would welcome any more suggestions of Jewish family memoirs, they really  do make for excellent reading.

 

Let's Preserve It ~ Beryl Wood - Apple and Mint Chutney

A request for the Apple & Mint Chutney recipe, and though I have never tried it, I will be very soon. 

Having used my rather formal WI recipe book for years (no jars with names on, fill to exact distance from the rim etc) I found Let's Preserve It by Beryl Wood a few years ago and it rekindled my love of the preserving pan and this season especially, but really the book is an all-year-round affair. I love it for the way Beryl reckons if it grows you can preserve it. First published in 1970 (Nigella swears by it) apparently as a 'manifesto for safeguarding our grandmothers' artisan ways'.

In her 2011 introduction to this reprinted edition Rose Prince suggests...

'Her book was a nudge that reminded me not to walk past a hedgerow without collecting a few rosehips or blackberries during their season, nor miss a glut of cheaply abundant fruit and vegetables. She reminds us that making a few pots of pickles, jam, jelly or fruit curd upholds a great and endangered tradition.'

I'm not sure I remembered the detail of this introduction. This being me I would have waded straight into the recipes, but I'm now fascinated to discover that Beryl Wood was secretary to the progressive obstetrician Dr Grantly Dick-Read. When he and his family returned to the UK from South Africa Beryl came with them continuing to pursue what Rose Prince describes as an 'off-beat career',  with stints at pest control and running an all-women car hire firm.

The book's 579 recipes are arranged alphabetically by ingredient so finding yourself with ...oh let's say a glut of lemons, and with no other thought than to make gallons of lemonade, Beryl will have you making chutney, curd, jelly, marmalade. pickle and then a whole raft of Lemon & Other Things. 

I've used my copy as a bit of a diary too and written in additional ingredients, or variations on quantities, as well as the date I made whatever it was. It would seem on 11th September (our wedding anniversary?) 2015 I made apricot jam. It was the year the Tinker (my dad) had died so we probably didn't feel much like painting the town, but I do know that I planted the kernels and now have three little apricot trees to show for that day.

So for those who asked here it is.

Apple and Mint Chutney.

Chop and chuck in the pan, boil until it thickens and then pot. Beryl's chutney tips include using the best vinegar, tie whole spices in a muslin bag, don't prepare onions until ready to use, don't over-cook, and chutneys always better for keeping...at least a month if you can manage to keep your hands off it, preferably a year. Cover in the same way as jams and enjoy it all.

3 1/2 lb apples

1 dsp (dessert spoon) chopped mint for each lb of apples

1lb onions

1lb each raisins, currants and sultanas

3/4lb brown sugar

2oz ground ginger

1oz salt (this is quite a lot, I sometimes use a bit less in Beryl's recipes. Clearly she wasn't worried about her kidneys or high blood pressure )

1oz mustard seed (tied in muslin bag)

1/4 oz cayenne pepper

1/4 oz mixed spice

3 & 1/2 pints malt vinegar

Happy preserving.

 

Preservation...

I hope this Thursday finds you well and not too windswept if you are here in the U.K. We’ve had to swaddle the greenhouse as usual in order to stop it heading for Wales.

But lo, it’s that time of year again. 

Time for the Transformation Challenge which this week is all about turning apples and tomatoes into chutney. 

I perused the book, wrote the shopping list and headed out on a mission for gallons of vinegar, brown sugar and all those spices I thought I had until I realised I’d thrown them all out in 2019 because most of them were dated 2015 (or even earlier)...

I doubt I'm the only one who's had a rampage through the food cupboards this last few months and decided that perhaps items from 2009 could go as well. To my shame it was the medicine cabinet that offered up the most shamefully out-of-date specimens.

How can that be when it seems like only yesterday I bought them.

In the end finding mace and mustard seed and pickling spice wasn’t quite so easy as I’d thought and I was grateful to my chauffeur who pulled up outside three different shops before my list was fulfilled.

Wednesday dawned nice and sunny and we were ready for the off. The Kayaker made the mistake of calling in just as the mass chopping was about to start, so he drew the short straw and was allocated the onions, while Bookhound did the tomatoes and I just gathered everything else together. 

Chutney is so easy isn’t it. 

Chop it all up, chuck everything in the pan and simmer until it’s thick enough to pot,

And so the shelf is now filling up with Green Tomato, Red Tomato and I have Apple and Mint in my sights just because it sounds delicious. 

I do of course live with a champion. Bookhound's Apple Chutney won first prize at the Village Show a few years ago, except it was never to be repeated because he couldn't remember what he'd put in it.

But all this has barely made a dent in the apple crop so next it will be blanching and freezing as many as I can before I surrender; except I’m always really grateful to my Late Summer Self when my January Self finds all this fruit for pies. 

Then it will be blackberries. 

Ours are nowhere near ready yet and we’re getting precariously close to September 1st when the farmers are allowed to cut the hedgerows again (they have to be left alone from March 1st for the nesting birds). I’m sure I’ll find some secret picking places and then it will be all systems go on the spiced bramble jelly and some jam.

Some years I’m a bit lightweight on the preserving front, but this year, even without the Village Show to spur me on, it suddenly seems really essential to have some comfort stores laid up ready for winter. The light is definitely  changing, the sun is a little lower in the sky, and we seem to lose another ten minutes of light every evening now. We always go out for a barn owl walk as dusk falls and that has shifted from 9.30pm to 8.30pm very quickly. 

And on the subject of barn owls we really have no idea what may have happened this year.

We had a nesting pair, and all seemed on course for owlets, Mrs Ravilious seemed to be ‘sitting’, Mr Ravilious was back and forth, but sadly we heard no owlet noises. We wonder whether the very hot weather in April and May might have done for them.  But the good news is there have been owlets very nearby, maybe our female decamped, so the colony lives on and thrives. At the moment we have one owl roosting in the box, a male we think, who pops out every evening at dusk and goes off hunting, and we are seeing several around the fields as we walk. Food has been plentiful and the fields have been nicely quiet, making conditions ideal, so it’s all a mystery yet to be solved. 

And another mystery to be solved, I’d better tell you about Magnus...

The naughty boy has been AWOL for five weeks now and I have to admit we are beginning to wonder what he’s up to. His longest previous was three weeks a few years ago and, though we’ve put the word around, no one has seen as much as a whisker. I’m hoping he’s doing a Six Dinner Sid and has found a nice supply of food and maybe a new temporary friend or two....but all the same we’re feeling a bit (make that very) sad without him.

We might have to start thinking about kittens because we have never been cats-less in forty years...which will of course be the cue for him to stroll in the door. 

Meanwhile has the preservation descended on you...

Along with this 'thinking ahead to winter' rather than be ambushed by it...

I'm not wishing summer away because we usually have fine weather through September and into October, but I do feel the need to be prepared perhaps more than usual...

I'd love to know if there is anything special that you do in readiness...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Family Memoirs

Checking in through the August sabbatical from bookish posts to bring you...well a sort of bookish post.

But firstly, how has your week been...

I hope, wherever you are in the world, you are finding some peace and calm in amongst all the ongoing noise.

I am putting my August to good use with plenty of reading (lots of bookish thoughts to come) and doing  useful things like Sorting Out the CDs. I mean, however did we accumulate so many, and what to do with them since I got with the times and upgraded myself to  iTunes, MP3 downloads and a blue tooth speaker. I spent a happy day going through them all and importing some forgotten gems onto my computer, before putting them all back where I'd found them, so I'm no further forward.

I'm back in the land of Kate Rusby having rediscovered her lurking in the CD repository. There was Little Lights, Sleepless and Awkward Annie, Underneath the Stars and Hourglass  and I've added the new album out this week. Hand Me Down is a selection of cover versions recorded during lock-down and you can hear every last emotion of  these times in her voice. Kate and her family have been a shining light through lock-down with their cheery weekly Singy Songy  sessions on Facebook. Of course ordering the MP3  means I don't have the CD notes explaining the choice of songs, but no matter. As James Taylor also emerged from the CD mountain there I was, back in the sixth form common room circa 1970, listening to Carolina On My Mind as Kate Rusby sang her equally emotional and exquisite version. It's the ultimate homesickness song...

In my mind I'm gone to Carolina
Can't you see the sunshine?
Can't you just feel the moonshine?
And ain't it just like a friend of mine to hit me from behind?
Yes I'm gone to Carolina in my mind

...that yearning to be back somewhere special (not the sixth form common room I hasten to add) and who knew that Paul McCartney and George Harrison had contributed to the original version (thank you wikipaedia).

And then there's the chez dovegrey LP cupboard...

No turntable for years, but who knows whether there's a vinyl in there worth a small fortune. We regularly open the dresser cupboard thinking we could use the space for something else, look at them, feel overwhelmed by the task and close the door again.

No such problem with books, and having recently read House of Glass - the story and secrets of a twentieth century Jewish family by Hadley Freeman (I will be commending it to the house with bells on, thoughts coming next month) it set me off on a journey around my shelves again in search of more family memoirs that I have really enjoyed.

In fact I was so enthused I wrote this post.

And I spent ages doing all the links.

Then as I was doing a bit of housekeeping on the scribbles last night, and updating the sidebars, I realised, to my embarrassment that I'd already written about family memoirs at the end of April.

Blame the Strange Times, and if I'd forgotten I'm hoping you may have too, my apologies for repetition, but this time I looked harder and I've found double the number of books... 

I had a bit of difficulty deciding when a family memoir became autobiography but decided, in the end, that it needed to be written by a member of the family, and predominantly had to be much more about others than themselves. I want delving and skeletons dragged out of cupboards, I want revelations and surprises.

I came up with quite a good haul in the end and then decided to sit them on their own Shelf of Great Importance so here they are, and this should stop me writing about the same books for a third time.

The Three of Us ~ Julia Blackburn

Running for the Hills ~ Horatio Clare 

On Chapel Sands ~ Laura Cummings

The Hare With Amber Eyes ~ Edmund de Waal

Elisabeth’s Lists ~ Lullah Ellender

The Music Room ~ William Fiennes

House of Glass ~ Hadley Freeman 

A House Unlocked ~ Penelope Lively

Hancox ~ Charlotte Moore

Climbing Days ~ Dan Richards

The Baroness ~ Hannah Rothschild

The Great Western Beach ~ Emma Smith

The Photographer at Sixteen ~ George Szirtes

The Pulse Glass ~ Gillian Tindall

Forty Autumns ~ Nina Willner

Links are to scribbles various down the years, and how lucky was I to interview some of these authors in the dovegreyreader tent at Port Eliot Festival

...Edmund de Waal (below), William Fiennes (above), Hannah Rothschild. It seems like several lifetimes ago that I had the nerve to ask ceramicist and potter supreme Edmund de Waal to assess my school pottery dish...

And we presented Edmund with a knitted hare with amber eyes, the very first of many knitsuke given to authors various as a souvenir of their visit to the tent.

But there must be so many more family memoirs (even more than you mentioned last time) and I love reading them so all your suggestions (again) very welcome (even more).

Meanwhile, am I the only one with a slight aversion to autobiography...

And am I right about my distinction between autobiography and memoir...

And has any music in particular cheered you during this last few months...

And now I think about it, what has Kate Rusby done with Hand Me Down but create a sort of musical memoir of her life...

Orchids

I thought I'd share something that has kept me and my book room very cheery these last few months, though I suspect Moth Orchids might be a bit of a Marmite thing.

Loved or loathed.

Orchids always seemed so exotic back in the day didn't they. A costly investment requiring heated greenhouses and much cossetting, but this version, the Phalaenopsis, now perhaps verging on the ubiquitous, like the Swiss Cheese Plants and the Rubber Plants of the 1970s.

Did anyone else have a prize specimen of Monstera deliciosa or Ficus elastica...

And I bet I wasn't the only one to polish the leaves with Baby Bio Leafshine...

And what were our homes graced with in the 1960s...

Tradescantia...

The Spider Plant in the hanging macrame basket perhaps...

Moth Orchids now easily bought in the supermarket, but I’d never really bothered, having quickly killed one that I was given as leaving present from work, until a few years ago a friend sent me one for my birthday. 

‘Just ignore it’’ she said,  ‘water it on a sort of when you remember basis,’ and that’s exactly what I did. It would go weeks without attention but the thing flowered deep purple blooms solidly for three years. As one lot faded the next lot were ready in the wings and suddenly I accumulated a few more. Easy to add one to the trolley in Tesco's. They’d flower for months and months and then I’d move them into the Orchid Rest Home (the laundry room) while they regrouped. Some would take a couple of years to flower again but by adding new ones in between I always seemed to have at least one in flower.

Then lockdown happened and to my dismay not a single one even in bud.

Cue Bookhound to the rescue, and home from shopping in those really early days with three all sold past their sell-by-date at a bargain £2 each, because everyone was fighting over toilet rolls and had forgotten about the orchids. I arranged them on the windowsill and there they have sat for the last five months, throwing out more and more, and even more flowers, and showing no sign of fading.

Thinking these must surely be on the wane any day soon, and now having something of an addiction, I added another on to the trolley last week because I couldn't resist the colour and the patterning on the petals...

I re-potted a few older ones a while back but I know plenty of people usually just leave them be.

So is it just me and orchids, or you also susceptible to planting an occasional one in the trolley with the weekly shop...

All tips gratefully received...

What about feeding them...

I do when I remember, but is there an optimum time in the growing/flowering cycle...

And if not orchids do you have another pot plant favourite...

 

 

Do Drop in...

Nipping in from the staycation deckchair, and the August sabbatical from longer bookish posts, with a post each Thursday-ish to make sure you are all alright, and this week to share my remedy if anyone is having a bout of the glums.

I had a mild episode on Tuesday which I think might be about occasionally realising I can’t just hop on a plane to New Zealand and see Offspringette, all compounded by the fact that it’s her birthday today, but it’s not just me. These days you very quickly realise it’s the same for everyone and there’s an odd sort of comfort in that. Anyway my bout of glum was swiftly rectified by an airlift into Waterstones to breath in some books. There was nothing I wanted but it was lovely to browse (again) and my remedy for anyone feeling a little marooned and holiday-less is of course a good book...

The Caravaners by Elizabeth Von Arnim, first published in 1909, and which I had bought as a special offer from Handheld Press.  

I’m about a hundred pages in and delighted not only by the story and the writing, but by one of those serendipitous moments when you discover that the date on which you are reading is the exact date something happens in the book. It is August 2nd when the German Baron and his wife set off on what is proving to be an ill-fated but hilarious holiday, travelling by horse-drawn caravan around England, and so I’m feeling like a tag-along and I really can’t stop laughing.

He’s such a pompous snob, and his wife, mediated through his eyes is, to his amazement, having a wonderful time and everything else is an unmitigated disaster. 

I skimmed the introduction in the Handheld Press edition and glimpsed  ‘feminism’ ‘extreme political right and ‘rhetoric of xenophobia’ and decided that, for now, this might be a book that I want to read for pure pleasure, not to argue for any latter-day relevance (unlike Rose Macaulay whose 1920’s writing is screaming 2020 at me) or worry as I read. All in good time to ponder all that, but for now I want to relax and enjoy. And thence to my shelves where I knew I had collected quite a few vintage books by Elizabeth von Arnim some years ago. The haul was way better than I remembered. 

And when I do eventually write about The Caravaners here I must remember to tell you about the 1974 student nurse holiday on board a horse-drawn caravan around County Mayo in Ireland...what on earth possessed us. It might have been fractionally worse than the student nurse holiday in Yugoslavia the previous year, when the very promising group of four handsome young men on the £48 Laker Airways package holiday flight, and travelling to the same hotel, turned out to be trainee Catholic priests...but that’s another story.

If you’ve read any of the Elizabeth Von Arnim books in my stash which do you recommend. They are all beautiful well-thumbed, probably by countless women in the past, and the typeface and font are readable so I could definitely try a few more. 

And if you are stay-cationing how’s it going...

Or have you travelled further afield...

 

Desire ~ Una L. Silberrad, Handheld Press & a mention of Rose Macaulay

In my quest to explore more (and different) publishers of forgotten fiction from the twentieth century, I stumbled across Handheld Press, and you may recall I recently enjoyed Business as Usual. I am grateful that Kate at Handheld persevered with emails given that my inbox currently totals 625 and I have been known to look at it and look away in a state of mild panic. On that note my sincere apologies to anyone awaiting a reply, I do get there eventually if not dreckly. I think almost 2000 people now subscribe here by email and they often send a reply direct to me which I endeavour to respond to but regularly fail. Please know that I read and appreciate every single one and it's always good to know you are out there and reading the scribbles.

And while I’m on the subject of thank you’s...thank you for ALL your comments here, especially these last few months. I’ve always said they are the oxygen of the scribbles and I love the way conversations develop. From the off back in 2006 this has been about creating a welcoming corner of the internet, and it’s been a joy to drop in and find you all here and contributing through such strange and unsettling times.

Under the banner of 'We Sell Stories', Handheld Press books are beautifully produced and arrive like an old-fashioned book parcel might have done in 1920; a layer of tissue paper around the book and all wrapped in brown paper sealed with paper tape. I'm sure even the postman enjoys this quaint variation on the plastic air-filled jiffy bags of today. Signing up for the Handheld e mail means special offers and discounts and just this week I took advantage of Kate's birthday offer and bought The Caravanners by Elizabeth Von Arnim for £10 inc. postage. But cue much excitement when a good friend ordered me two Handheld books at the beginning of lockdown as a gift. I saved Desire by Una Silberrad, with its gorgeous cover, for a Right Moment

When well connected socialite and girl-about-town Desire Quebell takes a shine to the rather staid but steady novelist Peter Grimstone who could have predicted what would happen next. 

'She read books as she made acquaintance with people, enthusiastically almost gluttonously, losing herself completely for the time being, and wringing out the uttermost...'

Desire, the illegitimate daughter of government financial adviser Sir Joseph Quebell and a variety actress, lives her life of privilege and wealth to the full, so when Sir Joseph dies and leaves Desire destitute I could only wonder what life had in store. Except Desire has proved herself to be a bit of a stoic and a stalwart and with a genuine sense of honour and fairness, likewise Peter who must make a choice between his family business and his career as a writer. Both will make sacrifices. Desire trains as a secretary, quite a move for a woman in 1908, and one that ostensibly takes her several (make that many) rungs back down the social ladder, and as for Peter ...well I don't want to spoil it.

Will their paths cross again ...

And will they help each other out...

First published in 1908, Desire has been brought back into print by Handheld Press and a very worthy return it is. I was surprisingly gripped and there are moments of real tension as the challenges mount for both Desire and Peter against a backdrop of family rivalry and sabotage.

Looking through the Handheld list my eye was then taken by Rose Macaulay.

Rose's final novel The Towers of Trebizond has sat unread on my shelf for years and Handheld are bringing more of her books back into print. I knew next to nothing about Rose Macaulay so was delighted to find two biographies (thank you Kate in Cheshire, I think you sent one of them) on my shelf as well. I settled down with The Towers of Trebizond and my trusty 1923 Bartholomew's Atlas (because where on earth is Trebizond) and that famous first line was all it took...

'Take my camel, dear. 'said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.'

I now have to read everything Rose Macaulay has ever written and find out everything there is to know about her. One notable critic has been scathing about her work (maybe that's why I had subliminally avoided...who knows) but I am going to beg to disagree. It feels (to me) as if the Anglican Church is on its beam ends right now and I loved all the wry humour concealing deep insights as Laurie, Aunt Dot and Father Chantry- Pigg make their way to Turkey with missionary zeal  to do a bit of converting. And of course the camel goes too and has starring role. More to come about The Towers of Trebizond (which is on the south coast of the Black Sea)

Having also now read another novel Potterism  (1920) I am finding so much to admire and much to think about. It could be argued that Rose Macaulay's perceptive post-war observations about the 1920s have great relevance for what we are living through now. Handheld are republishing Potterism in August, and what with 'woke' culture and confidence in the media currently undergoing a bit of a wobble, there couldn't be a more apposite moment to read it, so I am grateful to them for sending me an early copy.

I have a few more lined up too, Crewe Train, The World my Wilderness (with an introduction by Penelope Fitzgerald) and Non- Combatants and Others - Writings Against War 1916-1945. The latter also to be published by Handheld in August. Meanwhile Bookhound, sensing my enthusiasm, found me three volumes of Rose Macaulay's letters on eBay for £7 along with Staying With Relations (in a lovely old bound library edition) and They Were Defeated, and so, through my annual August sabbatical from regular to more occasional posts here, you can be sure it is Rose who will have my full attention, new notebook to hand, and I'll be back with plenty of thoughts about her in September. 

I'm hoping you all have some good reading set aside for August too, please do share...

And any more Rose Macaulay fans out there...

 

 

 

 

A Journey to a Bookshop

I had a bit of of an ‘I haven’t bought a book in a shop in ages’ moment a few weeks ago, in fact not since I bought The Mirror and the Light on March 5th, publication day, and so, once we were partially released back into the wild at the beginning of July, Bookhound dropped me outside W.H.Smiths and off I went. The same money had been sitting in my purse for almost four months, this couldn’t be right, something had to give.

I tapped on the shop door and they let me in. Only six people allowed in at a time but the shop was empty. I think confidence might be rising slowly now but it wasn’t backalong, anyway I went in and judging by the enthusiasm of the welcome you’d have thought it was my birthday and Christmas rolled into one. I followed the arrows to the paperbacks and now have to own up that I’d picked up and put back at least ten before I saw it, the sign saying ‘DO NOT PICK UP A BOOK UNLESS YOU ARE BUYING IT.’ I felt marginally better for having sanitised my hands but still, and so I proceeded with due caution and selected three.

Who knows what sort of reading mood I was in to pick up a big fat John Grisham novel, The Rainmaker. I haven’t read him in years but I was in the mood for a bit of  a legal thrillery page-turner. I’m about half way through and I’ll be honest ...I’m flagging. It all seems a bit padded out and extra-wordy but I’ll probably plod on during those deckchair moments in the coming weeks.

Then even more unusually I opted for a bit of Royal gossip. Lady in Waiting by Anne Glenconner. A candid look at life behind the scenes for the upper echelons in the post-war years, and you can but only feel sorry for them, and the children. The social life of Anne, Maid of Honour at the Queen’s Coronation and former a Lady in Waiting to Princess Margaret, and her husband Colin Tennant, is a mad whirl of nightly engagements and parties. There are houses in London and a stately home in Scotland and this is all compounded by Colin’s purchase of the island of Mustique. Anne is a saint, a martyr and everything else in between as she balances her frenetic life mostly spent placating the irascible Colin, alongside the demands of motherhood.

It has to be said, and I’ll say it...I was bound to be able to spot the future trials and tribulations for children left in the care of nannies and friends various whilst their parents were largely absent. To Anne’s credit she does also address her own shortcomings. These become apparent when nanny Barbara Barnes arrives as a role model and takes the helm. Barbara more famously known for her nurturing of the young Princes William and Harry, but her imposition of some routine and discipline can’t have been easy in the Tennant household given that there were now five children, no make that six if you include Colin. Colin still prone to rolling around on the floor with tantrums well into his later years. 

I don’t know about you but my lasting association between Mustique and Princess Margaret (besides Roddy Llewellyn of course) is the accidental burning of her feet in the hot bath water. I was sharing an office with the district nurses at the time and there was much speculation about it all, and the treatment and potential consequences I can tell you

 

I have to confess that my final choice, probably a salve to the two ‘popular’ reads was a Penguin  ModernClassic, The Man in the High Castle by Philip K.Dick. Endsleigh book group have been meeting via Zoom except I just don’t do Zoom so I’ve been absent. But the theme was Science or Science Fiction so I thought I’d at least try. In fact twenty pages in I’d decided that Philip Dick and I were not hitting it off at this particular moment in time and I abandoned. Maybe it will happen one day but I’ve never really ‘got’ sci-fi so I’m not hopeful.

I had a purse full of coinage so opted for the self service checkout and proceeded to feed £22 worth of change into the machine. About fifteen minutes later, and still the only person in the shop, and after a good natter with the staff while I fed the machine with every 1p, 2p, 5p etc in my possession, I was done. And I can’t tell you how good it felt to walk out of a shop with some new books under my arm.

Meanwhile, I’m wondering how you are doing with the venturing out, if allowed...

Are you nervous, getting less nervous, and feeling a bit more normal...

Or does it all feel a bit too hazardous for now...

And what about John Grisham. It’s years since I read The Pelican Brief and The Firm, any other good ones to recommend...

Sci Fi...will it ever happen here...

And Royal gossip...are you in or out. I thought I was ‘out’ until Anne Glenconner persuaded me otherwise.

Dahlias

Having inherited the dahlia bed from the Tinker (my dad, for any that haven’t met him here before) and the wonders he worked on it during his last two years living here with us, we have always felt an affinity with this little corner of the Tinker's Cott garden. I grew up with dahlias, but with no particular love for them until my dad started planting them here, and now it’s safe to say we are addicted.

It's always a bit nerve-wracking because we don't lift the tubers in the winter. They stay put with a thick layer of mulchy straw on top and we hope for the best. We unveil it once we are past our last frost date (about May 19th for us) and then wait and see what emerges. And it's an ongoing mystery as to why the slugs and snails slither past and walk another thirty yards across the lawn to eat things, but leave this bed alone.

But just when our early summer flourish is over, and the daisies have done their thing.. and how I love this picture of the Tinker in the midst of them...

Then along comes the dahlia bed, all singing and dancing until first frosts.

This year I have taken dahlia expert Charlie McCormick's advice and strung around the supports, and it's a minor miracle of scaffolding which is slowly disappearing from sight whilst doing its job. We add six new dahlias each year, start them off in pots in the greenhouse in early March and are martyrs to them every time there's a frost, dashing out to swaddle them. Dahlia corner is getting a bit crowded, and we’re wondering whether to extend it a bit, but in the meantime it’s a riot of mismatched colour and gorgeous flowers which are just starting to sing.

Wine-Eyed Jill now in her third year and more prolific than ever...

 

This a new one Rebecca's World...

Another new one and quite the star so far this year, Cornel Brons

Arbatax. A village show prizewinner, though sadly no show this year, but I had added in a second one for fear of losing the first.

Another new one, Edge of Joy and its growing on me...

Downham Royal was a fail last year and by the time I'd contacted Peter Nyssen (who always replace or refund if a problem) they had sold out. I was quick off the mark with my ordering in January this year...

And here's Cornel Brons again. I doubt there's a more perfect flower...

Waiting in the wings and laden with buds is Black Jack, and wait 'til you see it. I gave my Walking Friend one for her birthday and was speechless when I saw her flowers last week. She lives up on Dartmoor and her garden is always a few weeks behind ours, but there they were, spiky nine inch dinner plates of deepest purple.

Meanwhile I hope all is well in your gardens, or those nearby that you can enjoy if you don't have one...

And I'd love to know what's doing well in the flower department, and of course any good recommends....  

 

 

 

 

Plague - A Very Short Introduction ~ Paul Slack

'The fuller the sources become over time, the easier it is to test the accuracy of those sweeping statements of chroniclers about the havoc created by plague, and to see that the reality for everyone involved in an epidemic was personal stress.'
Plague ~ Paul Slack ( A Very Short Introduction)

For anyone who is feeling that stress please don't feel obliged to read this, though ultimately I hope it might be reassuring...

When all this started I could hardly believe what I was hearing...that the most popular book was The Plague by Camus and everyone was watching the film Contagion. They’re mad I thought as I walked past my shelf of plague books with my eyes shut.  

I couldn’t think of anything worse. We were living it after all, wasn’t that enough torture.

The Plague Shelf had built up through many years working in public health. Health Visitors of old were trained in epidemics and infectious diseases, and in Plymouth especially in disaster management if there was ever a nuclear accident. And so I’d picked up and added all sorts of book down the years, but reading them now seemed like madness.

It's funny how the cards fall though isn't it.

I can only blame the Happy Campers.

We'd all missed face-to-face bookish talk so much that we set up regular garden sessions and had decided on a shared read of The Wheel of Fortune, book by book, and with a session to talk about it in-between. We'd pay special attention to Susan Howatch's retelling of the era of the Plantagenets through the lens of twentieth century lives of the Godwin family. This historical connection had passed me by on first read; 1985, baby overdue and in need of escapist fiction, but this time around I am a fully paid-up member of the fourteenth century with an essential module on The Black Death, which arrived in England in 1438 or so, during the reign of Edward III.

And so I sidled up to the Plague Shelf and found Plague by Paul Slack, one of those Very Short Introduction series from Oxford University Press, and what a revelation these 120 pages have been.

I'm sure someone somewhere regularly says something about 'interrogating' or understanding the present through the lens of the past...or maybe it's shifted to the other way round in the current climate, but honestly my jaw was on the floor.

Quoting J.F.C. Hecker..

'The mental shock sustained by all nations during the prevalence of the Black Plague was without parallel and beyond description.' 

Paul Slack suggests this...

'It destroyed confidence in the future, undermined deference and conventional moral norms, produced extremes of religious enthusiasm and social and religious dissidence, turned everything upside down.'

'Psycho-pathological hysteria in critical circumstances' is mentioned too, but also the ability to accommodate the onslaught...

'not as something commonplace or everyday, but as inescapable facts of life.'

Can I tell you I found all that very reassuring; that human nature and our reaction to something life-threatening and in many ways uncontrollable, would seem to have changed very little since 1348. Maybe we've sheltered a bit too long under the cloak of invincibility where disease is concerned. I doubt we'll do that again for a while.

And there were some other fascinating similarities too...

Archbishop Carlo Borromeo, among the infected of Milan in 1576-7 'encouraged people in quarantine to come to their windows to sing the Litany and the Mass.'

Who will ever forget those moving scenes of Italians singing from their windows, and when we all knew this was headed our way too

In so many ways it has been far easier and more encouraging to return to the fourteenth century for an overview, rather than try and understand what is happening now. We are still slap-bang in the middle of history being made, as they were back then, and it may well be a few decades yet before anyone can make sense of all this.

But it also made me realise that for all our advances we are still only just learning what we are dealing with here. The science is young and has a way to go so, just as we might say now, 'Imagine them not knowing that the Black Death was transmitted by fleas on rats,'  (or by body lice as the latest research shows), well just imagine them in 3020 saying 'Fancy them not knowing Covid 19 was spread by ....'  

There is much about flight, about the origins of quarantine ( Venetian colony of Ragusa, now Dubrovnik in 1377) and isolation, about the conflicts of private and public interests when precautions are taken, about scepticism as public knowledge increased, about challenges to authority and all of it suggesting that the Old Testament adage ( I had to look it up, Ecclesiastes) in many respects still holds true..

...and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us. 

Feeling emboldened I moved along the plague shelf and read Ralph Taylor's Summer - A Scrivener, His City and the Plague by Keith Wrightson, and then picked up The Scourging Angel by Benedict Gummer.  And as quickly as this bout of interest descended, so as suddenly did it abate; enough of buboes and the like because now I'm plagued out and have moved on to thinking about who was writing in the fourteenth century, who could I be reading.

Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales of course. It's almost fifty years since I read Troilus and Criseyde for A Level. How we groaned at translating Middle English, and yet I glance at it now and it seems almost readable. Then there's William Langland and Piers Plowman...

Any other suggestions welcome.

Or books about life in the fourteenth century, fiction or non-fiction...

And I'd be interested to know, have you been fascinated by all this or avoiding delving ...well, like the plague.

 

 

 

 

Chicken Run the Third

It will be twenty-six years next month since we upped sticks and left town for country. Admittedly only six miles further up the road, but we’d found the location of our dreams, the place where we'd like our children to have some outdoor freedom, and the home we thought we’d still like to live in once the nest had emptied.

And we're still here.

I’m sure you’d all agree that the trauma of moving house is unsurpassed by little else on the stress-o-meter and our transit was no exception. I made things far worse by insisting that no house I left would be anything other than cleaned to operating theatre standards, though things started to fall apart when the removal men shifted the freezer and I saw what lay beneath. I had assumed (very wrongly) that the house we were moving into would be just the same, pristine and clean and lovely, ready to welcome us. Honestly, how wrong and naive could I be, it wasn't. I arrived feeling like a wrung out dishcloth and was ambushed by an unexpected grief for the first little home we'd left behind; the one we'd returned to with three new babies but defintely grown out of. Yet despite that this 150 year-old place had a huge heart and warmth and we felt it had probably been waiting for us to find it and make a home of it.

Adding to the stress on the day was trapping and boxing up the cat (Korky) as well as rounding up the chickens, and transporting them in their ark to their new home. We’d kept chickens for years in our little town cottage garden and thought nothing of twelve egg scrambled egg sessions (between five of us). The girls (Warrens for the experts among you) settled in well in their new surroundings. We only had our old collie dog so they could free-range safely, lay twelve eggs in the hedge that we wouldn’t find for weeks and generally cluck around happily. We took in a rogue bantam cockerel too. George the 5am scourge of a Dartmoor village and my HV colleague pleaded with me...if we can catch him please will you take him. He was an absolute gent was George. No trouble, pecked up food for his girls (twice his size) and then left it for them to eat, roosted every night at the top of the fir tree and far enough away from the house not to bother us with the crowing, except we quite liked it. We were living in the country after all.

We would add to the flock as required but gradually, as our own nest emptied and the chickens depleted, George crowed his last and we decided to stop with the whole chicken husbandry lark. Yet, every so often we’d say ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to keep chickens again,’ and Bookhound would pace out the corner of the garden have a bit of a think but that would be it.

Then lockdown happened and we were suddenly overcome with a massive bout of self-sufficiency. Nothing seemed certain in those early scary days did it, and we had to think carefully about how and where we would shop when supermarket delivery slots were like ...well like hen's teeth. The local farm shop was our salvation, quickly setting up online ordering and click-and-collect but maybe we also needed to think a bit more carefully about our own food production

And that aside Bookhound was definitely in need of a project.

Needless to say no project of Bookhound’s is ever knowingly under-constructed, skimped over or out of alignment (spot the spirit level), and, with access to building materials strictly limited, it was a case of using up all those 'things' that had been kept 'in case they came in handy', tucked away behind the shed for just this very moment. What has materialised is a spacious sort of hopefully fox and spaniel-proof triple-enclosure system (with the best views) that will allow for rotation when we hit winter mud. There’s a cosy roost, and nest boxes inside the woodshed accessed by a little door from the run that we can close at night. 

We rang the place where we had always bought our hens, at point-of-lay and rescued before they end up in Tesco's. Can you believe there was a waiting list...we weren't the only ones thinking about all this, but eventually home they came in the dog crate, six happy and docile Brown Warrens who will get along fine. 

The trouble we always had in the past was trying to mix in some fancy breeds because they looked nice, but they'd end up at war with the 'commoners' and it is only then that you see the true origins of the word 'henpecked.' 

As always they hide for a few days and take a little while to settle in. They have to learn to peck the ground, and to find their safe spaces, and we've had some fun 'teaching'  them to go into the hen house at night. But Harriet, Audrey, Dorothy, Judy, Bunty and Babs have all got the hang of it now and, as predicted, three weeks in residence and they have come into lay.

The Kayaker came round for lunch so we had the Ceremony of the First Egg and there it was ...a double yolker.


Any more Keepers of Chickens out there... all advice welcome.

Anyone else felt the urge to be a tiny bit more self-sufficient...

Or had a rethink about what really matters day to day...

 

 

 

 

The Splash of Words - Believing in Poetry ~ Mark Oakley

'Some writers have the gift of simply letting you know you can trust them, Mark Oakley has this gift in abundance...' 
Rowan Williams

Mark Oakley winged his way onto my radar via Bel Mooney.

Having shared my enthusiasm for Brian Doyle and One Long River of Song - Notes on Wonder, Bel had recommended Mark Oakley. Previously Chancellor of St Paul's Cathedral, Mark Oakley is now the Dean of St John's College Cambridge and has written a series of books. Brian Doyle was a very successful chapter-a-day read through May and I quite surprised myself with how much I was enjoying a bit of ...dare I say...meditative reading and directed thinking.

Having been a devout C of E attendee for many years I'm now a bit lapsed, none of which ever stops me from loving the liturgy and the presence and availability of the buildings (and missing them hugely during recent months)  but I proceeded with my usual caution over any religious writing.  I downloaded a Kindle sample of  My Sour Sweet Days - George Herbert and the Journey of the Soul by Mark Oakley and decided it was all a bit too much for the current state of my soul (which felt reasonably calm and OK ) and maybe I wasn't ready for the depths of George Herbert.

In the meantime I had a complete reorganise of the poetry shelves one day because I had nothing else pressing to do. The diary was an empty void and suddenly I needed to carry books halfway round the house to new homes.

I know for sure it isn't just me that does this...

Own up now all you book movers...

It was so good to see all the poetry books again and get them all into order and sit and browse a few, pull a few old friends and new-to-me poets off the shelf for a closer look, and how thankful I was that I had stocked up backalong in case of a future dearth. A charity shop in town had taken in a huge collection of as new contemporary poetry books and was selling them for 50p each, thus swelling my shelves by a quarter as much again.  Doubly pleased too that I'd rescued them because some weeks later the shop and it's entire stock was destroyed in a flood (floor mop jammed down a toilet in the flat above).

And then Bel recommended The Splash of Words -Believing in Poetry also by Mark Oakley,

'This beautiful and wise meditation centred around the soul language of poetry opens new windows in the shared house of both poetry and belief". 
Carol Ann Duffy

...and this time the Kindle sample was enough to convince me very quickly to splash out on the book (sorry).

'The phrase 'splash of words' is a good description of poetry. When you read a poem there is an initial splash like a pebble thrown into a lake. The words disturb your surface and have their impact...' says Mark Oakley in his introduction.

Yes, I could identify with that, so far so good...

'Then, as the poem begins to do its work, the ripples of meaning head out towards your shore, often slowly but relentlessly, and you realise that these words are shifting your perceptions...'

Yes I could see that too...still so far so good

'...and consequently even transforming who you are and how you understand.'

Whoa, steady on, lets wait and see.

There is a month's worth of a poem-a-day here with a commentary to accompany which, whilst obviously it does have a religious theme, doesn't beat you over the head with it...consequently twelve days in, at the time of writing this, I am coping and really enjoying the selection. Though I might not always segue neatly with Mark Oakley's spiritual stance or interpretation I think that's entirely Normal For Poetry, so we are having a jolly good to and fro about it all.

But there is another huge advantage to a book like this for someone who has just reorganised the poetry shelves. Each poem sends me there to see if I have said poet in a collection and so far I'm doing pretty well.

Jo Shapcott, W.H.Auden, U.A.Fanthorpe, Louis MacNeice, Dylan Thomas, Liz Berry, Mary Oliver, Alice Oswald, Emily Dickinson, Seamus Heaney, Fiona Benson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, R.S. Thomas, Carol Ann Duffy...

It also demanded a new poetry notebook. The last one full to the brim with notes I’ll probably never look at again, but it’s somehow nice to have a record of meandering thoughts and brief quotes...

That picture of the shards we've dug up in our garden over the years feels like a perfect picture for those fragments of thought that occur as I read.

But likewise Mark Oakley is finding new poets for me too, and I was so spellbound by Jen Hadfield's Paternoster that I immediately ordered her collection Nigh-No-Place .

Mark Oakley starts his book with Paternoster and that feels entirely right. It is a poem that cannot be rushed...in other words sets a reader's pace for what is to come, holding the steady rhythm of the plough horse, the swaying of the head, the sounds, the time honoured labour of man and horse. I don't even like horses that much, but I love this one a great deal. It brought to mind that other plough-horse related poem by Edward Thomas, As the Team's Headbrass. I've read Paternoster over and again and feel as I've ploughed the equivalent of Long Acre in front of the house in the process...

This on Jen Hadfield, who now lives in Shetland, from The Poetry Archive...

'Her poetry is found where the secular and non-secular converge: ‘Paternoster’ is the Lord’s Prayer as uttered by a draft horse, and one can almost smell the mix of grass and mash on its breath as it repeats the words “it is on earth as it is in heaven”.

And here the opening lines...

Paternoster. Paternoster
Hallowed be dy mane.
Dy kingdom come.
Dy draftwork be done.
Still plough the day
And give out daily bray
Thought heart stiffen in the harness.

'The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper,' said Bertrand Russell...

'Good poetry makes the universe reveal a secret' said the Persian poet Hafiz (another of the choices in The Splash of Words) but like many I sometimes struggle to find it, or to sharpen my wits, so I am really enjoying Mark Oakley's light shining a deeper understanding over these gems.

Oh...right...

'...and consequently even transforming.... how you understand.'

Meanwhile, any new poetry discoveries to report...

Any favourite collections jumping off the shelves at you lately...

Moved any books around the home from A to B to C, and those that were at C to A,  and those that were are B to C recently...

 

 

 

 

Hair today & gone on July 27th...

Have you all had the phone call...

The one we’ve all been waiting for, at least here in the UK...

Did you trip over on the way to pick up the phone because you couldn’t see where you were going...

’Hi Lynne...it’s Ed...’

’EEEEEEEEDDDDDDDDDD’

Ed is my hairdresser. He’s a good friend of the Kayaker and I had sent a nice message along the lines of  ‘tell him to ring your mother.’

I’ve been through the rumpled messy Carol ‘Gardener’s World' Klein look and am now heading for the full 1970’s page boy. it was almost time to get out the flares and the platform clogs. 

1975 I think. I'd just won a goldfish at a fair on Hampstead Heath, for which I bought a tank and luxury fixtures and fittings only for it to die a week later. Please note the Felicity Kendall 'The Good Life' dungarees and the 6" turned up hems, but also the page boy haircut. We used to go to the Jingles Hairdresser Training School, where their apprentices would practise on you for £1. I'd had the ignominious honour of being 'evicted' from the seat because a page boy was 'too ordinary and boring' for the up and coming student stylist.

Anyway, nothing fancy ever required for my hair these days. No colour, no foils, no highlights (age seems to be providing those without help) Just chop it to above my ears, sweep it sideways, don’t layer it to much or I look like a hedgehog, no thank you to the hairspray, quick ruffle with the dryer and off I go. 

As luck would have it I’d had my hair cut shorter than usual in early March thinking I would be going to New Zealand, and which was sure to involve some wilderness camping. Last time I went to New Zealand I made this amazing discovery at Cascade Creek that my hair could be washed (without shampoo) in a stream and would dry by itself without a hairdryer.

And again at Lake Hawea..

A skill once learned that I readily transferred to Dartmoor

Extraordinary.

As it is we seem to have been on a different ‘wilderness’ experience this last few months and although the fringe goes sideways it still has the power to annoy me when it grows too long,  but years ago someone taught me a cutting trick that never fails...

You carefully separate off whatever constitutes fringe, gather it together, twist it and twist it into a tight bundle and just chop off the end. Hey presto. you can see where you’re going again and it annoys you slightly less.

Someone said at the beginning of all this that after six weeks people would realise there is no such thing as natural beauty. Now being a person who worries more about my dahlias than my eyebrows I wasn’t too worried, but I suspect plenty of people have quite enjoyed a rest from the treadmill, maybe rediscovered something that had been lost in a sea of habit, even found a new style, who knows.

But hasn’t the unruly, over-long hair also become a badge of Lockdown Survival. We’re seeing it left and right on the TV (no names, no pack drill) and as Bookhound approaches the moment when he might need a pony tail it’s all become quite hilarious here.

Anyway, I’ve got my appointment, how about you...

How are your lockdown locks doing...

Anything else that you surrendered graciously and may never bother with again...

Anything that has driven you crazy and you are first in the queue...

 

Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose (8) - A memoir of love, exile and crosswords ~ Sandy Balfour

'Like a crossword clue, history never makes sense at first reading. The surface is plausible, but discordant. We need a second reading to impose order.'

I honestly don't know what I'd do without you all.

How would I find books like this if one of you didn't email and suggest I read it.

It was one of those mornings when I was in need of 'different' then in whizzed an email from one of you suggesting I read Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose (8) - A memoir of love, exile and crosswords by Sandy Balfour. It took me less than a nano-second to be convinced and order a copy...perhaps a sort of reverse version of what I do to some of you sometimes...maybe.

Here's the blurb...

Half a million people a day do it in the Telegraph. The Times claims almost as many, and the Guardian 300,000. Most people remember their first time, and everyone has a favourite. You can do it in bed, standing up, or on a train. You can do it alone, with a loved one or in groups. The Queen does it in the bath. It is not illegal, immoral or fattening. In fact it tops the Home Office list of approved entertainments for prison inmates. Crosswords are a very British obsession.

Crosswords are a very British obsession. Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose is a personal reminiscence and a guide to solving crossword puzzles. But it is much, much more than a 'how-to' book. Each chapter starts with a clue, and uses anecdote, history and autobiography to solve it, in the process describing something of what it means to love England. In the process, we encounter The Best Crossword Clue Ever, The Most Beautiful Clue in the World 'Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose' and the eccentric personalities behind such legendary compilers as the Guardian's Araucaria and The Times'Ximenes.

The Queen does the crossword in the bath??

I can't pretend to be an expert, nor obsessed, but crosswords do fascinate me whilst also making me feel that there's a whole world of knowing that I am excluded from. It is this knowing when you are looking at an anagram, when you are not, when the word is hidden in plain sight in the clue, or when you've got to really stand on your head and turn your logical and ordered world a little upside-down, and think way beyond the box. Sometimes I get into the mindset, sometimes I don't, so it was good to read that it took Sandy Balfour years and years before he felt at ease in the world of the crossword.

I hadn't realised how traditional the whole thing is either. Famous compilers who garner a reputation and a following, one of  earliest of whom was the nature writer Adrian Bell (Corduroy, Silver Ley, The Cherry Tree, Men and the Fields)

One of the lasting memories I have of sitting as an observer in a workshop on memoir writing with Julia Blackburn and Penelope Lively, was their suggestion that all memoir needs a scaffolding. Once you've found it the book takes shape around it and Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose is that clever memoir that has used its scaffolding well. 

Born and raised in South Africa Sandy Balfour's journey begins in 1983 when he and his girlfriend leave Cape Town, avoiding army conscription and apartheid, and with a plan to hitchhike to London. The journey takes him around the world but effectively into exile, in search of a place he can belong and which he would like to call home...

'I have only a desire to be on the move. I have cut myself off from friends and family. I have discarded my past. It feels like a kind of death. All that is left is myself.
I am not sure that is enough.'

Weaving through the quest are the crosswords, a quest in themselves, and if I could remember all the details I think I could probably smash out the Times crossword in hours rather than the days it would take me if I stuck at it, rather than surrendering. It felt as if I'd stumbled into a new world that has always been a mystery to me...

That each newspaper has its own style...

This whole network of compilers who go by pseudonyms like Rufus, Araucaria (a Monkey Puzzle tree) Bunthorne, Hendra, Custos, Logodaedulus. Gemini, Quantum...

That the editor has the final say if they feel a clue doesn't play by the unspoken rules...if it isn't 'cricket'...

And that cricket itself is a compilers dream providing a plethora of clues and solutions...

Sandy Balfour's journey woven around the crossword clues, of which there are plenty to solve, was indeed a great read and highly recommended if you fancy not only a  life-journey but also a glimpse into this mysterious world of wordplay.

So tell me...are you a crossword guru who knows all the tricks...

Or, like me, have you spent your life in the half-light not quite understanding the rules of the game...

Do you ever cheat and look up the answers online...

 

PS Thank you again to the recommender and what about the answer to the clue which is the title of the book... shall I spoil it...no maybe not just yet...

And what about these...

'The real reason for the meeting of Volkswagen and Daimler (6, 6)'

And this apparently one of the best clues ever set...

'Amundsen's forwarding address (4)'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Masks...

I’d put it off and put if off but to no avail, I’ve had to sit down and make some masks.

The Kayaker had sent me patterns and must have been on his tenth request for a mask, made with the fabric he had brought back from Africa in early March, before I capitulated.

Does that return from Africa seem like half a lifetime ago now...yes it does.

’Hold your breath when you land in Brussels,’ I had said...

‘ Why?’

I hadn’t liked to bother him with the finer details of what was heading our way, and after that initial visit on arriving back on March 6th we didn't see him for another twelve weeks.

For years he kayaked the White Nile in Uganda and had made many lifelong friends along the way. The village by the river is his second home, the people know and trust him, he knows and trusts them, all of which puts him in an ideal position to give something back and to know what might help them most. He’d been in Uganda for two months rolling out the project he’d been single-handedly raising money for over the last year. The Sleepwell Project had been a resounding success in the Acholi Quarters in Kampala and it really didn’t seem fair to taint the moment.

Here's the family that we supported by contributing a mattress, blanket and mosquito net. 

Reality soon hit home after landing at Heathrow, and I’m pleased to say the Kayaker took it very seriously and played by all the rules from his shared house in Plymouth, whilst raising more money to buy food for the people he'd just said goodbye to.and who were now in lockdown.  Lockdown in Uganda means something very different to lockdown here, and without work families simply can’t earn money to buy food. They have no savings, no back up, no NHS, no safety net. Watching this project unfold has given us a much-needed sense of perspective over the last few months.

The Kayaker also raised funds to pay one of the village seamstresses to make masks and they were beautiful.

Honestly, just look at them all...

Anyway, I pulled myself together and set to, and it's true, African fabric makes beautiful cheerful colourful masks and I could feel my spirits life as I matched the patterns and stitched.

Did anyone see Nicole’s incredible flamenco skirt on The Great British Sewing Bee a while back?

Wasn't it the most joyous and celebratory thing you have ever seen. I recognised the vibrant African waxed fabric designs instantly.

I was trying to think where this mask aversion might have originated, apart from the recent events that make them a necessity in certain places and situations now,  and I’ve traced it back to theatres as a student nurse. 

I did a theatre placement as a student nurse at Queen Elizabeth Children’s Hospital in Hackney and apart from the mask-wearing I loved it. It was smaller than Gt Ormond Street and more intimate. One surgeon and lots of opportunities to scrub for some really interesting operations. We would do on call which involved sleeping in a chintzy little bedroom next to the theatres and would be woken up at 3am to prepare for a baby in need of emergency surgery. We all knew our General Set of instruments by heart and would fire up the autoclave and have everything sterilised and ready, and it was all actually very exciting, but oh oh oh how we hated the masks.

I’m trying to think were they disposable or fabric tied on back in the 1970s?

I know just about everything in theatres was fabric and reusable, from our dresses and gowns to all the cloths used in surgery. Scrubs, as in trousers, were for surgeons not us and I'm sure we were all bare-legged because didn't tights risk a static spark...or have I made that up.

Whatever, the masks were awful, gave us spotty chins and we suffered. Why I then eventually decided to do my last three months at GOS in the main theatres, after qualifying as a staff nurse, remains an unfathomable mystery to this day. After a week, and having a top ENT surgeon throw a set of tonsils at me (my fault too slow), I bailed out and transferred to a ward, the metabolic unit, proper uniform, no masks, patients who were awake and the happiest few weeks of my hospital life.

The summer of 1976 and remember that tap dancing song Lullaby of Broadway?

It would start playing on the ward radio and we’d all grab a child and dance with them.

So anyway, that's me and masks and I'm just going to have to embrace it like everyone else.

Are you all masked up and ready too...

And what about The Great British Sewing Bee...

Hasn’t it been a cheery weekly feast for the eyes, and for me a very worthy winner took the trophy.

 

handiwork ~ Sara Baume

"In this contemplative short narrative, artist and acclaimed writer Sara Baume charts the daily process of making and writing, exploring what it is to create and to live as an artist. Elegantly encompassing images and in itself a significant artefact, handiwork offers observations that are at once gentle and devastating on the nature of art, grief and a life lived well."

What a beautiful and thoughtful book this was. Sent as a gift from a friend via Much Ado Books in Alfriston, Sussex, and arriving gift-wrapped and clearly much-loved before it even fell into my hands. I read a few pages a day through May, feeling not only the creativity and that flow which comes with an engrossing and all-consuming craft project, but woven in alongside was Sara Baume's grief at the death of her father. It inevitably reminded me of that summer after the Tinker journeyed on, the six weeks I spent finishing a quilt whose making had spanned some twenty years. I'd started it soon after we moved here, three children living here, my mum and dad regular visitors. Somehow it joined up all the dots that I held dear and needed to stitch into one. I took that quilt to New Zealand and gave it to our farthest-flung family member to somehow bridge the miles and keep the dots joined up.

There is much to cheer here. Sara Baume quoting Stephen Knott for example...

'Modellers often have a variety of different projects that are left half-finished or are completed at different speeds: it is not always a case of finishing one thing and going onto the next...'

'Oh good' I wrote in the margin.

There was so much that I understood and acknowledged about handiwork (the lower case is deliberate) and the book jogged many lovely memories too...

'What we all shared - me, my dad, his dad - was a suspicion of modern life, a loathing of fashion, a disappointment with the new technologies and a preference for the ad-hoc contraptions of the past - anything that can be disassembled and reassembled with hands and tools, based upon the principles of common sense.

Each in our own time, we lived and live in consonance with nostalgia for a former one...'

The importance of, and inspiration from a book like this for me, whilst acknowledging the author's life as portrayed, is also its ability to segue into my own memories and experience. I think that's true for just about every book I read, and this one was no exception.

One memory in particular about the Tinker's dad, my granddad...there's me in the smocked frock sitting on the wall with him, my brother too and my dad (in his reindeer jumper).

My granddad joined the police force after the First World War until eventually, retiring from a life doing point duty on Tooting Broadway in the mid 1950s, he and my grandmother moved from the London suburbs to a cottage built into the hillside in a little village just outside Crediton in Devon. The stairs were carved out of the rock and there was no mains drainage or indoor facilities. it was jugs and ewers and an Elsan up the garden. Milk had to be collected in a jug from the local farm... everyone thought they were crazy. But they loved it and so did we.

We would all travel on the steam train to Bow for our own  'fortnight in September' where we would be met by the Austin A30 and don't ask me how we all fitted in. I'd sit on my dad's lap in the front seat and 'do' the indicators (the switch on the dashboard that sent the little pointed arm out of the side of the car). It would be a very sedate drive because my grandfather was of the opinion that anything over 30mph and you were aiming a car, not driving it. We'd all settle in, visit the Elsan up the garden, smell the familiar scent of the geraniums in the conservatory and then head to my granddad's workshop to look at the brass microscope in the wooden box (I have it now) and where he'd always be making something out of something else. It was at this point that I obviously told him that the latest school craze was the hula hoop but I didn't have one. 'Hang on a minute,' he said, and before you knew it he'd found and coiled a piece of polythene pipe into a circle, joined it with a wooden stopper and I spent the next two weeks doing nothing else but hula hooping.

I was also extremely disappointed not to be allowed to take it home with me on the train. I couldn't see what the problem was.

Sara Baume's memories are intertwined with the making of a series of carved and painted birds and I used the book like a journal, writing in my own thoughts and recollections, prompted by Sara's, through that strange and surreal month of May 2020 that we have all just travelled through. The book is beautifully sized at 5" x 7" and well-spaced, often just a paragraph on a single page, almost begging me to add something of my own while giving me permission to use that blank space to think.

If you have read handiwork please do share your thoughts in comments..

And now I'm reminded of The Repair Shop...does anyone else watch it...and think the chap who does the clocks is a dead ringer for Steve Redgrave...

And though I understand it might not have been the case for everyone, I hope plenty of you have good memories of granddads too...please do share them.

 

 

Hamnet ~ Maggie O'Farrell

Did anyone else 'do' any of the Hay Festival online a few weeks ago?

I booked a few things though wasn't really sure what to expect but was pleasantly surprised at how lovely it was not to have to drive 185 miles, try and park the car, find the venue, queue, pile in, try and stay awake in a hot and crowded tent after lunch, fight my way out and drive home again and take days to recover.

I caught an interesting talk by Rhidian Brook about his book Godbothering, a compilation of his Thought for the Day broadcasts on Radio 4, and was impressed with his combination of assurance and humility as he talked about his faith, about what mattered to him and to the many millions who must have listened to him over the years. I knew the name rang a bell, I wrote about Rhidian's novel The Aftermath back in 2013.

And I also 'went' to Maggie O'Farrell's event.

I know, I know, it's all about being sociable and being there and soaking up the atmosphere, but as I sat on my sofa listening I'm afraid I realised that this is the litfest of the future for me. You know, that falling asleep thing in the midst of the crowd...where you allow yourself a very long blink...just the one and before you know it your head slumps forward and you wake with a jump and hope no one has noticed. Well I sat on my sofa, may have closed my eyes as I listened, but Maggie O'Farrell's warm and engaging voice was all enough to confirm what my partial listening of Hamnet had already confirmed, that here was a book I needed in my hand.

I 'visited' the bookshop and the book arrived the next day.

It is 1596 and while the reader is never told this is Shakespeare's family, and the playwright is never named, it is quite clear that here is an aspect of his life told from an entirely different angle and giving centre stage to Anne, or Agnes as she is named in the book, and their children, Susanna and twins Hamnet and Judith. Given that we were also mid-plague it was fascinating to read of the bubonic version arriving in Stratford and its detailed journey there via a single flea.

Family relationships are fraught and complex in the feverish atmosphere of Stratford and there is only one way that the couple know they will get permission to marry. Months later their first child Susanna is born, followed in a few years by the twins. There will be a terrible death that leaves Agnes undone, unravelled, dismantled and utterly changed and the book gives an incredibly moving account of the impact of that grief. The burial is both powerful and visceral while the aftermath sees the couple take diverging paths, thinking that neither really understands how the other is feeling. It is the writing and production of Hamlet the play that holds the key, and has the power to bridge the couple's divide, the question is will they meet in the middle and understand.

Expect more tears...

In fact maybe expect to feel like a wrung-out dishcloth by the time you turn the final page, but in the best possible way.

Along the way I was regularly stopped in my tracks by the imagery, and it was listening to the audio that made me realise I needed to read the words and let that happen...

'The fireplace, which is filled only with ashes, held in the fragile shape of the log they once were...'

Taken out of context that line may not seem particularly powerful, read in the narrative moment for which Maggie O' Farrell intended it and my breath was well and truly taken away.

And also perhaps expect to have your interest in Hamlet revived a little. If it is a play you know you might find that Maggie O'Farrell has invested it with a new significance, around themes of eternal life and remembrance. If it is a play you are less familiar with you might at least feel tempted to explore it with Hamnet in mind.

If you have read Hamnet please do add your thoughts in comments.

And talking of Shakespeare does anyone have a favourite play...

It is a long time since I have read any, probably too much studying and essay-writing in a previous life, but I do feel the urge to go back, and there are plenty of the plays that I don't know at all.

And other fiction based on Shakespeare plays...heavens there must be hundreds..

 

 

 

 

 

Hamnet alert...

A post coming up about Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell in a few days' time, but a heads up that it is 99p on Kindle today, and I'd hate you to miss it if it's a book you've been thinking about reading.

Books & Friendship...

Now don’t get me wrong...Bookhound has been wonderful company through these weeks of staying out of the way and not becoming a liability to the NHS or our family. We’ve rubbed along well enough for over forty-five years so that’s plenty of time for our annoying habits to be acknowledged and then ignored (if only he could hang a towel up after he’s used it, not leave his wellies in the doorway where I trip over them..if only I could shut the kitchen door...major issues I’m sure you will agree) but I have to say I have really missed my friends.

We’ve talked and emailed and kept in touch but nothing beats a face-to-face gathering, and once the guidance allowed for garden gatherings I was in contact with the Happy Campers like a shot. We have met for coffee together every few weeks for years now and it turns out that they had missed our meet-ups too. And so on a rather damp and chilly day they arrived in separate cars (despite living a few hundred yards from each other in town) bearing their own food and drink, anoraks, blankets and with special instructions to bring their own scissors if they wanted a bunch of sweet peas.

After a quick walk around the fields so that we could then justify sitting down, we each collected our gravity recliner from the summer house and set ourselves up two metres apart, swaddled like patients in a TB sanitarium, and proceeded to talk. Five hours later we’d just about covered all the ground we’d missed, eaten our own food, managed to safely share a full box of Lindor, they picked their flowers and I waved them off. Despite the near Arctic temperatures (felt like) our first socially-distanced gathering felt like a huge and normalising success. I actually felt as if I’d done something that I used to do but took for granted in that previous life.

One of our topics for discussion was obviously books and one of our number had come with a list of books that had felt important at seminal moments in her life. We all threw out author names from the past...Jean Plaidy, Norah Lofts, Anya Seton and what on earth had become of Susan Howatch we wondered. Cashelmara, Penmarric. The joys of the internet in the hand meant we could find out immediately and I recalled reading  The Wheel of Fortune back in September 1985. I know it was then because I’d bought it as my book to read whilst languishing in the local maternity home for ten days having giving birth to the baby Gamekeeper (weren’t those the days).  I’d thought it would be a good idea to make a start before I went into labour but hadn’t bargained on him being two weeks late, or the book being so compelling that I must have let a four-year old and a two-year old do their own thing while I sat and read. I’d finished the book long before the first contraction. The copy long gone but suddenly we all had the urge to read it...

"Robert Godwin's tumultuous ride on the Wheel of Fortune begins with his passion for his sensual cousin Ginevra, as they waltz to "The Blue Danube" beneath the chandeliers at Oxmoon, his beloved family home in Wales. As Robert discovers, his rational, well-ordered mind will be forever altered by his obsession for Ginevra, and his destiny will be forever linked to Oxmoon by the skeletons that lurk in the family closet.
For fifty years, from the sinister summer afternoon of 1913 to the 1960s, the Godwin family is sucked into a maelstrom of passion, disorder, madness, and murder. Fortunes rise and fall in this sweeping, compulsive tale, until the Wheel of Fortune finally comes full circle."

This, however, was the theme that I had no knowledge of back in 1985...

"Susan Howatch acknowledges that this novel is in fact a re-creation in a modern form of the story of the Plantagenet family of Edward III of England, the modern characters being created from those of his eldest son Edward of Woodstock (The Black Prince) and his wife Joan of Kent, John of Gaunt and his mistress, later wife, Katherine Swynford, Richard II (son of Edward of Woodstock), Henry IV (son of John of Gaunt) and Henry IV's eldest son King Henry V."

Anyway by the miraculous powers of 4G we were able to find three cheap copies on eBay which were duly purchased from our reclining pose, and we are all looking forward to jumping back into to this whopping great big book. I'm fortunate that I will be reading alongside two Plantagenet experts because it might still pass me by thirty-five years later. Incidentally I did eventually give birth to my whopping-est baby at 8lbs 6ozs, sans pain relief and about two hours after consuming a huge hospital dinner and a Mars bar. You get the hang of it by number three, but I have always associated The Wheel of Fortune with that moment in my life.

In other news, I found Avalon by Anya Seton for £2.99 on Kindle so I made a start. Could I ever have known, back when I was reading it as a fifteen-year old, that the action and the plot would walk right past my front door fifty plus years later.  

I’m wondering if you have books that hold similar memories for you...

A memorable book from a memorable life-moment...

And were you a Susan Howatch fan...did anyone read the Glittering Images and the rest of the Starbridge series... I'm really hoping these books stand the test of time

Allegation ~ R.G.Adams

A few books find their way onto my Kindle via Netgalley, a site where publishers make titles available pre-publication for reviewers. I particularly enjoy page-turning crime and thrillers on Kindle so I always have a handy supply ready, either via Netgalley or the 99p Daily Deal. It was whilst the nights seemed rather long, in the early days of the pandemic, that I started Allegation by R.G.Adams published by Quercus and found myself quite pleased that I was awake at 4am.

Kit Goddard is a rookie social worker nursing her own experiences of the care system, and  freshly principled in a way that can often fade as the rigours of the work take their toll. When allegations of historic sexual abuse of  young teenagers are made against Matthew Cooper, a pillar of the local community and the father of three children, one of them disabled , the family is allocated to Kit to investigate. 

I slotted right back into this scenario as a professional. It's one of the worst dilemmas imaginable (and one I was occasionally involved in as a health visitor in that previous life ) and whoever R.G.Adams is they really know their stuff

Some of you might recall how I berated (something I so rarely do on here that it might have been a once in fourteen years one-off) a certain famous children's author on her first foray into adult fiction...for slack research, and for misrepresenting professionals and the difficult work they do, well top marks to R.G.Adams because Allegation was factually accurate to the nth degree. I know it's fiction, and they 'make it up' but there's really no excuse for a 'casual' approach to research. 

Here is someone who truly understands the stomach-churning meetings and the high profile case,

The well-to-do parents and the threats they make...

The potential for false compliance...

The doubt and uncertainty that pervade and challenge the professional instinct...

The fear of misreading it, of missing the obvious, those home visits and the antennae waving...

The fear of being on what the legal advisers used to warn us was a 'frolic of your own'...

The paradigm shift from proactive to reactive practice where you decide you have to cover your back..

The antagonistic new manager full of ambition for spicing up their CV who swoops in and changes everything before moving on and up the pay scale...

And throughout all this the anxiety like a knot in your stomach that never quite goes away, pops back into your thinking at the weekends or the evenings.

Kit goes through all of this and more as she tests the limits of the system and her own expertise.

I tell you it takes nerves of steel to do it and R.G.Adams has either done it themselves, or knows someone else who has, because Allegation is gripping, well-researched and well worth a read if you fancy a jolly good page-turner. I think publication of the hardback edition may have been held over until next year, but the Kindle edition seems to be available this month and my hope is that this may be the first of a series. Kit is an endearing and interesting character and it would be a shame to lose such a promising theme.

Meanwhile your suggestions for page-turners if you have any...

I'm sure they will have helped some of you through recent months too...

And while we're on the subject of series, any suggestions about those too...

 

And if you have half a day spare here's a link to the one of the few public book beratings I think I have ever done on here. I've quite amused myself reading it again...it was eight years ago, I was very cross and I did go on a bit (apologies). Ah, our younger passionate selves.

Footnote : In case you look for anything connected to dovegreyreader on Twitter this is to let you know that I have deactivated my account on there as of this week. Though I had 5500 followers built up over thirteen years, and who I valued enormously, I’m afraid it is not the place it once was. It is now a forum I no longer wish dovegreyreader to be a part of, it is not a place I wish to look at, or where I want my writing to be featured or linked. 

 

A Reading Gallimaufry

While I seem to be in a happy reading groove now things were all over the shop backalong, but I did manage to finish a disparate range of books and here's a selection...

The Comforts of Home ~ Susan Hill

I do enjoy the Simon Serailler series (especially as I'm in one of them...number six I think) but had fallen behind with the life and times of our erstwhile hero and his detecting life, so it was good to catch up with the eleventyfourth (I'm losing count)one. There is some cold case crime to be resolved as well as a bit of drama on the Hebridean island that our man has travelled to in order to escape the stresses and strains of ...well 'that' accident of which I can say no more for fear of spoiling. Good plotting, involving characters and their lives as always, and lo and behold I have another one waiting in the wings.

 

 

 

 

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe ~ C.S. Lewis

I first read this aged about seven or eight on a holiday in Tintagel, staying with one of those aunts and uncles based on friendships your parents had made during the war. Tintagel had one gift shop and empty beaches, Uncle Bill ran a market garden, Auntie Pam was a teacher at Delabole Primary School, there was always a pile of children's books by the bed and this was one of them. I was transfixed all over again. Back in the day us children (Auntie Pam had three boys) were ushered out of the door and sent off to explore, and well I remember walking to St Nectan's Glen and imagining here could be Narnia.

Of course the religious allegory had by-passed my completely back then, but it jumped off the page this time around.

The question is...I don't recall ever reading any of the other Narnia books...should I, and if so which ones.

 

Officers and Gentleman ~ Evelyn Waugh

I mentioned my stately progress through the Sword of Honour trilogy a while back. It's all thanks in large part to a beautifully tactile, floppy, new Penguin Modern Classics edition that is everything you want the book in your hand to be. There is no wrestling the spine into submission to keep the book open, the paper is soft, the font is large enough and with the 1.5 line spacing I'm in reading heaven. 

Having finished Book Two Officers and Gentlemen I remain constantly amazed at Evelyn Waugh's ability to find humour in the midst of war. The invasion and eventual retreat from Crete was horrific and yet still he spots the risible and the ridiculous amid the bureaucracy, and the rigid adherence to protocol and orders even in the face of danger and defeat. 

It's also a very small world, this world of conflict. Everyone seems to know everyone else and old friends or foes suddenly find themselves flung together again. Old misdemeanours follow them around like a bad smell and it comes as little surprise when they carry on where they left off. And in the midst of it all Guy Crouchback  seems to be doing his honourable best  to preserve every else's honour and reputation as well as his own.

I'm saving the final book, Unconditional Surrender for exactly the right reading moment.

Meanwhile, as always please do share your recent reading successes...

 

 

 

 

 

Cyanotype Sunday (and Monday)

Goodness me, June already. Didn't that predicted twelve weeks seem half a lifetime away when this all began in early March, and yet here we are. Summer has been upon us for weeks in the UK and what a blessing it has been. The garden is looking wild and very lovely, I'll take you on a walk round soon.

Last year I had a magnificent summer of indigo dyeing. So much so that I still haven’t used up all the fabric that resulted, but it’s a well known fact that blue is my favourite colour, so when the Kayaker sent me everything I would need to try cyanotype I couldn’t wait to have a go.

The process of exposing treated paper to sunlight dates from 1842, just three years after the first daguerreotype processes were described. It involves a bit of alchemy in the form of two chemicals which when mixed and applied to paper (or fabric) can then be used to create an image.

I did the mixing and painted some paper and fabrics and then read the next bit which involved allowing everything to dry in a dark place to stop it changing colour. Had I read that properly beforehand I would then not have been panicking and had to put it all in the larder. Once dry you expose the paper to the sun with whatever you wish to ‘take a picture of’ resting on top.

The paper instantly turns from lime green to grey and then a deep bronze colour and the magic starts to happen until eventually, after washing, the end result is the most perfect shade of Prussian Blue.

I quite like the in-between stages too so I need to experiment with exposure times.

There’s no arguing with Prussian Blue is there, really there can be no better colour and it deserves to be in capitals. 

I then got fairly ambitious. This is called running before you can walk, and not helped by sitting to watch the SpaceX dock with the International Space Station and forgetting all about my cluttered masterpiece roasting away in the sun. 

We had watched the SpaceX launch the day before with great excitement, all a wonderful reminder of that childhood Apollo addiction, so it had seemed only right to see Dragon crew safely there. By this time I was using a piece of glass on top of the cyanotype to hold everything in place, and this was all fair done to a crisp by the time I remembered it  

 
The Before Washing (below) was actually quite interesting too, so I really need to experiment some more...

As luck would have it, earlier in the week I had spent a day clearing out my potting shed and now realised it would make the perfect ‘dark room’, so I have painted up another batch of fabric, now drying in said 'dark room', because of course there's a quilt begging to be made (along with the others shouting to be finished). I'm thinking leaves and plants from around the garden...ivy, honesty, lady's mantle, so many lovely shapes to choose from, so that's me sorted for this week.

Update : I’ve had another day of experimenting...some metal stencils and leaves various...

 

But how about you...

Setting aside the things we all miss, have you also found yourself adapting...

Have any new crafts or hobbies jumped up and bitten you with a bout of enthusiasm...

Or have you sensibly done what I said I would do (but haven't) and completed the Great Unfinished...

 

 

 

 

 

Jean Becomes a Nurse ~ Yvonne Trewin SRN

I’m not sure why I picked this up. Maybe it was all the news about Nightingale Hospitals, but anyway there it was.

I have a shelf full of these because I lapped them up as a girl who was always going to be a nurse (blame my mum, the uniform was the only thing in the dressing up box) and I think the SRN was about giving this novel for girls a bit of credibility as in...here is someone who knows their stuff. And I have to say, written as it was in 1961, only eleven years before I would start my training, things hadn't changed much by the time I started in PTS (Preliminary Training School) at Gt Ormond Street.

Putting on the uniform for the first time and feeling a bit of a fraud whilst hoping no one would collapse in front of you. I wasn't there but one of our set witnessed someone jumping under a tube train and the crowd on the platform parting like the Red Sea at the sight of her nurse's uniform that shed only been wearing for a matter of days. The motto behind this was to do up all the buttons on your hospital issue gaberdine raincoat when travelling.

Then there was the good old fashioned discipline, the Sisters you loved, the Sisters you didn't, the tutors who understood us and those who seemed more remote. My encounters with The Big Bruiser (as we fondly named her) still give me nightmares.

And then all the doubts and fears amongst the intake. Those of us who felt fairly sure we'd done the right thing, those who were plagued by doubt and would either put shoulder to the wheel or leave. We all learned quite quickly that getting emotional at the work wasn't going to help us at all, we'd need a teflon coating to survive, and those who stayed became a supportive and close-knit community, someone's door was always open, the kettle was always on somewhere.

Going home with friends for days off. My roommate's family lived in Heptonstall, her father's chauffeur would meet us at Manchester station and drive us there. When she came to stay with me my dad would meet us in the Vauxhall Viva. When Diana goes home with Jean she is mightily impressed by the dove-grey walls glowing softly in the sunlight, the curtains and chair coverings in cretonne with a pink and wine flowery design and the black carpet.

Jean is struck down by appendicitis which we can all see coming (except Jean) and she is whisked off to sick bay. I had to go to sick bay in a taxi in the middle of the night from our PTS home in Belsize Park. I know exactly which Chinese restaurant in Hampstead gave me food poisoning, but I'd better not mention it as a quick google check and I see it's still there. But heavens was I ill. They kept me in for days and I was like bambi when I finally emerged.

It's all captured in Yvonne Trewin's surprisingly readable book and I have to say I had a good old wallow whilst conveniently forgetting all the terrible times.

And I'm really sorry but I had to smile over this picture, the frontispiece to Jean Becomes a Nurse...

I mean...what exact bit of Jean is the doctor looking at in making his assessment that "She'll make an excellent nurse." How times and attitudes have changed.

And I'm thinking that there must have been other books trying to steer young girls into particular professions but I can't think of any now, can you...

And as always please do share your memories of these books, or their ilk, were they your childhood reading fare too.

 

The Luminaries

It seemed to appear out of nowhere, because I'm not really sure I knew it was even being filmed, but the six-part series of The Luminaries is coming to BBC One very soon.

It was all enough to make me drag the book from the shelf only to discover that it is five years since I read it, and that was before I had ever visited New Zealand. or done the entire Luminaries Trail around South Island.

We first drove from Christchurch to Clyde and cycled a hundred miles or so across the gold fields of Otago and the Maniototo, following the old railway line to Middlemarch...

It was dramatic, very hot and shadeless and no, I hadn't ridden a bike for about thirty years, and no I hadn't trained in the slightest despite saying I would, and yes I did wear padded shorts, and yes I absolutely did plead for an electric bike on the second day. And I got one and sailed around the rest like a pro.

But the scenery was magnificent and just to be there, 11,000 miles from home felt extraordinary ...especially now when I can't envisage even going into Plymouth just twenty miles away...no scrap that, into Tavistock a mere six miles away.

Having wild camped our way across to the much damper and cooler Westland, and made the acquaintance of those innocent little black dots called sand flies that give you the worst bite ever (and in quantity), Offspringette and I spent a day in Hokitika following the Luminaries trail. New Zealand is really good at the small museums in small places that do these wonderful tableaux reconstructions of What Life Was Like and I really enjoyed every one that I found. They are scattered around the old gold field sites and are chock full of artefacts and information, enough to give an impression of life for the early prospectors..

I'm slightly embarrassed to say that it was all a bit moving to find myself standing on the grass, on top of the gold fields, alongside Lake Kaniere (pronounced 'canary') and feeling quite emotional. I can completely understand why people love to come to the UK and follow in the footsteps of James Herriot, or travel on the railway to Hogwarts, in order to bring the books they have loved to life. 

And then looking at the photograph again this week, and then at my feet now, to see that I'm still wearing the same shoes four plus years on ( bought in a sale in Christchurch the week before we set off) this very minute. If that's not a good advert for Keen Targhee III trainers I don't know what is, even if they are now in a bit of a sorry state and I have some replacements to wear in. 

But they won't be the same because they haven't actually set foot there if you see what I mean (this might just be me, getting sentimental of course). Offspringette bought me a pounamu in Hokitika, a 'koru' spiral which I love and have worn every day since. And every morning, when I put it on again, I remember her and that day, and the fact that to be given one means you will go back again....or so the Kiwi working in a shop in Plymouth, who saw it, told me one day.

Anyway, with fondest memories of Hokitika I settled myself momentarily in the Sunny Chair at about 10.30 on Monday morning to read the first chapter of The Luminaries again. This felt highly illegal (surely morning reading must be non-fiction, learned and improving, to be legitimate) but was unanimously approved as permissible, and before I knew it I was back on South Island and the gold fields, but another interesting thing happened too.

Looking back I see that I found the book mystifying when I read it in 2015 and had to ask for your help in deciphering and persevering, and I'm not really sure I had completely grasped those nuances by the end either, (I'll dig out the original post for redux) and yet here I am 200 pages in and sailing through with ease and clarity. I'm sure having walked those shores helps no end because I have images in my mind.

And with that another connection landed plop into my mind too. Adele Geras kindly sent me something in the post recently and included this postcard of Lucy Boston's High Magic patchwork quilt. The card now sits on my desk...

Is this not The Luminaries in fabric...

And I'm transported back to that wonderful day at Hemingford Grey when Diana Boston gave Bookhound and I a tour and showed us the quilts.

Isn't it amazing where imagination and memories and a book can take you.

Meanwhile have you read The Luminaries and will you be watching...

And what about literary or artistic trails and travels...are there any you have done or would like to...

Anyone's footsteps you would love to follow...

Incidentally...

The best concoction known to mankind for repelling sandflies, and invented by the Christchurch cohort, is a mixture of baby oil and Dettol. Nothing and no one else will come near you either.

Robin & Heather Tanner

Early on in ‘proceedings’ I and two of my group of  friends, who meet several times a year from around the country, decided that in the absence of our traditional summer gathering perhaps we would read a book together.  The three of us settled on Wiltshire Village by Heather and Robin Tanner.

There followed the whole business of ordering a copy of the now out-of-print book online and awaiting its arrival. Mine was the last to arrive and I was about ready to mug the postman on each successive day that he drove straight past. This whole ‘waiting for the post’ has only got a whole lot worse because I’m not sure any of us could have imagined the reading trails that one small book, published in 1939, would open up for us....and the subsequent books we would be ‘forced’ to buy.

Robin and Heather were an arts and crafts couple. True to their values both spiritually and aesthetically, and kindred spirits from the day they first met as teenagers in Chippenham at the end of the First World War, forging a creative life together that makes for the most fulfilling exploration all these years on

Robin trained as a teacher, became a schools inspector but was also an artist of prodigious talent, specialising in etching, whilst Heather, with her First Class degree in English Literature, could provide the written word to accompany his work. Wiltshire Village was their first collaboration and is a fresh and vibrant now as the day it was first published. Recording what, even then, was a vanishing way of life, I have revelled in a book whose traces still echo today in the countryside here. Along with the village buildings and crafts there are beautiful accounts of the village year and the people, all accompanied by Robin's etchings. 

There was much discussion here over coffee one day about the Wiltshire hoop-raved wagon. How practical it was, the width of the wheel base to fit the ruts in the track, the outward tilt of the wheels and how these wagons would doubtless have been trundling up and down the lanes around us here....and how the carved decoration and chamfering was about removing as much unnecessary wood as possible to lighten the weight of the whole.

At a time when life has felt a little as if it has stepped back more than a few decades it’s been good to be reminded of how things used to be...

’There was no room for petty selfishness in true craftsmanship; whoever found a new way or improved on an old one shared the discovery and it became part of the tradition followed by all the fellow craftsman who came after him...’

And I find myself relating that to the now and the worldwide collaboration in science and research as we seek ways to treat and improve life chances with the latest affliction. New advances are shared and publicised and we can only hope that, whilst a vaccine may be a long way off, if it does happen its discovery and production will be a worldwide endeavour.

Talking of the postman, or in this case post mistress, she gets a mention in Wiltshire Village (based on Robin and Heather's home village of Kington Langley) along with the complexities of delivering letters to a scattered community many of whom may have the same surname. We love our postie and hats off to him for the round that he has to do. 

It reminded me of my early days as a twenty-four-year old rookie rural health visitor. Finding my way around the byways of West Devon and Dartmoor and being paid for it (and with car provided) was quite the novelty in 1978. However, when the only address I had was a cottage name and the village, with no postcode or satnav to guide me, my arrival was often a lengthy process. I would be wholly reliant on the older health visitors who would give me instructions that invariably started with ‘Turn left/right/go straight at Pridham’s Garage...’ The Garage is still there albeit under a different name, and we still direct people to our house by the same method..turn left at the garage, turn right after a hundred yards, go straight for two miles, only house you come to on the right. 

I wonder if many of you have recently reconnected with that sense of community that was a given in the days of Wiltshire Village. For most of us our radius from home had shrunk to about a two miles, and it was the introduction to another book, The Open Air - An Anthology of English Country Life by Adrian Bell that made me think...

’Another form of isolation has been brought by motors into country districts. ones circle of friends is no longer the circle of a ten mile radius ...one friend is forty miles in one direction, another twenty-five miles in another, half a dozen are in London...thus people living in a place may have no part in that place fundamentally, or in any place.

I hadn’t really given this much thought ...the advent of the car and what it must have meant...

’Whereas in the old days whoever lived round about you, unless they were extremely difficult, you fitted into your circle of friendship. The more socially gifted thus helped out the less, and the whole was leavened. Now, by more peremptory standards we choose only those with whom we are ‘in sympathy’, the spontaneous functions of local life consequently decay and the number of lonely old people must be legion.’

First published in 1936 The Open Air is, as Adrian Bell suggests, ‘an attempt to catch some glint of the genius of the country in an oblique, perhaps the only way.’ The world order was shifting and I’m grateful that visionaries like Adrian Bell, and  Robin and Heather Tanner, captured it and pinned it down before it was lost.

The three of us have exchanged almost daily emails and Wiltshire Village has led naturally along the Robin Tanner trail to his book of letters From Old Chapel Field and his autobiography Double Harness (more work for the postman) both of which are (or were) readily available at You Know Where and reveal more about this astonishing man.

Robin was a gentle soul, kind and caring, loved his friends and treasured their friendships, but was also an inspired and intuitive educationalist with connections to Dartington Hall and courses there in the 1960s along with countless other artists and crafts people. Every page offers up another name to be researched, another trail to follow...I’m currently happily diverted into the world of 1930’s textile designers Phyllis Barron and Dorothy Larcher (even more work for the postman) and their indigo vat and block printed fabrics.

It's been such an inspirational journey so far and there is a way to go yet.

Meanwhile I'd be interested to know if any of you have heard of Robin Tanner....read his books or seen his etchings (maybe even own one)...

Or whether you too have found some inspirational reading trails to follow in recent weeks...

And how about that sense of community...has it flourished were you are...

Our village has established a weekly Covid Chronicle. We all submit our copy and can't wait for each edition to arrive by e mail....there have been walking treasure hunts, photography competitions, someone's created a socially distanced five hole golf course on one of their fields, there are offers to shop and collect prescriptions, there's a plant swap in the church porch and generally everyone is getting to know each other in a way that they might not have done before.

We are all very excited about the party that we will have eventually.

Footnote...

Incidentally the senior health visitors were much better at directions than doctors. The ‘next left’ on one set of definitive instructions from a GP turned out to be a dried up river bed and there was quite a lot of bother and much hilarity extricating myself....'Oh, I didn’t mean ‘that’ left,’ he said when I finally got back.

Morabor ut in cochlea pace

I know there must be gazillions of people struggling with all this but is anyone else finding their lives  are morabor ut in cochlea pace ...slowing down to snail's pace (thank you google translator ...high risk strategy and I'll await corrections from the classicists out there).

And, setting all the worries and anxieties aside (and I no way diminish these, we all have them) perhaps not really minding that it has for a while...

In fact I'm almost taking advantage of permission to do so before we all have to return to civilisation and full diaries, and feeling that we must get out and about, and visit places and worry about R being above one (new language) and wearing masks (new fashion) ...and...and..

Botanical wanderings have been a real exercise for me in looking closely, and I see from your comments the other day for many of you too, and I am really grateful to Marilyn,a reader of the scribbles in the U.S., who wrote to tell me about the late Brian Doyle and a book of his collected essays One Long River of Song - Notes on Wonder. I downloaded a sample to my Kindle and realised very quickly that here was more writing for the now, and a book that I needed in my hand, one I could slot into the Read-a-Chapter-Daily category. I have rather too many of those at the moment, but all up-lifting in the face of so much that can be down-casting; books I will treasure in the years ahead as saviours when I look back on this time. I must confess I sometimes find books like this can be a bit sentimental and schmaltzy, a bit too pseudo-spiritual for this lapsed Anglican, and dare I say embarrassing, but nothing could be wider of that mark than Brian Doyle's writing...

"When Brian Doyle died of brain cancer at the age of sixty, he left behind dozens of books -- fiction and nonfiction, as well as hundreds of essays -- and a cult-like following who regarded his writing on spirituality as one of the best-kept secrets of the 21st century. Though Doyle occasionally wrote about Catholic spirituality, his writing is more broadly about the religion of everyday things. He writes with a delightful sense of wonder about the holiness of small things, and about love in all its forms: spiritual love, brotherly love, romantic love, friendly love, love of nature, and even the love of a nine-foot sturgeon.

At a time when our world feels darker than ever, Doyle's essays are a balm for the tired soul. He finds beauty in the quotidian: the awe of a child the first time she hears a river, the whiskers a grieving widow misses seeing in her sink every day -- but through his eyes, nothing is ordinary...."

Here's Brian remembering a moment when he looked at shrew...

Looked very closely...

'But there was something beyond curiosity or the startle of astonishment. For just an instant I paid attention with every shard and iota of my being. Maybe we couldn't survive if we were like that all the time, I don't know. But when it happens we see that which none of us can find words for. Sometimes we are starving to see every bit of what is right in front of us.'

Well I looked at the hawthorn flowers the other day...really closely and for a long time because I didn't have to be anywhere else, or do anything else because I have all the time in the world to do things right now...and had I ever noticed the pink bits before...

Cast not a clout ‘til May is out. Richard Mabey confirms it is the Hawthorn or May Tree blossom not the month that sees us putting away the thermals. The blossom banished from houses and that apparently has the ‘smell of the Great Plague.’

Since this all began I've been thinking I MUST keep a diary, must write it all down, but write what down. It wasn't until April 23rd, St George's Day, that I found a new A4 notebook and the right mood and actually wanted to start...and then it would be nothing about the Big Thing but it would be all the little tiny things.

The new flowers I'd seen...

The goldfinch that sat on the branch and sang for me...

The little patch of Lady's Smock right at the far end on the left of Hill Long Acre and discovering that the Orange Tip butterflies feed on it.

The nature reference books piled up on the computer-less writing desk in the book room...

Incidentally I spent about two hours sorting this desk....

Polishing it, finding 'things' for the windowsill, creating a nice place to sit and write and think and look things up in books rather than google..

Finding out all there is to know about sycamore trees because I walk to this one every day. Introduced to England in 16th century, naturalised since the 1630s, and might it be so ancient that it is approaching the 400 year limit of its life...

It would be a sad day.

And discovering that the leaves from Germander Speedwell, currently creating little lakes of blue in the hedgerows, were used in tea as a treatment of gout. Years ago I bought a copy of Flora Britannica by Richard Mabey, a charity shop find, and it is invaluable for diagnosing and explaining my field discoveries.

And then a good close stare at some lichen before realising I didn’t really know much about that either..

Lichen experts out there...might it Parmotrema perlatum...suddenly I need to know the right names.

Finally looking up which butterflies hibernate... Small Tortoiseshell, Comma, Peacock, Red Admiral and Brimstone and keeping an eye out, even following a few in the hope they will settle for my camera.. 

Then I needed to know the meaning of 'purlieu' ,because I am also reading a letter a day from The Natural History of Selborne by Gilbert White, first published in 1789 (when that sycamore tree might already have staked its claim on that corner of Bramble Park). Finding no copy on the shelf I treated myself to the edition from Little Toller Books with engravings by Eric Ravilious. Little Toller a small publisher I really don't want to lose through this and so doing my tiny bit to support them. The book arrived post free within days and with some lovely postcards included.

Purlieu : Originally land severed from an English royal forest by perambulation of an adjacent landowner's boundaries, but it can also mean a frequently visited place, a haunt. That might mean my desk too, because having prettified it I might then have spent another two hours sitting at it and staring out of the window.

I really am living the poem and I doubt I'm the only one who is purposely creating a little holiday from their day to day life as a way of managing the bigger picture. The W.H.Davies lines might be a bit hackneyed and cliched from overuse these days, but they are nevertheless still true...

What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare.

I know the worries for many of you may still be huge, but I hope you are all finding time to stand and stare too.

And do you have any more Chapter-a-Day reading suggestions...

 

 

Florence Nightingale's 200th anniversary & No Place for Ladies ~ Helen Rappaport

It was March 20th 2007 when I wrote about Helen Rappaport's first book, No Place For Ladies - The untold story of women in the Crimean War and here we are thirteen years later, Helen and I firm friends and how delighted I am that the book has been reprinted for the 200th anniversary of Florence Nightingale's birth. 

Not only do we have the Nightingale Hospitals, raised within days as our insurance against an NHS overwhelmed (beds thankfully not needed in quantity, but not yet decommissioned) but the arrival of Covid 19 has seen the nation pull together in many similar ways to the Victorians, though faced with a war on a different front. It would seem that the human instinct to support, to raise funds, to help and be useful, and to make things that will help those who are fighting on the front line remains undiminished by time, change and progress. Substitute scrubs for muffattees and there you have it.

And so in honour of the book's reincarnation I have dusted off that original post from the scribbles basement along with a comment that Helen left at the time. 50% of the royalties from any sales of the book will go to St Thomas's Hospital where the Nightingale nurse training school was established in 1860.

 

If a book can help me chip into a new seam of reading then it's worth its weight in gold and No Place For Ladies by Helen Rappaport has done exactly that. I've hit the mother-lode with this one and am now a mine of information on all things interesting about the Crimean War. I can bore the muffatees off anyone so here's a selection of my Crimean Cameos pronounced over kitchen table coffee at the weekend...

"Did you know that Queen Victoria asked Lord Rokeby to take a break from military duties and go out and pick her a nosegay of flowers in the Crimea and he did? It was sent back to England and is preserved at Windsor Castle to this very day"

"Do you know one nurse assisted at 56 amputations in 30 hours...or was it 30 in 56?"

"Do you know Prince Albert designed the Victoria Cross and they are all made from the metal of the guns?"
"Everyone knows that and they're running out"
"So where were the guns captured then?" Silence..."Ah see, Sebastopol"

"Do you know the soldiers dug up Crimean snowdrop bulbs and sent them home?"

I won't tell you anymore but rest assured there is plenty more in this extremely readable account of the role of the women at the Front and one that you desperately want to talk about afterwards, especially if like me you have a bit of a gap in your Crimean War knowledge

.
Florence Nightingale was busy trying to keep order and discipline in the nursing world, Mary Seacole was out there as the hostess with the mostest providing food and supplies as well as her vast array of very effective alternative remedies.Wherever there was a need Mary Seacole seemed to be the one to anticipate and fulfill it, red tape was there to be ignored.

Meanwhile the army wives, who were allowed to travel in small numbers with each regiment, seemed to struggle to find a role for themselves beyond attempting to care for their husbands and living in utter squalor and poverty as it became clear the army could barely look after itself, let alone its women.
Whenever I lay hands on a book like this I turn first to the bibliography to see what else might be worth reading.Helen Rappaport's research is formidable and there is a wealth of other reading to choose from and one book in particular that you will certainly want to read It's the day to day events that are so fascinating and if it hadn't been for Mrs Fanny Duberley's diary I suspect a great deal of this would remain a mystery. Fanny was the army wife with a difference and her diary a superb primary source.

Helen left this comment on that post back in 2007...

'I'm so glad you enjoyed the book Lynne. For me as a social historian it was a joy digging out the small but forgotten anecdotes about the war - such as the knitting instructions for mittens published in the Patriotic Journal or seeing the nosegay of Crimean flowers so lovingly preserved in the queen's album at Windsor, or the descriptions of Queen Victoria's solicitous sending of false teeth and prosthetic limbs to the wounded whom she visited. There was one aspect of the war I never quite found a way of working into the story though - and that was one or two Crimean 'romances', including the racy story of an English officer's wife who disappeared one day and weeks later was spotted shacked up with a French officer over in the French camp. So many wonderful stories that give a much more rounded view of ordinary people enduring a totally senseless war that take the story beyond all the tedious military strategy and the fighting. I really didn't want to get to the end of it! And still feel bereft ... but then, I have about six great big fat files full of research on Mary Seacole .... there's a lot more to her story yet to be told.'

I know Helen is currently writing a book about the White Russian emigrées in Paris before and after the Russian revolution, but who knows perhaps one day we'll get her definitive biography of Mary Seacole. 

Meanwhile a casualty in the current situation has been the Florence Nightingale Museum, at St Thomas's Hospital in London, who were preparing to stage an exhibition to celebrate the bi-centenary and of course are now closed.  The exhibition can be viewed online and having had a browse I can confirm that a virtual visit will keep you nicely occupied for an afternoon. Then maybe add them to your list of places to be supported and visited once London reopens....it would be very sad indeed to lose some of these collections.

Thank you...and tomorrow...

I wanted to say a huge thank you to all who left a comment on the VE Day post.

I'm still replying to each of you, and I will reply to everyone, but one of the highlights of the whole emotional day was reading those stories here and from people across my social media places, about their parents' and friends' wartime experiences. It made me realise how so many of us treasure those memories with so much love and pride and so the flame of gratitude burns on from one generation to the next.

It was a remarkable day and one you all contributed to in comments and I am so grateful.

I'm just dropping by today to let you know we have another 'celebration' on here tomorrow.

It will be the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Florence Nightingale and Helen Rappaport will be dropping in an out of comments during the day to answer any questions you might have for her. Not only about No Place For Ladies...Helen's book about the women of the Crimean War, and which is being republished this week, but I'm sure she will happily talk about  her other books too. There will be a post about No Place For Ladies appearing tomorrow morning and where you can leave any questions for Helen in comments.

Helen's other books include her Romanov titles ... Ekaterinberg, Four Sisters  and The Race to Save the Romanovs as well as Magnificent Obsession about Victoria and Albert, along with Beautiful Forever - Madame Rachel of Bond Street Cosmetician, Con-Artist and Blackmailer.

And if we're lucky Helen might also tell us a little bit about the book that she is working on at the moment.

Please do stop by.

 

We’ll Meet Again...

It’s is the seventy-fifty anniversary of Victory in Europe today. A day that marked the end of World War Two in the West at least, after almost six long years of conflict. Perhaps some people are thinking it’s time to let it go, move on, except we're far from thinking that. The lane is dressed overall and we are ready...

My dad always said he could never fully share the elation of VE Day, having just been posted to a ship that would be heading to the Far East where the war was still be decided...and they had been prepared and trained for serious fighting. The Tinker (Len) was under no illusion that this could be to the death. In the end events took a different turn in August 1945 and his ship was tasked with bringing the survivors home from the POW camps in Singapore...something he never forgot.

Having recently put those hundreds of letters that Len write to my mum (Vera) away for now I took out a few dated May 1945 just to get a feel for the mood of the moment. They have known each other about a year. things have been a bit on and off but there is talk of 'getting engaged' though Len isn't quite sure what he's supposed to do because he's never been 'engaged' before...does he have to ask someone...how can they buy a ring if he's miles away...is it fair on Vera if he's going to be away for several years which seems likely.

Len is now in the fighting ranks of the Royal Marines (rather than a bugler) on board a new ship in Portsmouth waiting to sail and has watched a training film entitled ‘Existence in the Jungle’...‘Hopeful isn’t it’ he writes to Vera. That same week he goes ashore and sees Flanagan and Allan in Dreaming which was ‘alright’ followed by White Cliffs of Dover which made him ‘ a bit on the sad side’

...which he didn’t need because he was feeling sad enough at what was ahead, and being parted from the love of his life for goodness knows how long. 

Then I read this, and remembering Len was a mere twenty years old...

'I expect by the time you get this the war in Germany will be all over and you will be getting back to peace routine again. It’s wonderful to think that all the danger to folks back home is over and you haven’t got to worry about bombs, doodle-bugs and rockets. You might think I’m soft but I’m going to church on Sunday to offer a few prayers of thanks for seeing my family, your family and a lot of other people’s families safely through the night. I think it’s about the second time I’ve ever been to church willingly, the other time was when I was christened, but I’m sure He will forgive me for that....’

Incidentally given that he had left school at fourteen I am very impressed with my dad's spelling, not a single correction required.

Then something that made me smile...

’Mum says that they have taken down the shelter in the back room and are decorating with big Victory ribbons...’

My grandparents, eschewing the discomforts of a cold damp air raid shelter in the garden, had built theirs in the dining room right in front of the fire, and kitted it out with all mod cons.

Len goes on to say...

'I think I have forgotten what a street fully lit and all the other things that go with peace look like...'

He's also been reading in the press about how many medals he will get...he thinks five. There then follows a bit of a diatribe about Hitler having taken his own life when it’s clear Vera and Len had a few choice things lined up for the man who had stolen their teenage years ...‘It’s not fair is it’ says Len, and I found myself agreeing. I think they were entitled to those feelings, but I also found myself understanding the importance and sheer enormity of the moment. The relief and the nation's need to rejoice and celebrate must have been profound. 

We might all be stuck at home but we’re safe enough where we are right now. For six years no one had felt safe anywhere and certainly not in their homes. No wonder they kicked up their heels and let rip and it sounds like they do certainly did...

'I have had a letter from home and it seems like they celebrated with a vengeance. They all had a tea party in the road and once the children had finished the grown ups sat down to tea, cleared away and everybody had their wirelesses out in the street and they danced until four in the morning. How I wish I could have been there...’

This picture of my grandparents says it all I think, whether it was taken on VE day or not they certainly loved to dance.

My poor dad missing out on all the fun at home, though it seems there was a bit of a knees up on the ship after all...

'I am only just beginning to recover from the VE celebrations. Oh boy!! What a week, we've had to stop as the flowing bowl floweth no longer...we had a victory march through the town yesterday and as you can guess it ended up in the rain...but there was much merry-making.

The night finished off with fireworks and bonfires. Some of the bonfires weren't satisfied with stopping at bonfires, they burnt a few houses down in the end I'm afraid, much to the enjoyment of the people watching, except the people in the house! I think they were in the state where you get past worrying about such petty things.

I bet London had a real crazy night though, I wish we could have been there...I can just imagine what Piccadilly and Oxford Circus were like that night. I bet it was bedlam and some fat heads next morning too'

So anyway, in solidarity and with remembrance and thanks, that’s why we’ve draped the hedge in bunting today and hung out the Union Jack. We'll be getting as near as we can to the village for our daily excursion, this to coincide with a socially distanced national minute's silence at 11am where we have been asked as a nation to remember, but also to think of those who have lost their lives in recent months too. There will be the playing of Last Post and Reveille and we’ll be having a jolly good Victory Tea Party of our own when we get home.

We’ll be singing We’ll Meet Again from afar, with the rest of the nation, and we’ll raise a cup of tea (or a glass of ginger beer) to all of you too, wherever you are and to absent family and friends as well...
 
Meanwhile, here's Flanagan and Allen singing Dreaming (to a horse it seems) from the film that my dad thought was 'alright'. 

As his letters show, he and my mum were doing a lot of dreaming in those years they were apart... my dad has heard there will be 100,000 prefabs built...maybe they could get one (they didn't)...lets think about curtains and carpet he suggests. If only they could have known then that they would eventually be together for over fifty years.

Botanical wanderings...

I bet I’m not the only one out there who spends a moment or three each day finding the positives in our Stay at Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives life. In the words of Terry Waite, a man who knows plenty about isolation, we’re not stuck at home, we’re safe at home, and no matter the hardships people are living through, and I know they are manifold, I have been quietly amazed at the ingenuity and spirit that is fuelling this strange time for so many. In our little corner of the world I have a regular marvel at wildflowers and I know I’m not alone.

One of the interesting things about our little corner at the moment is that, though it is usually very quiet even on a busy day, now we are blessed with walkers and we are really happy about that. People have discovered our beautiful lane and they are happy to stop and talk. We lost count of the number who stopped at the gate for a  socially distanced conversation on Sunday and quite a few were carrying armfuls of wildflowers. Now I know, I know, you’re really not supposed to pick them but we have to cut ourselves some slack right now and I think the hedgerows can cope. Besides which we have no access to any other flowers for vases and is there anything lovelier than a profusion of wildness on the kitchen table. 

I had thought I was a reasonably observant wild flower wanderer until all this happened. I’ve started slow-walking around a few fields that have been left alone for a couple of years and have been amazed at what I have noticed beyond the obvious. We’re in that happy colour phase of red, white, blue and yellow as the red campion, stitchwort, bluebell and buttercup light the way. Waiting in the wings are the foxgloves, and the woodbine (wild honeysuckle) and meadowsweet will soon be dousing the lane with their scent, but look closer and I have found all sorts of unknowns.

This week’s mystifying plant has been a strange yellow one. Pictures were duly dispatched to Fran H-B and Carol and discussion, and much poring over the books, followed. Meanwhile Bookhound Googled ‘Yellow plant bit like a brassica’ and beat us to it with confirmation that it was Yellow Rocket or Wintercress. 

Fran also confirmed Bush Vetch which I had never really noticed before and now see everywhere. 

I unearthed my I-Spy Wild Flowers because this school prize for 'Effort and Progress' when I was about seven is definitely where it all began, along with the cards we used to collect from the packets of PG Tips tea leaves. No such thing a teabags back in our day...how on earth did that whole thing happen. and to the extent that they have almost eclipsed loose tea.

It has been a resplendent year for buttercups too, the fields are gleaming...

 

The violets are almost done but I found a few lingering in the shade..

And the cow parsley is doing much prettifying of the hedgerows too...

More buttercups just because...

And now I'm thinking that you might all have been noticing things you might have missed before and not necessarily wildflowers. Please do share in comments...

Family Matters and Mr Atkinson's Rum Contract...

Everyone’s family is extraordinary in its own way. This much and more I discovered in all those years of listening to family histories as a health visitor. It was important to get a feel for where a family had come from, the experience, the highs the lows, the tensions, the ‘issues’ and it wouldn’t take more than a few open questions and saying yes to a cup of tea to learn more. I look on it as one of the privileges of the job, and it was one of the aspects I loved the most and found so fascinating. People’s stories shared and respected.

Translate that love into books and it is understandable that I am always drawn to the family memoirs. The secret to success is for the writer to make their own extraordinary family seem likewise for me the reader to whom they might otherwise be ordinary...if that makes sense, and it wasn’t hard to wander around my shelves and find a selection of those I have enjoyed most in recent years. I think I have written about all of these in the past so please do follow the links if you want to know more about each one..

Hancox - Charlotte Moore

The Baroness - Hannah Rothschild 

and an interview with Hannah at Port Eliot Festival here

The Valley - Richard Benson and an interview with him at Port Eliot Festival including sight of the knitted farm knitsuke 

The Great Western Beach - Emma Smith

On Chapel Sands - Laura Cumming...how did I not write about this? It was one of my best reads of 2019...

The Three of Us - Julia Blackburn 

The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal who I was also lucky enough to interview at Port Eliot Festival...happy days

Forty Autumns - Nina Willner

And then there was the astonishing and very beautiful book American Style and Spirit by Jane Bradbury about her Aunt Augusta and the Roddis family, their lives, their fortunes and their clothes. A picture of Augusta sits on the shelf above my desk and you might remember Jane  very kindly sent me a bunch of flowers as thanks for that post. The hydrangeas in the vase lasted so long they eventually put out roots and I was able to nurture a plant. Augusta’s Hydrangea has been through a few torrid times...I planted it out too soon and almost lost it...this year it dried out in the cold frame and I almost lost it again but, like Augusta's clothes, the plant has survived and is thriving again, and I am mightily relieved because it felt like a challenge at which I mustn’t fail.

It was the arrival of another book to add to this selection that made me think more carefully about their attraction. Perhaps, at the moment, it’s about immersing myself in someone else’s life and history instead of my own. It’s quite hard not to overthink all this, especially when the diary is empty and the next thing to get excited about it is the entire nation singing We’ll Meet Again together from their lockdown homes on VE Day. Actually, I am quite excited about this, because any sense of togetherness doesn’t go amiss right now. 

Richard Atkinson contacted me to ask if I might be interested in seeing a copy of his book Mr Atkinson’s Rum Contract - The Story of a Tangled Inheritance. Published very recently this one of those books that could so easily be consigned to the wilderness in the midst of the current situation, and that has to be heartbreaking for any author who has committed a huge part of their life to writing it. In Richard’s case ten years or so, having found a box of old family letters...

'Richard Atkinson was in his late thirties, and approaching a milestone he had long dreaded – the age at which his father died – when one day he came across a box of old family letters gathering dust on top of a cupboard.

This discovery set him on an all-consuming, highly emotional journey, ultimately taking him from the weather-beaten house of his Cumbrian ancestors to the abandoned ruins of their sugar estates in Jamaica.

Richard’s searches led him to one forebear in particular, an earlier Richard Atkinson, a brilliant but flawed West India merchant who had shipped all the British army’s supplies during the American War of Independence, and amassed staggering wealth and connections along the way. ‘Rum’ Atkinson died young, at the height of his powers, leaving a vast inheritance to his many nephews and nieces, as well as the society beauty who had refused his proposal of marriage; forty years of litigation followed as his heirs wrangled over his legacy....'

I'm about a hundred pages in and both intrigued and engrossed. So many of these writers have no choice but to address the 'something nasty in the woodshed' and Richard's family is no exception. He will have to confront involvement in slavery, but his ancestors were also witness to a backdrop of some of the most momentous times in history and I am re-visiting so much that I once knew. The Treaty of Paris...who knew the barest shreds of that were still lodged in my memory.

Meanwhile there must be scores of family memoirs deserving of a mention and already I realise I have forgotten to include Elisabeth's Lists by Lulah Ellender...

Lulah Ellender quotes Hilary Mantel...

'What is to be done with the lost, the dead, but write them into being?'

And I was reminded of an evening spent listening to Hilary Mantel. I hunted out my notes and here's what I jotted down...

'...As soon as somebody dies they become fictional, they become a narrative construction, preserved in memory but in a sense you are not dead if someone still talks about you. The thought hollows you out with a sense of waste and loss for those not known...my greatest joy is to take a name and give them person-hood... a particle of being... doing honour to what is lost...'

I am sure you have plenty more suggestions to share..

 

Greenery - Journeys in Springtime ~ Tim Dee

Every year we make a note of the date. Not the date when someone else sees a swallow in the village, but when our first one arrives and heads into the veranda knowing they are home. Variously April 28th, 15th, 17th, last year the 20th and this year Easter Sunday morning, April 12th but so far just the one. 

We thought he/she had been here before because there's a little perch they have made their own. It's a tangled up bit of electric cable that we always meant to wire up to an outside light but never did and there it sits. A complete eyesore if you look up and to the right of the front door but of course now we daren't change a thing about it. And so our single swallow arrived and there he has been sleeping for the past weeks waiting for the rest of the nest building team, and I'm wondering whether he is one of these. Last year's fledglings on the day they moved from nest to rafter with their first flight. 

Alongside the annual conflict is gathering. The wrens, who have been with us all winter, purloin a vacant swallow's nest and start loading it with mossy furnishings of their own, claiming squatter's rights, and there's nothing we can do about what happens next. It will be Armageddon out there because for all its diminutive size, Troglodytes troglodytes has the voice of a klaxon and will make its displeasure known when the Hirundo rustica mount their invasion and reclaim their property. It's usually a day to go out and leave them to it. We'll go for a walk instead and come home to a pile of moss on the deck, wrens in retreat back to their hedgerow nests and swallows back and forth with their preferred decor of mud, grass and white feathers.

 

This all brings me back to where I meant to start which was with Tim Dee's new book Greenery - Journeys in Springtime recently published by Jonathan Cape. I'm afraid I bought my copy from You Know Where to be sure it arrived soonest. My need for the real book in hand was yesterday once I'd read the Kindle sample.... 

'One December, in midsummer South Africa, Tim Dee was watching swallows. They were at home there, but the same birds would soon begin journeying north to Europe, where their arrival marks the beginning of spring.

Between the winter and the summer solstice in Europe, spring moves north at about the speed of swallow flight. That is also close to human walking pace. In the light of these happy coincidences, Greenery recounts how Tim Dee tries to travel with the season and its migratory birds, making remarkable journeys to keep in step with the very best days of the year, the time of buds and blossoms and leafing, the time of song and nests and eggs. After South Africa, we follow European migrants staging in Chad and Ethiopia, and on across the colossal and incomprehensible Sahara. We accompany storks venturing the Straits of Gibraltar, honey buzzards dodging Sicilian hunters, and tiny landbirds finding haven on the curious island of Heligoland. A diary of the spring spreading through Britain with a magic trinity of oak-tree-loving birds interleaves the continental greening. We read of other determined spring-seekers: D. H. Lawrence and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We hear from a Sámi reindeer herder, a barn-dwelling swallow-devotee, an Egyptian taxi driver, a chronobiologist in arctic Norway. There are bears and boars and bog-bodies too.'

 

So many books must be slipping into obscurity before they've even taken their first breath at the moment, and I can't quite imagine how the publishing world will regroup and get back on track after this, but it would be a real shame if this happened to Greenery because it is becoming, for me, the iconic book of this moment in my life. That sounds a bit dramatic but something similar happened with Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez, which I read through my dad's last few weeks. Looking back I see I wrote one post here knowing my dad would be reading it, and mentioned it in another here, a couple of months later knowing sadly he would not.

Arctic Dreams was a book that took me somewhere else, to another place that I didn't even realise I wanted to visit, but the memory of it, and the state of grace it created, has stayed with me...and I think Greenery will do likewise. Tim Dee's writing is bringing perspective, focusing my wandering attention and extending my horizons, and all at a time when the natural world has been giving some space to rest and breath.

I didn't know I wanted to go to the Sahara Desert but now I'm there, trailing the swallows as they travel north. 'We all, more or less, must be vernalised - and go through dark times in order to be born into light' suggests Tim Dee of our transition from winter mood to spring mood, but perhaps the same applies to moments like now. I think we'll all grow and change through this, in small ways, maybe in much deeper ways, the world will be different, no question....but some things won't change, like swallows migrating and barn owls nesting (deo volente).

I mentioned when 'our' swallow arrived 'home', but as Tim Dee points out with migratory birds, who do they belong to and where is home...

'Where are they at home? Whose swallows are they? Can anyone, in any case, lay claim to a bird?'

We talk of 'our barn owls' whilst knowing they are no such thing.

Greenery is punctuated with literary and poetic references that have thus far sent me scurrying in search of W.S. Merwin and Elizabeth Bishop, Shakespeare and Nadine Gordimer, Wordsworth and The Odyssey, and I'm only on page fifty six. The margins are unashamedly littered with pencilled thoughts as they flash into my mind. 

Meanwhile,  whilst I have discovered another book to add to the 'of the moment' reads in my life I'm thinking some of you might  have discovered yours too. And if not books for the now just yet, perhaps books from life-moments past whose power and effect has stayed with you.

Please do share them in comments...

And perhaps this beautiful film from New Zealand will help too. I would just have arrived home now, struggling with jet lag, but I'll be back there again one day....in the meantime Papatūānuku is breathing...

 

Leonard and Hungry Paul ~ Ronan Hession

It seems like some sort of minor miracle that I have finished a novel, a newish one at that.

Back in early March a parcel of lockdown books arrived from Susan Hill, and Leonard and Hungry Paul by Rónán Hession was included. Susan has always been a very reliable source of reading recommendations, with her finger on the pulse of the publishing world, what's current and what is worth reading....mostly. We might have disagreed about Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser- Akner last year, but it does't happen very often. 

It was a while before I opened it, (March 24th, I've written the date inside, it seems oddly important to do so at the moment) but as soon as I did, and had read the first paragraph, I knew I'd have to be rationing Leonard and Hungry Paul to a chapter a day...

'Leonard was raised by his mother alone with cheerfully concealed difficulty, his father having died tragically during childbirth. Though she was not by nature the soldiering type, she taught him to look at life as a daisy chain of small events, each of which could be made manageable in its own way. She was a person for whom kindness was a very ordinary thing, who believed that the only acceptable excuse for not having a bird feeder in the back garden was that you had one in the front garden.'

Consequently it was April 19th before I finally allowed myself to finish Leonard and Hungry Paul, and I think I could probably start over and read it again just for the book's gentle humility and the innate goodness of those who see life through a different lens; people who have different expectations and reactions to the norm. It's a book to make a reader question 'the norm' and who decides 'the norm' anyway. I've often wondered and suspect many of us, in our different ways, are doing some, if not a lot of that right now.

Leonard and Hungry Paul, both mature men are good friends. Leonard's mother has recently died leaving him alone in the house and the life they happily shared, whilst Hungry Paul (I could only assume this was probably a name given to him as a ravenous baby) still lives with his parents nearby.  There are simple certainties to the lives herein. Both Leonard and Hungry Paul work, they meet regularly to play board games, Hungry Paul's more worldly sister Grace is planning her wedding, people buy books in shops, meet for lunch...normal (well, the Old Normal) things happen and yet underpinning the whole book is a sense of goodness that I find it hard to describe.

Given how suspiciously minds are often encouraged to work today it would be so easy to jump to conclusions about both men... the mummy's boys, does the 'friendship' conceal something more, ultimately place them both on the autistic spectrum, job done, Sorted, pigeon-holed, move along, and yet Rónán Hession challenges assumptions and prejudices at every turn, denies a reader their judgements and I emerged from the final page completely grateful to have read this book. It's not slushy or sentimental but it made me question so much about myself, and at a time when we're all questioning so many other certainties too.

I'm bringing you news of this one this minute because it is a mere £1.89 on Kindle at the moment. Now I know (as a reading friend pointed out the other day) that some of us are currently racking up Kindle spending on a par with the GDP of a small nation, and that there will be a reckoning, so perhaps download the sample first and read the first chapter before you commit. And even if you do commit and then don't like, you can always return a Kindle purchase for a refund if done within a certain time frame. 

But I don't think you will be disappointed.

Meanwhile, as we all chug along in our respective restricted worlds, please do share any other good Kindle or otherwise reads that you have discovered.

 

 

 

 

Confessions...

Honestly, here we all are trying to read good books...books that I can hold my head up and be proud to say I've read through these challenging times, and then what happens...

This...

The trouble was that in an effort to avoid switching on the lunchtime news one day I persuaded Bookhound that now was a good time for me to see just one episode of Malory Towers. The BBC have generously made all episodes available at once. I loaded it with caveats...I'll watch the rest on my iPad.... it will probably be awful... you'll hate it but you mustn't mock.... 

And so we watched the first episode...

The next day we watched the second episode...

On the third day Bookhound says 'Is it time for lunch and 'your' serial...'

Note the 'your'...

And so it has carried on and Bookhound will possibly slaughter me for revealing this...but he gets as excited as I do about the lacrosse match, and the Open Day...and what will happen to nasty Gwendoline next...and who will Darrell lose her temper with now...and there you have it. It's a whole new world for a man raised on Anthony Buckeridge's Jennings and the world of Biggles, but it's a return to a familiar world for me as life at Malory Towers, the Cornish clifftop school, unfolds.

First Term at Malory Towers was published in 1946, and the series has never been out of print since, I'm now wondering if there is some sort of theory about the penchant for books about girl's boarding schools in the period immediately after a war.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This occurred to me having recently read Erica Wins Through by Josephine Elder published in the 1920s. Maybe its about security and safety and re-establishing the order...perhaps creating a new version. I'm sure someone has written a PhD on the subject. Various new themes have been introduced to the Malory Towers TV series, including a back story for Darrell and a bit of scandal at a previous school. And whilst pranks prevail discipline is still paramount (and matron is vile) but girls are encouraged and praised for standing up for what is right and fair in the finest traditions of boarding school stories.

Reading very lightly around the subject  I was interested to find a piece, in a collection of essays on the subject of  school stories, by Rosemary Auchmuty outlining the undreamt-of educational opportunities that these schools represented for girls...

'a chance to study seriously, perhaps to aim for university or a career, which in turn offered an alternative to marriage and money of one's own. Games brought girls the comradeship of the team and new physical freedoms. It is easy to underestimate how revolutionary all this was in the 1920s when only a quarter of all girls enjoyed a secondary education.'

Girls could be successful because all things were possible within the all-female educational environment, and the scope of a girl's ambition (or lack of it) is a contrast neatly played out between Darrell and Gwendoline in the TV series.

For whatever reason the indoor scenes were filmed in Toronto whilst the outdoor scenes were filmed at Hartland Abbey in North Devon, and the setting is pitch perfect having also been used for the upcoming film of Rebecca, Sense and Sensibility, The Night Manager and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

It's all a right old wallow I can tell you, smart uniforms, predictable plots, midnight feasts, wandering ghosts and happy outcomes but entirely enjoyable.

I read the books over and again as a child, copies long gone, but for old time's sake I downloaded a sample to my Kindle, started reading and before I knew it I'd found a bargain box set on eBay and couldn't stop myself. Six in the series written by Enid Blyton and another six sequels added at a later date. Enid Blyton was forbidden reading at my state primary school, considered to be a 'poor writer' by the headteacher, though fortunately my parents saw it differently, and the library had an endless supply. It was much later in my life that my dad confessed that he had read them all while I was asleep so that he could join in the conversation with me...and that he had loved them all too. Needless to say our own children were suitably inducted into the world of Enid, both books and videos, because shouldn't all children experience that sense of freedom and adventure so beloved by the Famous Five.

I smiled when I read this recently in the monthly Letter sent out a by 'a publisher'...

'And we were SO surprised when a very very intellectual friend of mine said she was hugely enjoying Anne of Green Gables on Netflix....'

Don't be in the least bit surprised I say. Firstly Anne is the absolute heroine and aren't we all Kindred Spirits right now, and even the 'very very' intellectual need something that offers consolation and safety and certainty. Malory Towers is proving to be our unashamedly nostalgic antidote to so much else at the moment and I'm wondering if you have found your antidotes too...

In that little book of essays on school stories there is a delightful one by Adele Geras. Adele has this to say about the pleasure of reading books like this...

'I do not think it's possible to over-emphasise the pleasure - sometimes a rather guilty pleasure - of having no roughage at all to chew on in a book ..it's just like eating meringues all day long...the last thing we liked was the distinct possibility that we ourselves would end up in a school just like Malory Towers...'

Sadly Adele's re-reading of In the Fifth at Malory Towers as an adult found them distinctly lacking, and she suggests they are best left behind in childhood...too late, I've bought them now, but maybe Adele didn't have a plague in progress, and after all the charity shops will be open again and in need one day. I'll have a go.

Meanwhile, it's perfectly fine to confess your secret antidotes here because I'd love some more suggestions...

 

Stitching a path through...

I hope you all had a good weekend and thank you for all your lovely Easter greetings, and for emails from those saying how pleased you are the scribbles is here. Can I just add how thankful I am that all of you are out there too, keeping our worldwide conversation going, and keeping each other on an even keel when any one of us has a wobble. I had a bit of a moment on the evening of Easter Saturday. The sudden thought that we wouldn’t be seeing the family for heaven knows how long and Easter egg hunts of the past just washed over me unexpectedly and in a flash. 

I doubt I’m alone with these moments.

I woke up on Sunday morning and decided the only way up was quilting. I’ve run out of fabric for The Knot Garden so that is stuck on my sticky fleece wall and on hold..

And I’d been reluctant to start anything new fearing it might always have plague associations...but then quilting is all about stitching whatever is happening in your life into what you are making, so I decided I needed to just woman up, eat chocolate for breakfast as per Easter Sunday tradition, and get on with it.

And so I tasked myself to get properly into Jen Kingwell’s Gypsy Wife Quilt.  This is Jen’s version...

It’s fiendishly complicated as you can see.

I had bought the pattern book ages ago and made a half-hearted start before realising that this thing needed planning, uninterrupted time and masses of concentration.

Then I thought I’d join one of the regular online groups that start in January and make this quilt to a monthly schedule through the year. 

That didn’t happen either.

Well I have no excuses now and by the end of