dovegreyreader scribbles

Remembering...

Remembrance Day, so that can only mean one thing... time to share another story from the Tinker's little memoir Bugle Boy, which for anyone who may not know is a published collection of his memories of going to war at the age of 14 in 1939 as a Royal Marines boy bugler.
I haven't mentioned the Tinker, (father of dgr ) in a while which is most remiss of me, but he is very chipper, walks twice as fast with the double pacemaker, sends you all his regards and reads here every day.
In case anyone's wondering it was Our Susan (Hill) who gave him that nickname and based on an incident I recounted to her concerning the regular gatherings of the Tinker's little band of octogenarian World War II veterans, which always seemed to involve some mischief and the need for an ambulance for one of them.


That's him, the little lad on the left in the cover picture and all ready to go off to a battleship in December 1939.
He did a wonderful thirty minute live question and answer interview about Bugle Boy on Radio Devon recently, so the book's still available out there and still being read which is lovely. And because it is the bugler playing Last Post and Sunset on Remembrance Day that always brings a tear to my eye, I have tagged on a picture of our own 'at the going down of the sun moment'  here last night, it was breathtaking.

My Debut

The first time Mum and Dad said they would come down
to Eastney to see me filled me with excitement. I knew
they would feed me and make me financially sound for a
short while and, of course, I could show off in my new
uniform. I suppose it was a month after I had arrived but
it had taken at least three weeks to assemble all my kit.
The accoutrements were no problem but the uniform had
to be specially made, after all at 4’ 8” I was not exactly off
the peg, besides which we had to be trained in how to
comport ourselves when out of barracks. In those days,
when a Royal Marine went out he wore white cotton
gloves and carried a silver-headed cane, something I was
sorry to see discontinued, it made you feel a little special;
but there was a drill to it all that had to be learnt before
you were allowed out.

It was a Sunday, as I remember, and they would meet
me at the barrack gate at 2 p.m. by which time I had
cleaned my buttons, boned my boots to the best possible
shine for a new pair and starched my cap cover. We never
had white-top caps then, just blue caps, but we donned
cap covers between 1 May and 1 October and they had to
be starched. A word about my boots; they too had to be
made, by the cobblers in the barracks, from greased cow
hide that took weeks and weeks of boning before getting
the required polish. They were size six and each boot had
116 hobnails, a heel plate and a large toe plate; when I first
put them on I felt like a deep-sea diver.

Two o’clock came eventually, I left it for a few minutes
to make sure they would be there to see me march up to
the Sergeant on the gate, and there they were, in earnest
conversation with the Sergeant. Drawing myself up to my
full height, I halted in front of the Sergeant.

‘Po/x 3943 Boy Bugler L. Chester, permission to leave
barracks Sergeant.’

My father was bursting with pride and my mother had
tears in her eyes; I was terrified. Whilst I stood there with
my proud parents watching, he did a 360-degree inspection
of me, including a bird’s eye view of my cap cover,
because I’m sure he was 7’ 6” tall.

‘You have dust in the welts of your boots, go back and
clean them properly.’

My father’s pride at that moment knew no bounds, my
mother shed some more tears and I was completely
humiliated. I have said that after three weeks we were
completely streetwise, we had ways and means for all situations.
For this one I went back to my barrack room, sat
on the bed for ten minutes then walked back again.

‘Why didn’t you clean them like that the first time,
laddie?’

In those halcyon pre-World War Two days, I’m sure
that was the way of the Royal Marines, more so with the
recruits: they endeavoured to break your spirit and then
proceeded to build you up to what they wanted – sheer
blind obedience. It worked, unless you were as cunning as
us boys who had nothing to break down in the first place.

At the eleventh hour...

I thought we'd have a quiet post for today, a sort of virtual silence with the merest whisper of a heartfelt poem from
Edward Thomas,
Killed in action at the Battle of Arras in 1917.
Edward Thomas has my poetry heart at the moment and I am finding it hard to imagine quite what such a gentle, nature-loving soul made of trench warfare.
So I'm reading his wife Helen's book Under Storm's Wing to get a clearer picture of Edward Thomas
the man, the husband and the father.
All is never as you expect and I sense it was Helen who made many sacrifices to enable her man to be the man he was and the one that we think we know.
And I think Edward Thomas knew that too.

And You, Helen

And you, Helen, what should I give you?
So many things I would give you
Had I an infinite great store
Offered me and I stood before
To choose. I would give you youth,
All kinds of loveliness and truth,
A clear eye as good as mine,
Lands, waters, flowers, wine,
As many children as your heart
Might wish for, a far better art
Than mine can be, all you have lost
Upon the travelling waters tossed,
Or given to me. If I could choose
Freely in that great treasure-house
Anything from any shelf,
I would give you back yourself,
And power to discriminate
What you want and want it not too late,
Many fair days free from care
And heart to enjoy both foul and fair,
And myself, too, if I could find
Where it lay hidden and it proved kind.

Edward Thomas

The Man Who Never Was

So I had Operation Heartbreak lined up to read and had heard Duff Cooper's son, John Julius Norwich, speaking at Dartington last year about his father, but I knew little about Duff Cooper himself, so time to head to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and back up the reading with some details.
A gifted orator and debater, Duff Cooper sustained a steady rise through the parliamentary ranks having reached the ranks of First Lord of the Admiralty in Chamberlain's pre-war cabinet, though he was seen by many as something of an 'indiscreet and belligerent firebrand'.
It was Chamberlain's Peace with Honour acceptance of the Munich agreement, at the price of Czechoslovak disintegration, which brought matters to a head.
In Duff Cooper's eyes legitimate reasons for war had been lost and, having seen and been considerably alarmed by Hitler's Nuremberg rallies in the early 1930s, Cooper had been warning of the inevitability of war for some time. Sensing that war remained inevitable but would now be one declared with dishonour, Duff Cooper tendered his resignation in 1938, but returned to the Ministry of Information under Churchill's leadership in 1941.
More visits to my primary source and his veteran's point of view and the Tinker always says, 'you needed to be there and to be living it to know'. He concurs with the opinion that though Chamberlain may have been pilloried for the Munich agreement, he bought this war-thirsty country, predominantly eager though unprepared as it was for war, some very valuable time.
Duff Cooper seems well placed to write a book like this, though Max Arthur mentions in his afterword that the novel's post-war appearance caused some consternation in diplomatic circles, fearing that it might harm Anglo-Spanish relations, whilst even suggesting that perhaps the operation might need to be repeated one day. Cooper was having none of that (indiscretion and belligerence to the fore) pointing out that Operation Heartbreak was fiction and in any case it was one of Churchill's oft-recounted dinner party stories.
And how clearly I remember the film, The Man Who Never Was.

One of those dreary 1950s winter Sunday afternoons, soaking up something of a war of which I knew little except that we'd "won" and my dad had helped.
Am I right about that opening scene, a deserted beach, waves lapping on the shore and... I look back now on all that heroic post-war glory that we imbibed as children and when I see the films again now, with a little more knowledge and life under my belt, it's slightly embarrassing to think we would then go out and play wars and battleships and heaven knows what else.
I'd take my maroon, coach-built doll's pram with me because I was a girl and girls did then, but it made a brilliant tank and with my roller skates on I could certainly rev up a good charge down Queen Anne's Gardens where my best friend Ann and her sister Christine lived, plus it was a cul-de-sac and very few cars...I'd be wearing a smocked frock, just visualise that if you can.
Novel, real story, film, whatever I'm delighted to have finally read this book because when I took the Tinker's little memoir Bugle Boy down off the shelf, there it was, a picture of a young Tinker with the following caption.

'HMS King George V, June 1943 at the invasion of Sicily. This was taken just prior to closing up at Action Stations. We wore boiler suits as anti-flash protection and my action station was in the 14" gun turret behind me. We were about to bombard the port of Trapani, where a Herman Goering Panzer division was stationed to make them think there was a landing imminent to keep them away from the beachhead, we also bombarded the islands of Favignana and Marsala on the way through.'

I know about 14" guns now I've been to the Imperial War Museum but I can also guarantee that as we sat and watched the film and Sicily was mentioned, the Tinker would have said 'I've been there' and we'd all have groaned and said ' you always say that,' because he did, and we'd have laughed without really understanding that actually he had been and why.

Operation Heartbreak by Duff Cooper

Operation Heartbreak had sat unread on my shelves since it was first published by Persephone Books in 2004, but I've been browsing the books again with new eyes for this year's November reading and several have been a perfect fit.
This one has the lovely blue endpapers taken from a Jacqmar printed rayon entitled 'Happy Landings'
and I know those  little decorative flourishes at the top of each page are carefully chosen too... for Operation Heartbreak these like little sets of wings.
It was interesting to walk around the Imperial War Museum and spot those little swatches of Persephone endpapers in the exhibitions, I instantly recognised 'London Wall' from Vere Hodgson's Few Egg and No Oranges.

Duff Cooper recounts the life of Captain Willie Maryngton, an orphan with an income, a career army officer who is utterly desperate to go to war. Bitterly disappointed to have missed out on active service in the First World War by a matter of days, Willie is even more distraught and disillusioned to find he is too old to serve in the Second World War and must stay at home and train the troops. Having been a cavalry man and subject to the all-consuming hobby of hippolatry (it's in the book, honestly) the changing face of warfare and increasing mechanisation leave Willie, a man without a war horse, stuck in the old groove.
But Willie nurses a constant sense of unbelonging and remains emotionally 'stuck' too, his parentless background has done little for his emotional maturity despite the presence of a family who have taken him under their wing, his relationships with women are doomed, often a complete disaster. His life takes on a routine of monotony and dullness, then add in the unrequited craving for front line action and it all breeds in him a streak of bitter regret and suspicion of those around him.
Everyone else is joining in the 'party' and somehow Willie is always on the outside looking in.
It slowly becomes clear that Willie is going to play a major role in the war and gradually Duff Cooper builds towards the ending that you know is coming if you are aware of the real wartime events on which the book is based. It is a book charged with increasing emotion and the final pages just turn those screws steadily as they quietly increase the poignancy of Willie's life.
I'm thinking these facts are well known to many but if not, and you think this might spoil your enjoyment of Operation Heartbreak, stop reading here ** and scroll down to ***

**
Operation Mincemeat, the actual British Intelligence Operation to deceive Hitler into thinking the allied invasion of Sicily would take place elsewhere, so the plan was for the body of Major Martin RM to wash up on a strategically chosen Spanish beach carrying secret papers. Spanish intelligence handed the papers to German intelligence before returning them supposedly unopened to Britain. It was only the misaligned refolding of the papers that gave any hint that the ruse might have worked and in fact it did. Hitler continued to expect an invasion via Greece and Sardinia weeks after the invasion of Sicily had begun.

***

Max Arthur's afterword offers a context to the events recounted in the book but more about Duff Cooper and the film of the real events on which the book is based tomorrow. I'll bet some you of you watched The Man Who Never Was, curled up on the floor on a dreary winter's Sunday afternoon as I did.

On W.G.Sebald

Once I'd read Rings of Saturn I bought all of W.G.Sebald's books. I then read Austerlitz and The Emigrants and still have Campo Santo and Vertigo left unread, saved as you do (well as I do) when I discover a writer and know that what I have is all there is.
But On the Natural History of Destruction has always felt like a challenge too far, especially if read out of  context and it has been down to Mathilde Wolff - Monckeberg to offer me that context with her book, On the Other Side : Letters to My Children from Germany 1940-1946.
To be honest, it would have been much easier to avoid both of these and just stick to books about evacuated children in Cornwall (which I've loved too), somehow skirt around and evade the whole tragedy or else read it slant, but there is something extraordinarily compelling about Mathilde's letters and I felt I owed it to her courage to explore further.
Born in the Allgau Alps in May 1944, W.G.Sebald argues that he inherited a silence, a sense of a collective amnesia, an aura of something forbidden, a war that wasn't talked about and in particular a series of events which he examines in the first of four essays contained in this slim but incredibly hard-hitting volume.
One of the most controversial campaigns of the Second World War was the carpet bombing and destruction of many German cities by the RAF in the latter years of the war. The figures advanced by Sebald, even if guesstimates, are staggering; a million tons of bombs dropped, 131 towns and cities attacked, 600,000 German civilians 'fell victim' as Sebald puts it, 42.8 cubic metres of rubble for every inhabitant of Dresden.
Mathilde Wolff - Monckeberg wrote letters to her children from Hamburg, a city decimated in air raids during a long heat wave in July 1943.
The details of those raids are out there for anyone to read up on and Christopher Beauman in his excellent afterword to On the Other Side suggests three outstanding volumes which address the history and the morality of the strategy. I don't want to be drawn into the whys and wherefores because I think everyone has to reach their own personal understanding of it all.
Sebald proceeds to explore and prosecute his case with no small degree of disbelief verging on disdain in an attempt to identify exactly why so little of this punishing devastation had found its way into post-war German literature. Sensing feelings of a shared guilt, few writers seem to have fulfilled what Sebald sees as the writer's task,

'to keep the nation's collective memory alive.'

Sebald's inherited silence is one also identified in reality by Janet Flanner, wartime writer for the New Yorker, and visiting Cologne after the bombing. Janet Flanner observed and reported first-hand the death throes of a once glorious city which now

'lay by its riverbanks...recumbent, without beauty, shapeless in the rubble of loneliness of complete physical defeat. Through its clogged streets trickles what is left of its life, a dwindled population in black and with bundles - the silent German people appropriate to the silent city.'

I'm very much a two-sides-of-the-story person and plenty in W.G.Sebald's book troubled me. Being aware of the storm of controversy On the Natural History of Destruction had stirred up on publication, I turned to The Emergence of Memory - Conversations with W.G.Sebald to explore this further.
I needed some balance to Sebald's anxieties because something within me was uncomfortable with his insistence, his expectation, that those who had lived through this devastation somehow had a duty to find the words to describe it, as Ruth Franklin suggests in this book, the need

'To resurrect a memory he never experienced.'

Surely this is about saying the unsayable and Ruth Franklin quotes German writer Dieter Forte's response to On the Natural History of Destruction which seems to confirm that,

'there is horror that exists beyond language...He overlooks my generation, the generation of the children in the big cities, who can remember, when they are able, when they can find words for it - and for that one must wait an entire lifetime.'

In three further essays Sebald examines the work of three German writers and it quickly becomes apparent which of them merits his respect and which his barely disguised disgust.
On the Natural History of Destruction has been one of those astonishingly powerful reads for where it has led my thinking, and though I know it might seem mystifying... a bit like taking myself off and rolling in barbed wire for fun...somehow I don't want to shy away from the more challenging reads.
This, another quote found at the Imperial War Museum, seemed to encompass all my thoughts about this book and Mathilde's, more of which soon,

'I pray on you to believe what I have said.
I reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it.
For most of it I have no words.'

Ed Murrow Buchenwald 1945

Eunice Fleet by Lily Tobias

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dyeing

This last week I have been mostly tidying and dyeing and please note the careful placement of that 'e'.
Rev, Cheryl's into dyeing (again note the 'e') and on my recent visit to Cambridge and the vicarage I was completely enthralled by her dyeing room (definitely note the 'e') and a glorious array of hand-dyed fabrics using natural plant dyes. These are subsequently stashed and stitched into Cheryl's equally wonderful quilting projects. Cheryl has lifted her technique way beyond mine, I'm stuck firmly in the traditional, Cheryl's quilts and wall hangings are modern and laden with significance and I loved them.
So when I took to dyeing I couldn't help but think of my visit to Cambridge except I haven't been sweating over vats of woad or out trapping cochineal beetles for my purposes.
We are making keen headway on the house mess.
Though the nest never quite seems to empty with this boomerang generation, the Kayaker's departure to antipodean shores for a year feels like a bit of a staging post, a time to sort out bedrooms, clear out what has been the shared teenager's sitting room for years and most importantly deal with the Kayaker's whim which had overruled all dissent and dyed their sofa covers Bermuda Blue.
Fair dues, it did look bright and jolly and yes the sea really is that colour when you go there, but we were all a bit sick of it so a simple transformation to a nice shade of indigo was suggested and agreed by me, with me.

This is actually Grand Cayman but just angle your computer screen towards you a fraction and it's Bermuda Blue alright.
Once I decide on these things I have to do them NOW.
No time to procrastinate and wonder where I can go picking woad, it's straight into town at 4.30pm to pick up some Dylon stuff for the washing machine and the salt and set this slouchy couchy mess off on its journey of transformation into a grown-up sofa.
I don't know about you, but two days of this clearing out thing and hardly any reading time and I've about had enough. One room transformed into a minimalist paradise whilst all the clutter seems to be scattered everywhere else between the doorway, the back of the car and the seven miles to the tip.
In the midst of all this anguish, and despite postal strikes, a book arrived to cheer my very being and I kept eyeing it on the kitchen table all day as a sort of antidote to all this parental rite of passage that was going on, this reclaiming of the home.
Meanwhile dyeing a sofa cover and all its cushions is a recipe for torrential rain, then of course when you try to get the thing back on, that sofa seems to have grown at least a foot since you last looked and naturally there has been internal shrinkage of piping cord.
Re-clothing the now grown-up sofa akin to a jolly good cardiac workout.
More about how my day was strangely and unexpectedly salvaged by Changing My Mind - the Occasional Essays of Zadie Smith, tomorrow.

Grantchester, Rupert and...

Back to that Cambridge trip and the real Grantchester Meadows where RevCheryl and I set off from one vicarage, ostensibly to walk Amy the vicarage dog, but to go and look at another vicarage and have a wander around Rupert Brooke country. This is RevCheryl's home turf so my thanks to her for the guided tour and my apologies for being an embarrassing tourist and snapping everything in sight.
I read Jill Dawson's The Great Lover this 'summer' and had quite thought I liked Rupert Brooke before I started it.
Stunning adonis-like, floppy-haired privileged lad that he was, not doing anyone any harm and then those immortal lines of poetry

If I should die, think only this of me: 
That there's some corner of a foreign field 
That is forever England. There shall be 
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; 
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware...'

All marvelously and quietly stirring, then dying ingloriously of septicaemia following an insect bite to his lip before he'd even fought a battle, and buried in some distant olive grove, well that always seemed to add to the poignancy.
Jill Dawson, having immersed herself in Rupert Brooke's letters then began to elaborate and fictionalize his life and loves at Grantchester, his indecision and confusion about his sexuality and moving around the edges of the Bloomsbury set which won't have helped, a fear of madness and actual nervous breakdowns, affairs of the heart including much lusting after both Nell the maid from the nearby Orchard tearooms and then a schoolfriend from Rugby, followed by a prolonged stay on a South Pacific island.
Except perhaps none of that really happened and in the end I suppose it shouldn't matter, The Great Lover is fiction after all.
The trap for the unwary, and I fall head first into it every time, lies in trying too hard to discern the fact from the fiction, what happened, what didn't, what is myth, what is not.
Where exactly does the author's imagination begin and how far can it go?
Hilary Mantel talked fascinatingly about this in relation to Wolf Hall (I'm still on cloud nine for Hilary, the Booker win so richly deserved)
The Great Lover opens with a letter sent to Nell the lusted-after maid in 1982 from a child fathered by Rupert Brooke whilst on Tahiti (did he?)
As Nell the maid says in her letter back, and perhaps this is Jill Dawson's early explanation to her readers,

'A biography is a good way to find out things but to my mind, well. It has its limits. After all, a biography is written by a person and a person does not always understand another as well as they might think...I do think they set too much store by facts and not enough by feelings. As a girl I set a lot of of store by facts, but I learned that they could be wrong.'

Nor have I read Christopher Hassall's biography of Rupert Brooke so I have litte to go on but Virginia Woolf who in 1918 pronounced Rupert Brooke,

'jealous, moody, ill-balanced'

After reading The Great Lover I'm afraid I'm agreeing with Virginia, and Jill Dawson certainly conveys these elements of his personality, sadly by the time I got to Tahiti with him I've got to own up, I'd sort of had enough of Rupert and I wanted to get home.
All was not lost.
Nell, as the daughter of a bee-keeper, offers access to that rich, honey-sweet element in the book which kept me reading, especially as a foil for Rupert Brooke's odd ways, his over-bearing mother and his frequently selfish and eccentric behaviour. Too much of Rupert would be a bad thing, Nell's feels like the voice of balance and reason and for all her lack of education, yet possessing acres of good common sense and useful intelligence, she almost becomes the choral character, there to offer a grounding in the realities of life and in stark contrast to that life of privilege enjoyed by so few. 
So with all this in mind it was good to trace Rupert's footsteps just a little and wander through The Orchard tearooms on a quiet Monday morning that week and not difficult to imagine Rupert lounging there too.
and of course another famous 'author' now lives in The Old Vicarage at Grantchester, so we had to go and look there as well.
No signs saying 'Go Away...No Circulars, No Hawkers, No Bloggers ' so I took a few shots for the record.
Statues abound in the vicarage garden and nor is Rupert forgotten,
...and at least he's a little warmer than this poor chap.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher at my kitchen table

The kitchen table has looked like this through this week as I've indulged in some mellow, sun-dappled quilt-history reading, some knitting planning and general book-meandering to any warmth that may escape past the Aga-Hog, a sleeping - snoring Rocky. In the midst of all that I've strayed wantonly off into yet another exploration of the writing of Dorothy Canfield Fisher.
I also discover that Remembrance Sunday was the fiftieth anniversary of her death, November 9th 1958.
I have been re-reading The Homemaker for the zillionth time and each time I find a new and previously unseen perspective in that book to explore and more of that soon, but as you already know I have also found myself completely engrossed in Dorothy Canfield Fisher's book of short stories, The Bedquilt edited by Mark Madigan.
In his introduction Mark Madigan crystallises my thoughts on the writing of Dorothy (incidentally originally named Dorothea after her Middlemarch namesake) and perhaps now explains why hers is writing I return to with great frequency,

'Fisher brought to her short fiction a deep understanding of human beings and the world we inhabit. Above all else, these stories bear the imprint of her "special way of looking at things", a way of interpreting life as she knew it - with "her whole personality."

The story of the title has long been a favourite, as spinster relation and Elwell family drudge Aunt Mehetabel dreams up the superlative quilt pattern which she then proceeds to hand piece and quilt over a period of years. Eventually her skill and application win her the status of minor local celebrity and a previously unthinkable degree of inclusion into a family who have taken this maiden aunt for granted all her life. As word spreads of a masterpiece in the making and strangers arrive at the door to view her tiny stitches and immaculate seams, the family begin to realise her value, though perhaps still as a marketable commodity. Nevertheless Aunt Mehetable is given fabrics, a work table of her own and best of all, every quilter's dream possession, time away from her chores to sew.
The empowering 'completeness' this offers to Mehetable's self esteem, giving her a voice after a lifetime of silent disadvantage, makes for a far deeper read than the brevity of the story first suggests. Similar themes to those that always jump out at me from Susan Glaspell's brilliant play Trifles where, through the stitching of the log cabin quilt, Mrs Wright heart-breakingly but symbolically creates that warm, happy home she yearns for.
The metaphor of the quilt is a powerful and multi-faceted one wherever it is used
As well as a perceptive empathy in identifying the plight of these single, seemingly parasitical women,  there can be no better story than The Bedquilt for conveying the joy and thrill of creativity.
I'm convinced that any craft activity done at any level accesses a feel-good bit of the brain. Knowing and feeling those shafts of excitement that can pierce the day in day out-ness of life once that bout of startitis strikes, the idea is born, the mind-planning begins and the materials are required yesterday, which all justifies the existence in every knitting or quilting home of  the ubiquitous stash. Truly awful, I'm sure you'll agree, not to be able to respond instantly to those moments of pure inspiration before they are effaced by the sight of a full washing machine.
For Elaine Showalter The Bedquilt is no less than " a parable of the woman writer and her creative fantasies.'
Hmm, parable? Fantasies? So we might not quite have perfected the bouts of finishitis here yet, but we will, we will. But yes it is a parable ( I never argue with Elaine...'Showalter argues that...' has earned me many a good essay mark) and on so many levels.
Meanwhile lest you thought I may have finished it this week, no it's still a fantasy awaiting reality.

as is this one,
 

but for the hundredth time of showing, here is one I made earlier.

Armistice Day

Catching up on the Bugle Boy prize draw, congratulations to the winner, Becky. Anyone else who may have read the Tinker's book will know about Harold 'Podge' Overbury who joined the Royal Marines at the same time back in 1939. I think Podge is easy to spot in this picture and he and the Tinker remain friends to this day. It has to be said, they are mischief when they get together so as you can see I had a firm grip on them both as they lined up, medals-galore for Sunday's Remembrance Day parade.Then I couldn't stop myself welling up as they led off the Royal Marine contingent with another veteran, Tom in the middle. My mum would have loved moments like this.

For today and to end this year's Remembrance Read, an extract from Bugle Boy by Len Chester (aka The Tinker and father of dgr in case you have missed that bit ) Essential background to this story is that Hodge eventually became known throughout the corps as Podge and I won't be the one to say it was because his mum, Mrs Overbury was in charge of the barrack's cookhouse. Podge features in the film of The Cockleshell Heroes, he's the one barking out the orders on the parade ground, something for which he became legendary as a Regimental Sergeant Major and drill instructor at Lympstone Commando training centre.

Podge’s Mum
To illustrate the remark I made that Wren Overbury was
not to be trifled with, I will relate the tale of the complaint.
It must have been sometime in 1942 when it happened
as I had just returned to barracks after two years
on my first ship and the new mess hall had been built.
We had liver and onions for breakfast, ‘baby’s head
and guardrails’ as it was known in the vernacular. The
liver was like the soles of our boots and the onions looked
like bootlaces, most unappetizing. In comes the Officer of
the day, as was his duty at every meal, being concerned
about our wellbeing.
‘Any complaints?’ he asks, holding his nose twixt finger
and thumb.
‘Yes’, says Hodge.
Well you may have seen a cartoon where the Officer is
aghast and the Corporal swells with indignation; this is
where it originated.
‘Taste this liver and onions sir, we can’t eat it and we
are told we must have a good breakfast before going on parade.
‘Don’t talk to the Officer like that, son’, says the
Corporal.
Mind you, the Officer had to agree that it was pretty
gruesome and he was due for his own breakfast shortly.
‘Fetch this man another breakfast.’
Up comes a plate with egg, bacon and fried bread.
‘Do you withdraw your complaint?’
‘Yes sir’, says Hodge.
On the way to the washing-up space, in a corridor, he
is suddenly grabbed by a huge Sergeant in cook’s whites
and literally lifted off the floor by his neck.
‘Are you the little …… who just made the complaint?’
‘Yes Sergeant’, squeaks Hodge.
‘Do you realize that it was my breakfast that you have
just eaten?’
‘No,’ says Hodge, ‘and if you don’t put me down I
shall report you.’
‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ says Sergeant.
‘I’m Po/x3834 Boy Bugler Harold Overbury.’
At this the Sergeant turns a paler shade of pale.
‘Is Mrs Overbury your mum?’ he asks in a squeaky
voice.
‘Yes’, says Hodge.
‘God, you won’t tell her will you?’ he says, and gently
lowers Hodge to the ground, straightening his tunic and
dusting him down.
As far as I can remember, Hodge never had reason
to complain henceforth – that was the kind of fear
Hodge’s mum could instil. Bombs, bullets, even a draft to
a ship were not equal to the wrath of Mrs Overbury protecting
her young.

"Through Pity and Terror ..." by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

As you'll see later in the week I'm in the grip of a Dorothy Canfield Fisher revival with a re-read of The Homemaker et al and also this book The Bedquilt & Other Stories which I thought I'd already done cover to cover until I came across "Through Pity and Terror...". It seems completely appropriate to mention this story here as part of my Remembrance Read 2008 . Another remarkable story in The Bedquilt, Memorial Day May 30, 1913 leaves me with a sense that Remembrance shouldn't be confined to just a single week of the year, but more of that another day.
Thank you too for all the comments and e mails about it all, you have all given me plenty of reading ideas to follow up.
"Through Pity and Terror..."  sees Madeleine and her husband, pharmacist Jules Brismantier, living a charmed and blissful married life in France thanks in part to Madeleine's serious attention to domesticity; the perfectly positioned furniture with well-matched fixtures and fittings in their home, the piano which Madeleine plays with exquisite grace, the immaculate and well-equipped kitchen, the elaborate meals never late to the table, even the pristine children dressed in white who only play with 'nice' children and wait for it, as a measure of her domestic wealth Madeleine has a currency of two hundred and twenty sheets in her linen store,

'in her heart, inherited from long generations of passionately housekeeping women, she took immense satisfaction in all the ample furnishings of her pretty little home. What woman would not?... a model wife and mother on the pattern of all the other innumerable model wives and mothers in the history of her family'

Well this is Dorothy Canfield Fisher so before we all descend into a bout of the inadequacies we know we'll discover that this could all be flawed, and when you then watch as Madeleine settles into another pregnancy (and you can only imagine that Madeleine could actually  'nest' for Europe) but you realise this is France in the summer of 1914, the alarm bells start to toll,

'Drenched in sunshine and peace, their little barque was carried rapidly along by the Niagara river of history over the last stretch of smooth, shining water which separated them from the abyss.'

Jules heads off to war and Madeleine, the birth now imminent, is left to cope alone as the Germans advance on the now deserted village. Children Raoul and Sylvie quickly have to shake off their cotton wool upbringing and embrace those Montessori skills of independence and self-reliance so beloved by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, rapidly having to pull above their weight and assume adult responsibilities as the base and truly vile terrors of war invade their beautiful home.
By diverse and Aristotlean means of both pity and terror does Dorothy convey that covert message in the title; that domesticity and an immaculate home may not be the most trusted or essential of assets and that in times of war it is an indomitable human spirit that will survive,

'The walled and sheltered refuge in which she had lived all her life was cast down and in ruins...her mind came back with a mortal sickness to the knowledge that she now had nothing, nothing to depend upon except her own strength and labour - just like a poor woman. She was a poor woman.'

 Like several other US women writers, and not content to sit back home in America and just conserve food for Europe, Dorothy Canfield Fisher headed to France to help with relief operations during the Great War and also to be near her husband John who had volunteered for ambulance duties.

' Like nearly all of my generation I'm terribly tragically bewildered by the complexity of the situation'

wrote Dorothy to a friend, but they were a family who couldn't bear to be apart and Dorothy saw no reason to let a European conflagration of great magnitude stand in the way of their togetherness.
Browsing Dorothy Canfield Fisher's book of letters, Keeping Fires Night and Day, (and much more on these to follow too)  I came across this letter written in 1917 in response to hints of longevity for her writing from US literary critic Dorothea Mann, 

'I don't think I'm such a great writer! I do my honest best but doubt that anybody will read me fifty years from now as Miss Mann prophecies - it'll take more than her say so to make me do anything but laugh at such an idea.'

and how fortunate we all are that Dorothy was for once proved entirely wrong.

A day to Remember

I'm thinking plenty of people may have missed the Jo Brand programme on Vera Brittain this afternoon because of a BBC rescheduling. We only caught it by chance because we'd lit the fire and had planned to have a lazy TV afternoon and evening after this morning's local Remembrance muster, more of which on Armistice Day which will be the final day of this year's Remembrance Read.
Points of View, now looking like a much more serious affair with Jeremy Vine at the helm made reference to the poor BBC scheduling of Little Dorrit and it has certainly left me flummoxed and out of the loop with the series which I was so looking forward to. Then Jeremy suggested we might all enjoy the programme to follow on Vera Brittain, which of course we'd just watched.
Anyway food on laps and pots of tea and suddenly there was Jo Brand.
If you did miss it and can catch it on Iplayer it's worth it because I felt it offered such good explanations for the woman that Vera Brittain became. The losses built up to almost unbearable proportions as one by one the men closest to her were either slaughtered in the trenches or died later of injuries sustained in battle and Jo Brand pulled together all the various strands with clarity as she spoke to Vera's daughter, Shirley Williams and her biographer Mark Bostridge. Interspersed with scene re-creations which worked well in this context and added huge impact to the moment when Vera heard of Roland's death.
Last night's Festival of Remembrance also excelled for its much upgraded content, no more PE teams vaulting over horses, this was Katherine Jenkins, Blake, Russell Watson and some very jazzy Royal Marines band-playing all linking into footage of the troops now serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The poppy petal drift was as emotional as ever and all in all I think we continue to honour the promise
'at the going down of the sun and in the morning we will remember them' with huge gratitude, pride and sincerity.

Beyond the Home Front - Edited by Yvonne Klein

This has certainly been an enlightening week of Great War reading, much to ponder and reflect on, pre-conceived ideas to challenge and reshape and this book has added much to the mix. On Remembrance Day it seems like a good idea to remember the women again too.
Beyond the Home Front, Women's Autobiographical Writing of the Two World Wars, edited by Yvonne Klein and published by Macmillan in 1997; a book with the most arresting of covers and which has lurked long on my shelves patiently waiting its moment. A very readable book of two distinct halves and, whilst in keeping with this week's theme I have concentrated on the Great War half, I suspect had I ventured into the Second World War half I would have been able to make some fairly clear comparisons between the roles of women in each conflict.
There is an early acknowledgement by Yvonne Klein in her introduction that the Great War has become the subject of a vast mythology and this alone has given me almost too much to think about and reconsider, because like many I've bought into that mythology unwittingly down the years,

'disillusion,the lost generation, the slaughter of the innocents, the deaths of the best and brightest, all have entered the common consciousness as the truth about that conflict.'

Another more disturbing suggestion emerges,

'Along with this collective nostalgia for innocence lost exists another, more sinister idea...that on the whole women benefited from the war at the expense of men.'

and it is this assertion that Yvonne Klein explores, extrapolates and subsequently gently explodes with her selection of women's writing from the likes of Sylvia Pankhurst, Gertrude Stein, Enid Bagnold, Vera Brittain, Helen Thomas (wife and subsequent widow of the war poet Edward Thomas) and many more lesser known names whose writing I must now seek out.
Some interesting ideas emerge on the role of the nurses which obviously hold a particular fascination for me.
Mary Borden is one, Vera Brittain another and though I had sensed as much in previous reading I had failed to really think through Yvonne Klein's suggestion,

'Cut off from whatever sustenance might be found in a sisterhood of shared experience, the nurses are left to themselves to numb the guilt they feel for surviving at all and for their inability to provide comfort commensurate with their patient's suffering.'

On reflection now I can see it clearly.
It's true, I've been browsing the book again and there is little sense of nursing camaraderie in Vera Brittain's life as a VAD in Testament of Youth. Vera frequently seems isolated and alone. Mary Borden in The Forbidden Zone does seem to be the only woman working on her wards and other writing nurses express open antagonism towards other women in hospitals. Enid Bagnold levels accusations of 'condescension and indifference', whilst Florence Farmborough finds the English nurses 'arrogant and brutal in their methods.' Florence can barely give voice to the excruciating pain that she witnesses (and I too am wincing ninety years on) at their insistence on pouring salt into open wounds.
But who can even begin to imagine the trauma faced by these women? The courage and personal sacrifices made by so many of them must have largely faded into the background at the time given the in-extremis situation of the men at the front, so this has been a good re-balancing read offering new and revealing perspectives, whilst an essay by Vera Brittain in this week's Telegraph filled in even more gaps. It has all opened up new lines of thought which will continue to inform anything and everything I read on the subject and that to me is the sign of a book worth its space on the shelf.
Florence Farmborough incidentally, who was teaching English privately in Russia in 1914, immediately offered her services as a nurse in Moscow and her diary With the Armies of the Tsar, A Nurse at the Russian Front in War and Revolution 1914-1918 was eventually published in 1974. I'm envious of one item of uniform, 'a thick sheepskin waistcoat for winter wear, whose Russian name, dushegreychka, means 'soul-warmer'.
Makes me want to put one on right now.

A Dance for the Moon by Richard Burns

It's doubtless completely unfair but I have high expectations when poets turn their hand to fiction. I unwittingly set the bar high on their ability to choose the right words and get them in the right order, assume beautiful cadences within a sentence and generally expect to be moved by the writing above and beyond the norm. All uncalled for but to read Richard Burns is thankfully to know you are in the hands of a very accomplished wordsmith.
As Mike has pointed out A Dance for the Moon first published in 1986 predates Pat Barker's Regeneration by about five years yet it still holds up remarkably well in 2008, timeless subject matter and writing style.The opening pages give voice to the strange living death that is the life of David Goodchild, the shell-shocked and traumatised poet, whilst perfectly expressing the utter embarrassment of his family coping with something they know so little about. David's mother seeks out Winfell, a private nursing home and the all-powerful resident psychiatrist using the latest analytical techniques and David is admitted for treatment.
Random events ambush David unexpectedly,

'Doors slammed the length of the train. A whistle blew. And David, hearing these sounds, shivered and turned pale.'

Moments of acute pathos and extreme gentleness ensue as his mother, escorting her son by train to the nursing home, is faced with the child she once knew and strives desperately to contain David's excruciating and debilitating anxiety in the only way she knows how,

'Mrs Goodchild turned from the window, and was shocked by what she saw...she had to fumble one of his hands free before she could hold it and reassure him.
    'There, there,' she said, made vulnerable by the inadequacy of her own response, 'There, there. It's all right. There, there...gently, gently,' she murmured. 'Everything will be all right. You'll see. Everything'll be fine.'

Richard Burns displays impressive narrative skill slipping imperceptibly from third to first person to cleverly offer multiple points of view. Amongst those points of view, that of the station porter, a working class war veteran nurturing a growing resentment of Winfell and all it stands for,

'Jack Brough loathed Winfell. He loathed what it stood for. Officers got shell-shock; privates got drunk. Jack Brough had been a private.'

Suddenly the social class divide temporarily bridged by the war yawns like a gaping chasm once more and with it comes a renewed understanding of just how deeply embedded were the scars of this conflict.
Interspersed throughout the book, David's poetry and of course it is here that Richard Burns excels, not least with this idea,

'What is snow? Frozen water, but water that has frozen in a special way. Water that is frozen, yet it is not ice. A poem is like that; it is an idea that has turned into a crystal of delicate beauty; it is something that can transform a landscape or smother a man, yet something so fragile it can be moved in a single breath.'

There is too much in this book to notice and admire on a single read and I will certainly read it again but prepare to find yourself completely caught up in the whole as it works towards the eventual discovery of exactly what happened to David in the trenches and how that all plays out during his stay at Winfell.
There's so much I could comment on about this fine novel but I will give not another thing away other than to say expect the unexpected, the different, the unusual with this plot and by the denouement I was squinting from behind closed fingers because I couldn't bear what I thought was going to happen actually happening. I was all over the place, compassioned up to the eyeballs as Richard Burns carefully placed me on an emotional knife-edge with my sympathies rocking precariously on the brink, tipping who knows which way. I think I know where I stand but I do keep changing my mind a fraction now and again.
The final cruel irony is agonisingly and excruciatingly painful to witness and left me quietly stunned verging on deeply shocked, all making this one of those books that glint and glimmer in your mind long after the final page. Trust is breached every which way you turn, but my hasty early judgements on the characters seem to have given way to an altogether more measured consideration.
Richard Burns has cleverly shown me both sides and left me to make my own mind up.
If that's not breath-taking emotional engagement with a novel then I don't know what is and what more could a reader ask?
Now I'm completely in shreds but just don't miss A Dance For the Moon whatever you do.

One comment leads to another, a book and Richard Burns (not that Richard Burns)

Comments have always been the oxygen of dovegreyreader scribbles and the benefits hit home last week with this suggestion from Mike Petty,

"I wish you would seek out A Dance for the Moon, by Richard Burns, about the travails of a shell-shocked poet. Published 5 yrs before Regeneration and superior to it IMHO."

As always I don't need much encouragement to seek out a book that one of you recommends, and Mike's wish felt so urgent I was onto Amazon Marketplace in a flash and had purchased a copy for 1p before the minute was out.The book arrived within days and was read within days because then Carol came on here and said,

"Also, thanks to Mike Petty's comment on your post of last Sunday, I'm half way through Richard Burns' A Dance for the Moon. It's as good a novel about WW1 as any I've read, and doesn't have that deliberately shocking element that I thought Regeneration slightly suffered from - but is no less powerful for that."

How good is all that to know and how near might Carol and I have been to remaining clueless about Richard Burns but for Mike's timely recommendation? Well me anyway, Carol's probably well on top of all this.
Information is hard to come by now that any trace there may have been of Richard on the internet has been supplanted by both a rally driver (also very sadly deceased) and another writer sharing the same name. I am therefore very grateful to Mike for scanning the newspaper obituary that he wrote for this Richard Burns, and also for sending over other articles published following Richard's early death.
On the day before his 34th birthday, August 31st 1992 and on the brink of taking up the post of Head of Creative Writing at Lancaster University, Richard Burns took his own life. Every tragedy conceals a sad narrative of its own and Richard's harbours a terrible disillusion with the fickle world of publishing in which he found himself mired.
Described by Philip Hensher as 'one of the most varied and interesting novelists writing in England', Richard had been cited back in 1987 among a list of young writers to watch out for, and in the company of Jeanette Winterson, Kazuo Ishiguro and Caryl Phillips you can only only imagine that like them his star may have been in the ascendency still.
Perhaps pressure like that coupled with a keen sense of his own worth ('ungraciously immodest' has been mentioned) and a highly cynical and suspicious approach to the integrity of the realms of publishing made Richard Burns his own worst enemy, but it was also seemingly sufficient to kill the spirit of a promising but fragile writer.
However placing supposition and that highly-charged emotional baggage aside, now that I've read the book I'm truly very hard-pushed indeed to understand exactly how A Dance for the Moon has faded into such complete and utter obscurity. A prizewinner in the Jonathan Cape First Novel competition and first published in 1986 as part of the prize, it attracted great critical acclaim,

'...remains one of the best novels about the effects of the first world war upon its most sensitive participants. In it he showed a remarkable grasp, aided by much painstaking and sympathetic research, of the way such poets a Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Ivor Gurney and others felt, both as writers and as victims of months and even years of continuous violence.'

Plaudits surely making it deserving of ongoing recognition, especially given the Pat Barker novels some five years later which this would sit alongside very comfortably?
Like Carol, I'd make it a sure and certain inclusion amongst the best of the Great War fiction and yet who has even heard of it?
Mike's obituary is strangely prophetic in saying this of Richard Burns,

' He was angry and cynical about what he saw as the publishing business's pursuit of the fast buck, but he was fiercely proud and protective of his work and it is to be hoped that it will remain in print as the best memorial to him. "That'll be the day," Richard would have said.'

Even more poignant and quoted from Xandra Hardie's obituary to him, Richard Burns' own self-fulfilling and equally prophetic perceptions of death, written as an outline for a book never written,

' Suicide is the mark of the minor artist: it is a way of drawing attention after the art has failed...to kill oneself whilst in charge of one's destiny; it is to shout loudly, though in an empty auditorium : "I am here, I had something to say, and look what you lost when you failed to listen!" Above all, though, it is an act of vanity, and a way of conceding defeat, whilst pretending victory. For to continue to work the artist must survive.'

I know fiscal times are tough and there's much anguish and fingernail biting in the world of publishing right now, but there must be a publisher somewhere who could just perhaps give JKR or Wayne and Colleen or Peter and Katie a little less money (they really wouldn't mind surely) and get A Dance For the Moon out of mothballs and set up a little print run ?
My thoughts on this incredible novel tomorrow but in the meantime, if you haven't read it head to the library or grab your copy for 1p off Amazon, I think I can promise that you won't regret it.

The Forbidden Zone: A Nurse's Impressions of the First World War by Mary Borden

Pictured here, one of Grandad's medals, and how haunting that engraving now seems with our revisionist approach and doctorates in hindsight.
It's almost beyond comprehension even to consider the British casualties alone for that first day of the Battle of the Somme, July 1st 1916.
19,240 dead
35,943 wounded
2,152 missing
585 taken prisoner.
In the words of Gavin Stamp ' That dreadful day ended in chaos and confusion, but it soon emerged that a catastrophe had occurred...it was the greatest loss of life in British military history.' It is also estimated that perhaps a third of those who died could have been saved if help could have reached them in time. many lay wounded on the battlefield for days afterwards.
So expect little escape from the trauma if you decide to read Mary Borden's book The Forbidden Zone, A nurse's impression of the First World War published by Hesperus Press but don't be deterred. This little book packs the hugest of punches, gives such a stark and sharply contrasting account of humanity at both its worst and yet also at its most glorious. A microcosm of thoughts and emotions about the Great War crystallised into just over 100 pages. I'm not sure I've read a more moving and terrible account yet all rendered in great swathes of understated almost elegiac narrative. Somehow this doubles and redoubles the power of this little book.
Wealthy Chicago-born Mary Borden took herself off to the Western Front . With no nursing experience and a spare command of the French language she had written to General Joffre offering to fund and manage her own field hospital and faced with over half a million wounded troops the General was hardly going to refuse. During the Somme offensive of the summer of 1916 Mary located herself at Bray-sur-Somme, uncomfortably close to the front line, doubtless much closer to the action and the terror than the Generals themselves, according to Gavin Stamp, holed up in a luxury chateau.
In six months it is estimated that the hospital received 25,000 patients and at any one time cared for about 800 wounded men, and with no nursing experience Mary must have had to adjust dramatically. Each nurse will have developed her own way of dealing with the less palatable aspects of the task in hand and somehow Mary did and quickly.
Her descriptions are matchless the imagery beautifully juxtaposed for maximum impact,

'The daylight brightened, painting the surfaces of the buildings with pale rose and primrose...the pattern of the town spread out on the earth, with its neat edges marked by walls and canals, gleamed like a newly varnished map.'

then a bombing raid destroys all before,

'Scars appeared on it like the marks of smallpox...it seemed as if it were being attacked by an invisible and gigantic beast who was tearing and gnawing it with claws and teeth, Gashes appeared in the streets, long wounds with ragged edges. Helpless, spread out to the heavans, it grimaced with mutilated features.'

Believe me, if this is how Mary can breath life into an inanimate sight, then expect more to follow and it does,

'There has been a harvest. Crops of men were cut down in the fields of France where they were growing. They were mown down with a scythe, were gathered into bundles, tossed about with pitchforks...scattered by storms and gathered up again and at last brought here - what was left of them.'

' Real, splendid, ordinary men' now 'mew like kittens' and though the stories are brief, often just centred on snatches of moments or events which must have crowded into Mary Borden's life on a daily basis, they are perfectly pinned down on paper for our examination. With her now well-developed nurse's-eye-view for the grim realities don't expect to be spared the harrowing nature of what she was experiencing, but it's all wonderfully written. There was no need for exaggeration of emotion as Mary recounts the story Rosa.
Brought in from No Man's Land with a clean shot through the roof of his mouth, it is clear this casualty has attempted to take his own life rather than wait for the enemy to do it. Strong as an ox he has miraculously survived this court-martial offence for which the punishment is execution. If his life is saved it will be for him to face a firing squad.
Try and sift the ethics out of that moral maze, Mary does and acts decisively.
There's dark humour too, watch out for the knee that resembles a ragout of mouton and almost ends up on the menu.
But it's the pain that Mary Borden conveys supremely well as the men lie in its grip,

'Pain is the mistress of them...you can watch her plying her trade here any day. She is shameless. She lies in their beds all day...she never leaves them...she lies there to spoil their dreams.'

The metaphor extends and develops and moulds finally into the death of a soldier and somehow there is a profound grace in amongst all this dying and putrefaction,

'Listen! The whimpering mew of the wounded cat has stopped. There's not a sound except the whisper of the wind in the grass. Quick! Be quick! In a moment a man's spirit will escape, will be flying through the night past the pale, beautiful sentimental face of the moon.'

An essential book for any Great War reading shelf.

Vera Brittain

 Wednesday July 14th 1915

'I am coming to the conclusion that practical ability is of much less importance in a nurse than psychological fitness. Adaptability, sympathy and magnetism of temperament count for more than the ability to bandage and make foods.' 

Chronicle of Youth, Vera Brittain's War Diary 1913-1917

Vera Brittain has been a heroine here since that first all-consuming read of Testament of Youth. I dashed out and bought the diaries, biographies, fiction, anything I could find and they have graced my shelves ever since, but now I'm grateful to Yvonne Klein and her book ( which I'm now officially calling excellent and more about it later in the week) Beyond the Home Front for offering a much greater depth to my understanding of her.
Like so many of the women of her time Vera certainly seemed to know that not to have taken part in the war effort would have created a huge and insurmountable divide afterwards; to understand and communicate with the returning men it would be necessary to somehow have suffered too. Nursing therefore the single most effective and available route for women to feel most needed and to approach the vicinity of that suffering and in Vera Brittain's case to occupy her time,

'Nursing is a great rest to my brain...I began to ask myself  "What do I think about when I am doing my work at the hospital?" I came to the conclusion that I thought of nothing at all except the thing I was going to do next...this kind of thing enables one to keep more cheerful & therefore more brave.'

Yet emotional anaesthesia must have also surely become a necessary option for survival. Vera feared losing Roland to his war experience almost as much as she feared losing him in battle and her anguish is palpable at receiving no letters from him in response to her own regular correspondence,

'Still no news of Roland. If it were not for the nursing I don't know how I could bear this - but nursing takes all one's energy and occupies a great deal of the time that would otherwise have been spent on sad thought.'

'The war I began to feel was dividing us as I had so long feared...was it I wondered because roland had lost interest in me that this anguish of drifting apart had begun - or was the explanation to be found in that terrible barrier of knowledge by which the war cut off the men who possessed it from the women who, in spite of the love that they gave and received, remained in ignorance?'

How anyone emerged from this conflagration and carried on with any semblance of life I am hard pushed to imagine right now and this has all made for profoundly reflective reading, but I do feel fully geared up for the forthcoming BBC programme on Vera Brittain to be presented by Jo Brand. In a previous pre-comedy life Jo was a psychiatric nurse so I'm very interested to see just where her focus rests on the life of Vera Brittain, and whilst we are on the subject of Jo Brand it's worth noting that she is also to chair a new £25,000 literary prize up for grabs in 2009.
The Wellcome Trust Book Prize is open to outstanding works of fiction and non-fiction on the theme of health, illness or medicine and finally signals an official meeting of the minds of literature and medicine. At last the discipline of Medical Humanities gets the long-awaited seal of approval from the literary world.
I can almost hear the chorus of groans, that we hardly need yet another literary prize, but I think we absolutely do need this one and I for one will be slavishly following longlists, shortlists, sharing book-thoughts and making predictions from my own forthcoming reading. Anything published in the year from October 1st 2008 is eligible.
Meanwhile I will be in front of my TV at 17.45 on Sunday November 9th and I expect a lot of you will be too.

Meet Grandad

  Let me introduce you to Bookhound's grandad.
William was born in 1896 and was one of the lucky ones, he came from Bethnal Green in the East End of London, served with the Royal West Kent Regiment and was eighteen when he found himself on the front line.
He survived the Battle of the Somme and lived to see his 100th birthday and get his telegram from the Queen. In this week of Remembrance reading that seems like a fact worth noting because William must have been a rarity.
The first time I met Grandad (and yes he was as cheeky and cheery as he looks) in 1975 he was already almost eighty and there he was jumping up and down outside the closed doors of Royal ward, men's surgical at the London Hospital where Bookhound was a patient. Read that story here but on this occasion I was the nurse sent by Sister to please tell the little old man bouncing around outside the ward and waving at us that he would have to go away and come back at normal visiting time like everyone else. Grandad was a cook extraordinaire and, convinced (rightly) that there would be no food worth eating in a hospital, had baked a tin of cakes for his grandson's sustenance and begged me to just let him sneak in quickly...please...which, incurring the wrath of Sister Royal, I did, because he'd come on the bus and would miss the next one home.
For Bookhound he was a very special man, everything and more that a grandad should be, lovely, kind, warm, funny and caring and Bookhound remembers hearing about the Great War in their conversations.We have a few photos and Grandad's medals and we don't know much more, but we can imagine.
Reading Soft Words Butter No Parsnips, The Life and Times of John Iliffe Poole by Lynda Franklin, John's grand-daughter, I suddenly realised how important these records are for individual family histories and the important stories behind the names and faces, so often left unsaid, unrecorded, perhaps never even heard.
Fortunately, as we all know,  the Tinker (father of dgr  for anyone who still doesn't know him) has saved us the trouble of second-guessing by giving into our nagging and writing his WW II memories down for us in Bugle Boy.
Lynda Franklin has had to unravel, puzzle and piece together her grandfather's memories and documentary evidence, add in historical background to locate John's life in its time and, knowing the campaigns he was involved in, has built up a picture of what life might have been like for him during the Great War. When firm facts such as injuries emerge it is possible to be more specific and here some remarkable facts do emerge. Having been exposed to a gas attack during the war John developed a malignant growth on his larynx and was one of the first patients ever to undergo a radical laryngectomy and subsequent tracheostomy in 1924 and was given just six months to live. It's all quite remarkable because he actually lived with that tracheostomy for the next fifty-five years and in that time provided tireless support and encouragement to other laryngectomy patients as well as a 'home from home' for over 70,000 Service personnel from all over the world during WWII.
So as my profoundly moving week of Great War Remembrance Reading continues it seems meet and right to begin by remembering all those ordinary people who did such extraordinary things.

Remembrance Read - The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme by Gavin Stamp

"Behind that long and lonely trenched line
To which men come and go, where brave men die,
There is a yet unmarked and unknown shrine,
A broken plot, a soldier’s cemetery..."

The words of John William Street's poem, The Soldier's Cemetery struck me as doubly poignant once I'd turned the final page of Gavin Stamp's excellent book in the Profile 'Wonders of the World' series, The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme. Plus I'll confess right now that I knew next to nothing about anything to do with it all beyond the existence of memorials and cemeteries various, the fact that there is a daily ceremony at something called the Menin Gate and that it's all looked after by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
So the first surprise was that a key player in the whole project was Sir Edwin Lutyens who, as well as designing country houses and getting Gertrude Jekyll in to do the gardens, was also the architect responsible for the Thiepval Memorial, that 'tower of arches' on the Somme as well as the Cenotaph in Whitehall.
Sir Edwin by all accounts a garrulous and persistent talker who drove many people up his walls and across his ceilings with his bluff and incessant wit and humour,

'his good spirits depress everybody - and one sees people getting quietly out of his way simply because the effort of sympathetic laughter is overwhelming'

But we must surely forgive all faults in a man with such a unique architectural eye and a talent for visualising structures in three dimensional form as well as 'in the round' whilst still retaining classical sentiments. Put to the test whilst designing the Viceroy's House at New Delhi, Lutyens stuck to his principles and I can almost hear him saying it,

'One cannot tinker with the round arch. God did not make the Eastern rainbow pointed to show his wide sympathies'.

Fearing cohorts of winged angel statues sprouting bigger and better wings than the next grave in the post-WW I cemeteries, the War Graves Commission was an early feature of the Great War. It quickly dawned that this was going to be no ordinary carnage, there were going to be huge fatalities and the unmarked mass-grave mistakes of the Boer War must not be repeated. Early decisions were taken and adhered to, all casualties of the war would be buried more or less where they fell, there would be no exhumations and removal of bodies to quiet corners of English churchyards by the more well-to do families. It was agreed that the officers would wish to rest with their men and likewise there would be no distinction between rank when the graves were finally marked with identical headstones. The cemeteries and memorials themselves thus became a map of the war, and at a total cost of £8,150,000 it's worth remembering that the Battle of Passchendaele alone cost £22 million.
Shocking then must have been the gradual discovery, having agreed that every single soldier who had died would have a memorial, that there were over 500,000 bodies missing, whereabouts unknown, theirs was indeed 'an unlucky and ill-used generation.'
The Thiepval Memorial recalls the names of 73,000 British and South African soldiers who were killed on the Somme but have no known graves and it keeps watch over 'this landscape touched with infinite sadness' , a sentinel illuminating what felt like two diametrically opposed abstract concepts as I read.
The uncertainty, identified by English architect Roderick Gradidge,

'The mind has difficulty in deciding exactly what type of building Thiepval really is. The triumphal arch becomes a memorial cenotaph in one view, in another it is a solid memorial tower, its base pierced by arches in all directions.'

But then the certainty coded within these walls and arches, a certainty that feels strangely like a sure and certain hope, in fact oddly uplifting,

'There is certainly no triumph, no victory in the Thiepval arch, although there is no humility either; it does not glorify war, but dignifies the wasteful sacrifice of young men by remembering them in a stupendous, breathtaking architectural gesture...it invites contemplation, but although it is assertive and proud it does not hector.'

So how exactly do you make a book about a memorial interesting to read?
Well, Gavin Stamp has excelled in his descriptions and his arguments and there is much in this book to feel humble about. His impassioned polemic about the flawed reasoning for this war makes for tough reading, even if you know it already which I think most of us do by now,

'One of the least attractive aspects of the English is our refusal - manifest facts to the contrary - ever to admit we were wrong, or ever behaved in anything but an upright, heroic, honourable way, while former enemies are still demonised.'

I'm not sure that's a purely English trait within the international community (or perhaps I'm just trying not to kick us when we're already a bit credit-crunched ) but Gavin Stamp's intelligent, evidence-based position about the likes of the  'repellent figure of General Haig' and the 'lions led by donkeys' makes a revisionist interpretation of the Great War seem an essential chapter to be written in our history. This is one of those important books and I feel privileged to have read it and greatly enlightened as a result.
Another outstanding success for the Wonders of the World series here at dovegreyreader scribbles, so once I've been to Stonehenge I want to go to the The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, the question is do I really want to go via St Pancras Station?
Well I have no choice, that's where Eurostar begins, yes it's St Pancras Station next.

Sunday Salon - Remembrance Reading and a poppy to pick

In the run up to Remembrance Day I find my gaze fixed firmly on books with poppies on the cover
and so we've donned our blog poppy and I'm trawling my shelves for a varied selection of unread books on the Great War.
It's sobering reading of course, self-punishing in an odd sort of way, could be a bit like slapping yourself with a wet cod all through Lent, but mine will be just five days on here the week after next, not forty days plus nights, and I always feel it does me no harm whatsoever to just remember and think about it all.
I still find it incredibly moving to watch the Festival of Remembrance, that programme from the Albert Hall on the Saturday evening, the war widows, the nurses, the Chelsea Pensioners all getting into step as they march down the staircase aisles (they never mess it up), the poppy petals floating down during the silence and then the timeless words of Laurence Binyon,

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

It's the ninetieth anniversary of the Great War this year so I've focused my reading choices solely on WWI and thus far plenty of books have emerged that I've 'always been meaning to read' and here are the books that will hopefully feature in the days leading up to Sunday November 9th,
Women, Men and the Great War - an anthology of stories - Trudi Tate (editor)
All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque
The Forbidden Zone, A nurse's impressions of the First World War - Mary Borden
Women's Fiction and the Great War - Suzanne Raitt & Trudi Tate (editors)
The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme - Gavin Stamp

Looking back I think I can pinpoint exactly where the reading around this theme really began to mean something.
1996 and Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth goes down in my reading history as the single book that gave me a depth of understanding about just exactly what the war had meant for that generation above any other book I had ever read before. Looking back I see I read it early in the year and interestingly it doesn't seem to have launched me on a WWI reading fest. I think I was completely shattered by the impact of the book but I'd obviously recovered later in the year because I then read Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy and determined to add in some Remembrance Reading each year thereafter.
Looking on through successive years I see that in 1997 it was Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks and Charlotte Gray in 1998. Empire of the Sun by J.G.Ballard in 1999 and then some lean years when studying, working and teenagers usurped any wartime reading inclinations I may have had.
Back on track in 2003 with William an Englishman by Cicely Hamilton, Blitzcat by Robert Westall and then I got a grip in 2004 and set up quite a prolific Remembrance/ Wartime themed year of reading for myself including
Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald,
Little Boy Lost - Marghanita Laski
The Garden of the Finzi Continis - Giorgio Bassani
Prisoners of Hope, The Silver Age of the Italian Jews 1924-1974 - H.Stuart Hughes
The Siege - Helen Dunmore
Few Eggs and No Oranges - Vere Hodgson
Chronicle of Friendship - Vera Brittain
Vera Brittain a Life - Mark Bostridge
The Village - Marghanita Laski

2005 saw more, here's a selection,

The Stonecarvers - Jane Urquhart
Stones From the River - Ursula Hegi
Ann Frank and After , Dutch Holocaust Literature in Perspective - Dick van Galen Last
Those Who Save Us - Jenna Blum
Manja - Anna Gmeyner
The Eye Among the Blind, The Child's View of the Third Reich in German Literature - Debbie Pinfold
The Artificial Silk Girl - Irmgard Keun
Ice Road - Gillian Slovo
When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit - Judith Kerr
The Nazi Officer's Wife - Edith Hahn
Out of Harm's Way - Jessica Mann
A Long Long Way - Sebastian Barry

And from 2006 it all went on here so you'll have to rummage to find the books, but that's not a bad starter for ten for anyone wanting some good war-related reading. If you do decide to pick up a good Remembrance Read over the next couple of weeks please do come back and tell us about it, or perhaps leave a link in comments to your thoughts on your own blog and I'll list them here, because I'm sure you all have plenty to add to my choices.
Also please feel free to pick this blogpoppy, originally in our garden, and wear it on your own blog if you so wish.