Life must be filled up

Some years ago, I took over from a friend who was helping a very old man with his garden. Mr J had moved to Dorset on retirement and built an award winning garden from scratch. The way he’d planned out the garden from a bare plot round a bungalow was amazing, and he’d then filled it with unusual shrubs and perennials. By the time I knew him, he was in his nineties and the only gardening he could manage was some pottering in the greenhouse. His daughter begged him to move nearer the family but he was obstinate, telling me that if he left the garden, ‘I’d be dead in mumfs.’ I’m sure it was love of the garden that kept him going. He kept an eye on it by whizzing round on his mobility scooter in the most terrifying manner. Once, he managed to tip himself into a hedge; luckily he was wearing his panic button but he still had to wait a while to be rescued.

He had a man in to do the ‘cuttin’’, as he called it, and me to be his weeding, watering and tidying slave. Goodness, he was an old bossy boots but I got fond of him and missed him when he died, aged ninety six. Unlike many keen gardeners, he wasn’t very generous about giving away roots or cuttings, claiming that if he gave away everything people asked for, he’d have nothing left. I did manage to get some seed from a lovely tree peony he had. I was successful with the seed but in my old garden I already had one tree peony and couldn’t decide where to put another. So I just kept potting it on into ever larger pots. I brought it with me when I moved, then when I’d cleared a whole bed of rubbishy stuff and was ready to replant it from scratch, in went the peony at last. Ten days ago, I found this.



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Rather hubristic to call a book The Book of Nightingales rather than A book; it implies that the work is absolutely the last word on nightingales. I don’t expect it’s the author’s fault as this book was previously published as Whistling in the Dark: in Pursuit of the Nightingale. The copy I have is a Sinclair Stevenson reissue from 1997 illustrated with photographs.

This is a lovely book; not one to rush through but to pick up every now and then to read and ponder over. It’s part natural history, describing the habits and habitats of nightingales; part cultural exploration of the importance of the bird in myth, legend and literature; part personal odyssey as Mabey travels through England and Europe pursuing the song of the nightingale.

Since the time of the ancient Greeks, people have been fascinated by the small brown bird with the amazing voice. Nightingales have long been associated with spring and with love. They have been seen at different times as ‘melancholy’ or as ‘merry’ birds. Chapters in the book are interspersed with some of the many poems written about nightingales, notably those by John Clare, Coleridge and of course, Keats. The number of nesting birds in England has been declining for years, so our chances of hearing the song are slim. May is the best month for it, apparently, and my best hope would be to go to the firing ranges at Tyneham, where Mabey has found nightingales nesting in the scrub around old shell craters.

In the 1920s, the cellist Beatrice Harrison famously played ‘duets’ with a nightingale in Surrey woods. Millions tuned in to the wireless to hear this first outside broadcast. Here’s one recording on an old 78.



For a really spine tingling experience, click here for a recording made in 1942. A nightingale sings while Wellingtons and Lancasters fly overhead on their way to bomb Germany. Brrr.

The first Test against New Zealand starts today! I’m very glad, as it will help me through a horrible day of noise and freezing cold while I have the kitchen door replaced. Coincidentally, I’m reading More than a Game by John Major. I absolutely loved the preface, in which John Major writes of his own life in cricket, famous cricketers he’s met and so on. He’s very good at anecdotes. After that, sadly, it becomes a book with John Major’s name on it. He credits a team of researchers, then makes the error of putting down everything he’s learned, as people do when writing a bad essay. So I’m skimming through pages of history (which I know anyway) in search of the nuggets which are actually about the history of cricket. The author’s love of the game shines through, which is what keeps me reading and the book is full of the kind of arcane facts which cricket fans like so much.
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When I was a child, there was a fat blue book in the bookcase called Festival at Farbridge. Because I read everything in the house, I read it. All I remember of it is a lot of men arguing about how Farbridge should celebrate the Festival of Britain. I’ve tried more than once to read Priestley’s most famous novel, The Good Companions but have never got through it. Wonder Hero (1933), is much shorter than either of those books and I whizzed through it in no time.

Charlie Habble is a pleasant, ordinary working chap from the Midlands, lucky to have a steady job. One fateful night, a fire breaks out in the works where he should have been keeping watch. The fire could have set off an explosion which would have taken out half the town. Due to misunderstandings, Charlie is hailed as a hero, taken up by the mighty Tribune newspaper and run by it as a ‘stunt’. He’s taken to London, put up in an expensive hotel, kitted out with new clothes and given £500.00. In return, he has to make public appearances and be interviewed for film and radio. Luckily, he’s a level headed type and quickly tires of the shallowness of that part of London society he’s introduced to. Meanwhile, pretty Ida has won a beauty competition. She’s a Midlands lass but has far less sense than Charlie and imagines that her looks and success are going to make her a film star. She and Charlie meet because they’re being put up at the same hotel.

Half way through, the book becomes political, as Charlie goes north to visit relatives who have fallen on hard times. The town is dying; grass grows where once ships were built and skilled workers are laid off with no hope of future employment. His family live close to starvation and while Charlie helps them out, it’s left to the fiery local doctor to rage against what’s happening and propose measures to deal with it; that is, to spend some money. Interestingly, in view of recent world events, banks are top of his list of targets. The book ends as a love story but with the author’s proviso: ‘Good luck.’ Nothing suggests that Charlie and Ida will have an easy time of it.

I found this entertaining and it must have been popular, as my copy is the fifth edition in the first year of printing. It’s been described as a satire on the newspaper industry, but it fails there, as Scoop is so much better. Its main interest lies in the social history and the sometimes Dickensian characters. The boarding house where Charlie stays for a while in London is very similar to Todgers. J B Priestley was once a household name; a bluff, pipe-smoking Yorkshireman who had an opinion on everything and could write a book on any subject. He was a popular broadcaster during the war, until the BBC dropped him for being ‘too left wing’. It seems to me that he was a man with a keen sense of social injustice who distrusted all governments, isms and ologies. In other words, he didn’t like the status quo but was not sure how things could be improved. He seems to be little read or mentioned these days; perhaps it’s time to try some of his books again.

huskyteer had a great find at the weekend and presented me with a copy of The Girl Who Wouldn’t Make Friends, one of the harder to find books by Elsie J. I was keen to read it to get the back story of Robinetta (Robin) Brent. EJO had a habit of mixing characters from different series and Robin appears in several later books. I don’t have most of those so followed up with the end of Robin’s story in Robins in the Abbey. Robin is twelve in the first book, published in 1909 and twenty when she meets the Abbey crowd in 1947; her transition from Edwardian schoolgirl to post-war young woman is seamless, if ridiculous. Reading these two books back to back was an excellent idea as it demonstrated perfectly why EJO’s early books are so enjoyable while her late ones make you want to scream.

Robin Brent lives with her mother and two brothers while their father is abroad. One day, she receives a solicitor’s letter telling her that she has inherited the estate of Plas Quellyn in North Wales. It turns out that the late owner, the artist Robert Quellyn, had once been in love with Mrs Brent, had made the will in favour of her daughter and never changed it. When the family travel to Wales to visit the estate they find a delightful spot but trouble in the form of young Gwyneth. She had been unofficially adopted by Robert Quellyn and his wife and is now left with nothing. As a result, she refuses all overtures of friendship from the Brents and hides herself away. Gwyneth is a good example of EJO’s tendency to excuse inexcusable behaviour. Theft? Attempted murder? Gwyneth is guilty of both but is just silly and naughty, apparently. All ends well, as you’d expect, and the book is very enjoyable apart from a ludicrous set-to with some would-be burglars. EJO excelled at writing about place and the descriptions of Wales are really beautiful. She was also very good at writing about boys. Robin’s brothers Cuthbert and Dicky are believable and there’s a lot of lively dialogue. It’s a pity she stopped writing this sort of family story and limited herself to writing about girls.
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This book was published in 1964 and is a sharp slap for anyone who thinks of Monica Dickens as a cosy writer. I’ve always found One Pair of Feet interesting, was distinctly underwhelmed by Mariana, which so many people love, and have enjoyed lighter books like Flowers on the Grass. Kate and Emma is one of the bleakest books you could ever read. It’s the story of the unlikely friendship between Emma, middle class daughter of a magistrate, and poor abused Kate, from a dreadful home. They first meet when Kate appears in court, because she’s left home and is running wild. There’s an immediate attraction between the two girls, which eventually tests Emma’s loyalty to the limit.

Kate gets pregnant, marries, and by the time she’s twenty two, has four children. Emma is horrified to find Kate slipping backwards, her life descending into the same squalor she fled. Then the abuse begins, of her elder son. Emma has a job in the family firm, various boyfriends, and time spent working in America. Through it all, and even when she is shocked to find her father not the perfect man she wants him to be, she tries very hard to keep in touch with Kate. When she starts to suspect the worst of her friend (without blaming her), she turns to her old friend Johnny Jordan, ‘the cruelty man’ and easily the nicest character in the book. What they find is horrific, but still Emma won’t give up on Kate. Predictably, the book ends with both girls unhappy.

The narrative is in the first person, the girls taking alternate passages (no chapters, very annoying!), often describing the same events but each from her own angle. It’s a salutary reminder that the community spirit said to be found in working class communities in the 1960s was in fact sadly lacking; also that, nearly fifty years on, little has changed for some families and their neglected and abused children. I’ll end as I began, with Larkin’s depressing line: Man hands on misery to man, It deepens like a coastal shelf, because that’s what Monica Dickens seems to be saying here.

Spitalfields Life | In the midst of life I woke to find myself living in an old house beside Brick Lane in the East End of London

I've been following with interest and horror the plans by the Geffrye Museum to destroy the Marquis of Lansdowne pub. I think they were undone by that fateful comment about having 'no interest in the culture of the labouring classes'. The council has seen sense and here's a small victory for the people.

This is the first time this year that I’ve done a monthly round up; I’ve just written a few reviews. Of course I’ve been reading, but does anyone want to know that I read twenty Daisy Dalrymple books on the trot and enjoyed them? Probably not.


Borrowed image. I wish my copy had this dustwrapper.

Escape to Mulberry Cottage, Victoria Connelly
A Half Forgotten Song, Katherine Webb
A Holiday to Remember, Mary Kennedy
A Trick of the Light, Louise Penny
Strange Affair, Peter Robinson
The Summer House, Mary Nichols
The House in the Square, Joan G Robinson
The Ridleys, Richmal Crompton
Linden Rise, Richmal Crompton
Family Roundabout, Richmal Crompton
The Testing of Tansy, Winifred Norling
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I heard this song, Sympathique, on the radio this morning and really liked it.

It’s always feast or famine at the market and today was feast. Drove down in brilliant sunshine to find the place heaving with sellers. I’d hardly been there five minutes when I was carrying a bag back to the car. A lovely Irish lady was surrounded by eager hunters, and no wonder. Early as I was, I just missed out on a box of lovely old haberdashery items, meh. Still, for less than a fiver I bought from her: a vintage crocheted baby blanket; two vintage aprons in sealed bags, two Cornelia James scarves and a useful little bag.



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