Life must be filled up

I seem to have been reading several books at once for quite a time; The Town House by Norah Lofts lasted me for days. When I’d finished the lot I started on my library books and read two of them over the weekend.

Muriel Spark is a mystery to me. I can’t see how she does it. Symposium begins with a dinner party and you might expect another of those prosperous-north-Londoners’-angst books so despised by people who think novels should be gritty and ‘real’. Instead, as the narrative moves back and forth and amongst the various characters we find a surface world of normality with crime, murder and madness bubbling under. I read this in an evening and went on thinking about it for a while afterwards, still pondering on how Muriel Spark makes a starkly told story utterly brilliant. It’s all down to supreme craft, I suppose and I wish I knew the secret. One interesting point: several times while reading this I was reminded of Alexander McCall Smith, especially when people were talking. Much as I admire AMS I wouldn’t put him in the same league as a writer, but I wonder if there’s an unconscious influence?



Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending is even harder to write about. Although short, it’s very dense and also very literary; full of allusions. The narrator Tony, in his sixties, looks back on what he sees as a comfortable life which he has allowed to happen to him, rather than taking command of it. He begins with his schooldays and the description of a group of clever teenage boys is reminiscent of Barnes’ early book, Metroland. This book has a longer time scale, one which will last beyond Tony’s eventual death because history has no end, only addition. Tony is a pretty ordinary bloke: divorced but on good terms with his ex-wife, retired, a grandfather. ‘Average’, he thinks rather bitterly later in the book. There is a mystery in his past which the reader would like solved but the book is about the solving, or the possibility of ever solving a mystery, rather than about the event itself.

At school Adrian, the cleverest of the friends, tells their history master that history is ‘that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.’ Tony’s story seems to bear this out. Can we trust our own memories? What of other people’s memories of the same events? One particular document, a letter which he hasn’t seen since writing it forty years earlier, shows Tony something about himself he had forgotten. Another, which he hopes will explain certain events in the past, has disappeared, probably forever. His university girlfriend, Veronica, is always telling him, ‘you just don’t get it’, which is pretty irritating of her. Poor Tony can never get whatever it is because she always means something different. By the end of the book he thinks he has a last ‘got it’, which is a resolution of a kind but not the end. Brilliant, brilliant stuff. I really need to read it again.

‘Over the five days of the trial, thousands of Isabella Robinson’s secret words were read out to the court, and the newspapers printed almost every one. Her journal was detailed, sensual, alternately anguished and euphoric, more godless and abandoned than anything in contemporary English fiction.’

The trial referred to was the divorce case of Robinson v Robinson and Lane. It was scandalous, as any divorce was then, and only made possible by the ’Matrimonial Causes’ Act of 1857. What made it such a curious case was that the evidence against Mrs Robinson was based entirely on what she had written in her diary. The learned judges had to decide whether what she wrote was fact or the product of a fevered imagination. In effect, she was either guilty of adultery or mad.

Isabella was a widow with a son when she married Henry Robinson, a prosperous engineer. The couple had two more sons, but the marriage was not a success. They lived for a while in Moray Place, Edinburgh; Cornflower has kindly provided some location photos here. This was a good address. ‘To rent a house in Moray Place cost between £140 and £160 a year in 1844, according to Black’s Guide’. The Robinsons moved in professional and upper middle class circles of the ‘rational thinking’ and progressive kind, people interested in science and ‘improvement’. Their friends included the phrenologist George Combe and Robert Chambers, the publisher, and their closest relationship was with the family of Edward Lane. Dr Lane was an advanced thinker, a believer in hydropathy and the benefits of letting nature cure sickness. His wife Mary was born a Drysdale and her brother George wrote a book on sexual philosophy. Lane later set up his own clinic at Moor Park, Farnham in Surrey, where Charles Darwin was frequently treated. I mention all this to highlight the double standards which prevailed at the time of the trial, when men who held advanced views and had been happy at one time to enjoy Mrs Robinson’s conversation, were quick to distance themselves from her once her reputation had gone.
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I bought The Telegraph this morning, for the Chelsea Flower Show supplement. Top of the front page:
Geoffrey Boycott
Why England should whitewash West Indies

What were they thinking? All he says is that he expects a comfortable 3-0 win for England in the series. After complaining for months that there's nothing on television, I've been struggling to fit in the cricket and the Chelsea coverage. Must be summer.

I picked this up at a jumble sale, with several other ‘read and then give away’ books. The premise is one common to spy and thriller stories: innocent people get caught up in international intrigue. In this case it’s a young couple, he a don and she a barrister. They’re holidaying on Antigua when a Russian money launderer approaches them to arrange his resettlement in England in return for information. Anyone with any sense would of course run a mile, or at least get the next plane back home, but then there’d be no story. Once they’ve contacted the right people in England, Perry and Gail are in it up to their necks. The willingness of people in the Service to put the lives of others at risk is mind boggling. It reminds me of Peter Cook in the famous sketch from Beyond the Fringe: ‘Goodbye, Perkins. Don’t come back.’

This sorry tale of corrupt Western politicians, bankers, lawyers and EU officials colluding with Russian oligarchs and criminal gangs ought to be shocking, yet somehow isn’t. We know all this stuff, although we pretend we don’t. As long as we own houses, have money in a bank and a pension fund, we’re all complicit and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it. I found the book sadly lacking in tension, rather boring in fact, and I think A Most Wanted Man was better.

In contrast, the book by Helen MacInnes which I read most recently, Prelude to Terror (1978) was gripping. It’s a cold war thriller set in Vienna, which also features chases, mountain hideouts and how to throw a pursuer off your trail. Robert Goddard is another author who keeps you turning the pages faster and faster. It seems unfair that these writers, although popular, aren’t taken seriously, whereas le Carré gets proper reviews and each new book is hailed as ‘masterly’.

I was reading an article in today’s Telegraph about telly-dons and why it’s wrong to be snobbish about them. In the bitchy world of university historians, it seems, no sooner does a colleague dare to appear on television than he or she loses credibility as a serious historian. What? Once a chap like David Starkey has spent half a lifetime buried in Tudor documents, why shouldn’t he make some money by sharing his knowledge with the rest of us?

Not that he’s free from bitchiness himself. He apparently criticised Lucy Worsley for what he termed ‘historical Mills and Boon’ on television. I do have some sympathy with this view, having a great aversion to mob cap history, but in spite of that, I’ve found all her programmes lively and interesting. She may look about twelve with her little hair slides, but she is, after all, chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces. Hardly a job you get by looking cute. Also (my turn to be shallow) I really like her clothes, especially the teal coat and purple gloves combo. She’s wearing the coat again for her latest series, Antiques Uncovered but is outshone by the dandyism of co-presenter Mark Hill. Ooh, those velvet collars take me back. In yesterday’s episode he even sported a curly brimmed bowler, very appropriate for the Victorian seaside artefacts they were looking at. It’s social history and if it’s also popular (damning word) history, it's none the worse for that.



I wish Mary Beard hadn’t bothered to respond to A A Gill’s insulting and pointless remarks about her appearance. ‘Leave it Mare! ‘e’s not worth it!’ She looks what she is, a fifty seven year old woman who doesn’t worry much about her image. Why should she? In the last episode of Meet the Romans she had me crying over little dead Roman babies. If that’s not bringing the past to life, what is? I hope to see lots more programmes like this one, fronted by older women with grey hair. The British are supposed to like eccentricity. Do we really want homogenised presenters, all toned and bronzed and with their teeth fixed until you can't tell one from another?

Murder at Mansfield Park, Lynn Shepherd
Summer Term , Carol Pearce
We’re in the Sixth!, Carol Ann Pearce
St Kelvern’s Launches Out, Carol Ann Pearce
The Deans Solve a Mystery, Kathleen Fidler
The Counterfeit Madam, Pat McIntosh
A Rising Storm, Rachel Hore
Ninepins , Rosy Thornton
A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar , Suzanne Joinson
Friday Nights, Joanna Trollope
Look Back with Love , Dodie Smith
Look Back with Mixed Feelings, Dodie Smith
John & Mary’s Secret Society, Grace James
The Cave of Winds, C Bernard Rutley.
Wedding Tiers, Trisha Ashley
( thoughts )

As reported earlier, I picked up the first two volumes (of four) of Dodie Smith’s autobiography at the market recently. I read them back to back, which is always a nice thing to do. The first volume, Look Back with Love is everything Geranium Cat says it is: a classic, captivating memoir of a bourgeois childhood at the beginning of the twentieth century. Dodie’s mother was widowed very young and moved back to live with her parents, brothers and sisters. This made Dodie the only child in a large household of adults and it’s perhaps not surprising that she was spoiled. Sixty years later, she was able to recall in detail the houses they lived in and the appearance and characteristics of everyone she met; a sure sign that her gifts lay in writing and not, as she hoped, in acting. Already in this book there are hints of trouble ahead in her wilfulness, attention seeking and conviction that she was ‘so very interesting’.

Look Back with Mixed Feelings lacks the charm of the book about childhood. It covers the years from her time at St Paul’s Girls’ School in London to her employment as a buyer and manager at Heal’s. In between is the history of her attempts to go on the stage. True, the older Dodie realised that she wasn’t a very good actress but at the time she was sure she would be a success one day; all her friends were on the stage or hoping to be. I’d read this book before and also Valerie Grove’s biography, so I knew the story. Even so, I grew increasingly irritated by her persistence in the face of total failure, her reliance on her loving uncles for an allowance (she then failed to visit them for nine years, by which time two of them were dead) and her utter selfishness. The First World War seems hardly to have affected her; she appeared more interested in her clothes, or lack of them. Shortly before the war ended she blagged her way into a touring party going to France. Once there, finding herself doling out tea instead of acting, she dismissed the idea that she might have been doing war work all along by thinking of a new one: that really she was a pacifist and therefore exonerated from any guilt. I respect the views of genuine pacifists but don’t think Dodie was one, philosophically. It was typical of her way of rationalising any fault or bad behaviour. Eventually she gave up trying to act and a new chapter in her life began when she was employed by Ambrose Heal. Fame and fortune lay ahead.

Dodie Smith is a good example of my dictum that you should never let a writer’s life or character influence your judgement of their work. I simply cannot like her, yet she wrote two wonderful books which I shall love forever.
Edited to say, in case you hadn't guessed, that the books are I Capture the Castle and The Hundred and One Dalmatians.

All these books from the same seller for £1.40. One of them is a very good buy.



A pile of knitting patterns so heavy I could hardly carry them, £1.00 the lot. Hours of fun ahead looking through them.

So why I am feeling like kicking myself? I missed a great stamp bargain. Looked through an album, asked the seller how much he wanted for it and got the response, ‘Haven’t looked at it yet, love.’ This annoyed me, I thought he was rude and replied sniffily that he wouldn’t sell it then would he? Later on, some old chap I don’t know told me he’d bought the album I’d been looking at it. Curses, it would have been a fantastic bargain at £40.00. Also, the same man who two weeks ago sold me Long Barrow for 50p. wanted £5.00 for a bag of mixed knitting yarn. I thought then it was too much and when I got home, that it would have been a bargain for odd pieces of crochet. Idiotically, I will be beating myself up about this all weekend.

In other news, what about our weather? Yesterday: thunder, lightning, hailstones rattling down. This morning: mega-frost and cold legs at the market. Currently: warm sunshine but a chilly breeze. Thanks to the storm, there’s thatch everywhere but it’s too wet to sweep it up. You have to love our climate, it’s never dull.

BBC News - Influential guitarist Bert Weedon dies

Effort free posting with 'post to Live Journal'!

Levon Helm of The Band has also died. What a rotten day for music.

click to see all the stamps

Here’s the latest mailshot from Royal Mail, introducing the new stamps which will be in use from 30th April. The interesting thing about this leaflet is that nowhere does it say, ‘This is the biggest price hike ever! We have to do this in order to maintain our wonderful service.’ Instead, it goes on and on about how beautiful the stamps are. If you like Machins (I do) you’ll probably agree. Look closely at the new Large Letter stamp and you see that the security background printing ‘ROYAL MAIL’, with its hidden codes, has been changed to ‘DIAMOND JUBILEE’and wow! it's iridescent. How can you resist? I wrote before about the ludicrous expense of all the new Olympic stamps. Do they really expect people to buy these as well as paying so much more for their regular postage use?

I'm guessing that big companies like Amazon may try to absorb the new postal charges but that won't be an option for small sellers and people who use eBay. Trouble ahead. So are you stocking up now? What about the idea of buying stamps in advance for the next three Christmases? (Suggestion from money expert Martin Lewis.) Apparently, some people are investing thousands in stamps, hoping to make a profit later. Not really an option for most of us.

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