Life must be filled up

Rather a dull month for me.
Practically Perfect, Katie Fforde A sloppily written disappointment. I stayed in the Cotswolds for
Agatha Raisin and the Vicious Vet, M C Beaton. These books are silly but entertaining. I read this one in about an hour and it made me laugh. Then I turned to
Dodo, an omnibus by E F Benson. Alas, confirmed Tillingite that I am, I found the character of Dodo so tarsome that I just couldn’t read the long, wordy book. So I reached out for another Donna Leon, 10p-from-the-library purchase,
Suffer the Little Children
Popular Music, Mikael Niemi
Prunella Plays the Game, Irene Mossop
Charm’s Last Chance, Irene Mossop
Agatha Raisin and the Walkers of Dembley, M C Beaton
The Girl of his Dreams, Donna Leon*L
Said to be more thoughtful and darker than Leon’s other books. Slower, certainly. After the first chapter I was thinking ‘That’s enough about Brunetti, get on with the murders already’ but nothing happens until p.109! You can only get away with this if you write brilliantly; Leon’s writing is fine for a crime series but hardly deathless prose.
By Gwendoline Courtney, all re-reads
Sally’s Family
The Girls of Friar’s Rise
At School with the Stanhopes
The Farm on the Downs
Elizabeth of the Garret Theatre

Lorna at Wynyards, Elinor Brent-Dyer
Stepsisters for Lorna, EBD
Jam Tomorrow, Monica Redlich


( About Kathleen O’Farrell )

Yesterday, I took my visitor to see my favourite garden, at Cranborne Manor.



( Why I love this house and garden so much )

Sometimes, it takes a visitor to make you enjoy the benefits of living in a pretty place. This morning, instead of just going about my business in town I went to see this again



The Priest's House museum, shown here from the lovely garden at the back.
( photos )

Bloomsbury Books have recently republished A Kid for Two Farthings by Wolf Mankowitz. I notice that the 1955 film starring Celia Johnson and David Kossoff is being shown on Film 4 at lunchtime today and will presumably be repeated.

It’s a romanticized view of an old East End which was already changing and is worth watching for the opening sequence alone. Brings a tear to the eye. See a wonderful poster for the film here.

For the first time in years, I haven't been able to grow my own sweet peas so I couldn't resist the bunches for sale at the market. These were last year's.

Has anyone else noticed that PM with Eddie Mair is turning into Home Truths? And is it just me, or is he really far too pleased with himself these days?

I once taught this woman. Now I’m paying for her enormous salary and expenses. There’s no justice :-)

It's been pouring with rain since I woke up this morning. The man who cuts the grass for me, (I try not to refer to him as 'my gardener'), is here pruning climbing shrubs which are trying to get into the upstairs windows and the thatch. I didn't expect him to turn up but in spite of the weather he is wearing, as usual, shorts 'n' shades. Ha ha ha! Bless.

Happy birthday ramblingfancy! Never mind the rain, have a lovely day.

I’ve been rereading Jam Tomorrow by Monica Redlich. It was first published in 1937 and the copy shown here is the Puffin edition of 1947; it’s ‘Warmly recommended for girls of 10-14.’ The central character is sixteen year old Jean Bascombe and the story opens with her return train journey from school, spotting all the familiar landmarks, welcomed by her brothers, delighted to be home for the summer holidays. Home is an old rectory in a village being encroached on by road, rail and town. Jean takes home for granted but it’s far from normal. Her widowed father is one of those (to my mind) supremely selfish, vague clergymen who spend most of their time in the study and seem happy as long as meals are on the table at regular hours. The live-in help, instead of being a hardworking, motherly type, is lazy and rude. The children are on bad terms with most of their neighbours, who consider them wild and mad. Money is an ever present worry, in spite of the maid, gardener, car and school fees, as the modern reader will note rather tartly. ( Read more... )

Have a go at GCSE English Literature with the Beeb.

I got six out of seven, due to a disagreement over interpretation :-)

Stuck In A Book has posted today about Maidens’ Trip by Emma Smith, an account of women’s canal work in wartime. It reminded me how important canals with their longboats, narrowboats, barges, whatever, were in children’s fiction in the first half of the twentieth century. I suppose the very earliest reference of this type is Toad and the washerwoman in The Wind in the Willows. Kenneth Grahame also presciently included a canary coloured cart; caravans were to feature greatly in children’s fiction. David Severn’s The Cruise of the Maiden Castle (1948) is his second book about the Warner family and is full of detailed and lyrical descriptions of working a boat through the English countryside. It is beautifully illustrated with woodcuts by Joan Kiddell-Monroe and is very romantic writing. There’s nothing romantic about the barge in Two Fair Plaits by Malcolm Saville (also 1948), a ‘Jillies’ adventure about a kidnapped child. This is a wonderfully atmospheric book about London, the Thames and docklands in the late 1940s, for those who like that sort of thing, which I certainly do. A year earlier he had written about the traditional, jolly canal life in The Riddle of the Painted Box, one of the Mary & Michael stories. Barbara Willard wrote three books about the Pennithornes and the second features a canal holiday. Snail and the Pennithornes Next Time was published in 1958; was this the last hurrah of the canal adventure, or can someone think of a later one? The canals were allowed to decline and then whammo, along came the heritage industry and there’s a lot of interest in them again. Katie Fforde is a fan and The Rose Revived is about life afloat. The romance of the canals lives on!

Or, the bottle brush bush in my garden. Callistemon flowers are usually bright red. I expect this one is called 'citrinus', 'pallidus' or something suitable but I don't know for sure until I can research it.

It’s fun opening up the boxes and being reunited with my books, although I despair rather at finding I still have too many for the space available. For some reason it’s the children’s books which I want to read again. After finishing my Courtney-fest with The Farm on the Downs and Elizabeth of the Garret Theatre I turned to Lorna at Wynyards by Elinor M Brent-Dyer. The copy shown here is the GGBP reprint.

EBD, as we affectionately call her, is of course best known for her long series of Chalet School books. The first was published in 1925, the last in 1970 and they are still sought after and read today. She wrote another series, known as the La Rochelle books, plus a number of standalones and historical stories. There are however many connections between the books. Like anyone in love, EBD liked to drop the loved one’s name wherever possible; her favourite Joey features in the Lorna books as the famous author Josephine Bettany. ( Lorna at Wynyards )

A miserable Sunday on the sofa requires comfort reading and I picked Sally’s Family by Gwendoline Courtney. I’d never heard of the author until a few years ago and this book quickly became a favourite. It was first published in 1946 so is very much a post-war book, with housing shortages and rationing. The six motherless Hamilton children have been scattered during the war, each billeted on a very different family; Sally, the eldest, has been in the ATS. Sadly, their father has been killed in the war but before he died he told his friend Charles Selwood of his chief wish: that his children should once again live together as a family and that all should have a good education.

Major Selwood owes his life to Hamilton so he offers a house at low rent to Sally, who arranges for all the children to join her there. Ingleholm turns out to be filthy and ill-furnished. The next-in-age sister, Kitty, has been spoiled by her foster parents and seems unwilling to do any work; the younger ones are fun but a worry because their school fees have to be paid. Sally sometimes despairs of the project but with the help of Charles and his housekeeper succeeds in getting the others to work together to make a cosy home and tame the wild garden. The descriptions of how each room in turn is made comfortable are lovely. As so often in fiction, I find I enjoy the struggling parts of the book best and at the end feel sorry that the family will eventually split up again as each character finds a future. (See what Miranda thought about it here.)

( more Courtney & housekeeping comfort )

We both enjoy astrantias.

I wasn’t surprised to read this story in The Times this morning. Years ago, I saw some French visitors in our local supermarket. They were loading up their trolley with Mr Kipling cakes.

In Prunella Plays the Game by Irene Mossop (first published 1929), the game is cricket, hurrah! Although Prunella is the new girl and titular heroine, this book is really about her cousin Jacinth: plain, good humoured and underestimated. St Prisca’s is a boarding school for sixty or seventy girls, depending on which page you believe. The previous headmistress was rather lax and a group of girls, headed by another of Prunella’s cousins, the lovely Camellia (known as Queen) has had things all its own way. The in-crowd run everything to suit themselves and their friends regardless of talent. This has particularly affected Thyra, a brilliant but wayward girl who has never been allowed to shine and has turned to mischief instead. (It's rather cheek of girls called Thyra, Dione and Aveline to tease Prunella about her unusual name.)

The new head, Miss Kestrell (The Hawk, obviously) is determined to get the school to pull together and perceptively appoints Jacinth head of the Rubies, to the amusement of Queen and her set. How Jake builds up a successful cricket second XI, doggedly defending her own decisions and her friends, makes for a very entertaining story with believable characters. Even the baddies are not all bad and astonishingly the girls visit some ruins without getting trapped inside them and have a boating mishap with no one even near drowning. ( Read more... )

Popular Music by Mikael Niemi is undoubtedly the strangest book I’ve read this year. It was recommended and lent to me by huskyteer. We’re agreed that promoting the author as ‘the Nick Hornby of the Arctic’ is misleading; if you were expecting a Nordic High Fidelity, you’d be disappointed. I snuggled under my IKEA duvet cover to read about Matti growing up in Pajala, Tornedalen, in the far north of Sweden; within the Arctic Circle and a very long way from Stockholm. It’s a salutary reminder that ‘the sixties’ were far from being a homogenous experience, because we’re talking peasant society here. And what a society! Seldom can such a cast of grotesques have formed the background to a child’s life. This is part of the charm of the book, of course; just as in Lake Wobegon Days adult life as seen by a child is desirable but completely alien and incomprehensible. We see Matti through various life stages: starting school, first drink, first gang, first sex. There are some extraordinary and confusing scenes. One event is definitely an hallucinatory experience but several others *might* be. Did these things happen, or not? On finishing the book I read the Swedish reviews at the back and found them referring to ‘tall stories’ and ‘fabulism’, so I was over-credulous.

Rokunroal muzzeek is central to Matti’s growing up, though there’s less of it in the book than the title suggests. The story of how Matti makes enough money to buy a guitar is quite revolting, though I see it could be hilarious. He teaches himself to play and to sing in English: Ollyu nidis lav and Owatter shayd ovpail; I had to read those titles twice. Then he forms a band with his best friend and two other boys and they proceed to astonish and shock the neighbourhood. ‘Some of our mates gave us the highest praise you will ever hear from the mouth of a Tornedalen citizen: “You weren’t too bad, really”’. Pure Wobegon. Matti has been warned by his father that thinking too much and reading lead inevitably to madness. He and Niila worry that rokunroal may be knapsu, a dialect or Finnish word meaning ‘unmanly’ (like knitting) but nothing can stop them playing.

In its way this book is an elegy for a lost society, a village community in terminal decline. It’s very sweet and I loved it. Wish I could read Swedish though, because I feel I'm missing something.