Life must be filled up

I was going to post today about Mary Portas and her doomed attempt to turn around a failing charity shop but thelondonpauper has said it all brilliantly already. So, having misled you twice...



What do you read in a heat wave? (No sign of it ending today here in Dorset.)
There’s something about the rare summer weather we get that makes people indulge in a Country Living English dream: a garden full of blowsy roses, meals outside (don’t say patio), Pimms, strawberries, just-picked salad leaves, cucumber sandwiches; a sort of Emma Bridgewater/Cath Kidston-fest of chunky china on flowery cloths. Katie Fforde fits the bill here. I’m currently reading Practically Perfect but it’s nothing like as good as Wild Designs, which has an older heroine, a lovely house, gardening and even the Chelsea Flower Show. Raffaella Barker’s story of upper middle class life in rural Norfolk, Summertime, could be photographed to fill an issue of Period Living. For the real thing rather than aspiration, Angela Thirkell is a good choice: try Wild Strawberries, Summer Half or Before Lunch. And you can never go wrong with a P G Wodehouse like Stormy Heavy Weather.

Where did the month go?



I’ve just read The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman and will now add my voice to the chorus of praise for it. I wouldn’t expect to describe a book which begins with 'orrible murder as charming, yet it is. Nobody Owens, known as Bod, escapes as a baby from the man out to kill him and finds refuge in the graveyard, where he is brought up and kept safe. It’s the graveyard folk who make the story so delightful. They’ve lived in different centuries and preserve their habits and speech patterns and they are always introduced by the inscriptions on their graves; just one of many touches of humour in the book. It’s cleverly written to be exciting for children without being too frightening. 'The man Jack' is sinister, the threat to Bod is real, but the reader never doubts that Silas, Bod’s guardian, will rescue him from any pickle he gets himself into. This reader lost it when it’s revealed that the child has been predestined from blah, blah, blah. It’s just me; I don’t like that sort of story and I never will. Ignoring that (sorry, fantasy lovers) it’s a wonderful book. ( More books )

The Guardian's '1,000 novels everyone must read' is like an enormous book blog. Rather didactic in approach, it's naturally got people talking. Today I had a look at Comedy. I'm glad to see Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis and Geoffrey Willans given their due, but where is Jane Austen? The introduction to the list rightly points out that comedy can have a serious purpose; can't a book be romantic and funny?

Stephen Moss (who he?) writes of Decline and Fall, ‘Waugh's bleak, amoral first novel is a young man's book, best read by young men (and perhaps the odd woman).’ That's me then, the odd woman, because I've read the book countless times and not just when I was young. Angela Thirkell is listed, hurrah! but an oddly chosen title, I thought: Before Lunch. ‘Published in 1939, Thirkell's irresistible comedy of manners is the most well-known of her Barsetshire series’. I wouldn't have thought that was true and it's not one of my favourites. What do other Thirkell fans think? Michael Frayn is rightly on the list but for Towards the End of the Morning (very funny) and not The Tin Men (even funnier). In fact, one of my favourite comic novels.



Any omissions/strange inclusions strike you?

Edit: I've just realised that Adrian Mole has been overlooked. Just his luck.

Here’s a meme from rosathome
Comment on this post.
I will give you a letter.
Think of 5 fictional characters and post their names and your comments on these characters in your LJ.

She’s given me the letter ‘M’. You're very welcome to comment, whether or not you want a letter!

Meryon Fairbrass. Descended from Sussex pirates, he is tough, handsome, clever, amusing. You’d think he was too good to be true except that his creator, Monica Edwards, based him on a real life boy whom she said was all that and more. Forms one of the Westling foursome with Tamzin, Rissa and Roger.

Mary of the John & Mary books by Grace James. She’s sensible, realistic, more of a Martha, really. One of the reasons I like her so much is that I feel all the characters in the books and the author herself preferred John.

Miss Mole. Not really a favourite character but a good excuse to push again the novels of E H Young, which I enjoy so much. A single woman with no money, dependent on dreary work but finding happiness by defying convention. A much better book IMO than Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day.

Mrs Morland, ‘happily widowed’ writer of detective stories. She features in many of Angela Thirkell’s Barsetshire novels, starting with High Rising. Apparently vague and disorganized (her hair is always coming down); actually hard working single mother of four boys. Her son Tony is much fancied by aficionados.

Jonathan ‘Jonah’ Mansel, cousin of Berry in the novels of Dornford Yates. War hero, ace driver of only the best cars, murderer (only murders villains, so that’s OK), a man of wealth and taste.

I've achieved my ambition of a vase of sweet peas on the kitchen table every single day for (I hope) three months. I don't grow them properly so as the season goes on the stems will get shorter and shorter but the flowers will still smell as good. Those in the vase are just a basic Unwins mix. In the past I've added in the variety 'Matucana', which has small, dark flowers and is very strongly scented. It's an odd fact that while most serious growers are men, sweet peas are regarded as quintessentially feminine. One thinks of Angela Thirkell's Mrs Brandon, draped in soft chiffons, reclining on a sofa. On her very first appearance (in The Brandons) she 'had collected another great bunch of sweet peas and was holding them thoughtfully to her face,' ( More sweet pea pictures )

I bought this book because I liked the cover. It is written in the first person by Sir Roger Marrion of Wynyates, Surrey, and purports to be his war journals. He and his wife Richenda, one of those Dresden porcelain invalids with an unspecified complaint and always described as ‘a great lady', make Wynyates self sufficient for the war, never forgetting the cottagers. The book is an unconvincing defence of an old, feudal rural order and full of astonishing assertions such as that The Battle of Britain was won by men wearing ‘the old school tie’ and that ‘Eton never surrenders’. It is quite dreadful. I had never before read a book by Warwick Deeping and looking at the long list of titles on the back, the only one I recognized was Sorrell and Son. I now burn to read Mad Barbara.


Warwick Deeping died in 1950 and The Old World Dies was published posthumously in 1954. This set me thinking about other popular authors who were nearing the ends of their writing lives by 1945 and my first thought was of Dornford Yates, who died in 1960. Lower Than Vermin, published in 1949, made me shriek when I first read it as a teenager. The title, of course, comes from Aneurin Bevan’s notorious description of the Tories, made at a meeting of the Labour party in 1948. Yates’s book is another defence of the old ways, showing how a noble family had sacrificed generations of young men for its country, only to be rewarded with the loss of everything they possessed and stood for. Unfortunately the book is full of wildly intemperate and ludicrous statements and the Socialist (Boo!) character turns out to be a murderer. Poor old Yates. He couldn’t stand the new order and went off to live in Southern Rhodesia.


Angela Thirkell is another author who ruined her post war books by constant references to THEM, by which she meant the Labour government. In one she even refers to ‘the happy days of the war’ when England stood alone. Sadly, these writers blamed the new government for what was really the result of five years of total war. Just as unhappy but braver about it was that remarkable woman, Flora Klickmann. Best known today as the editor of the Girl’s Own Paper, she was very popular in her lifetime for her Flower Patch books, about her cottage and garden in Worcestershire. The last of these, Weeding the Flower Patch, was published in 1948. Klickmann was already in her seventies when war broke out and she spent the war years in the country looking after two guests described as ‘evacuees’, two women who seem to have needed a great deal of care. In this book, typically, rather than moaning she cracks on with life, her main complaints being about food and the difficulty of supplying the household.


Two of the most popular writers of the early twentieth century happily ignored the war in their writings and went on with the fantasies which had so delighted their public before the war. Georgette Heyer scarcely modified her style and Arabella, published in 1949, is one of my favourites. Jeffery Farnol (died 1952) brought out The 'Piping Times' in 1945 and made it an idyll of a rural England which never existed even before 1914, full of rolling English roads and foaming pints. I must admit I found it very enjoyable.

The queen of all ‘everything has changed for the worse and nothing will ever be the same again’ books is of course Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. That is so much in a class of its own that I can’t include it here.



Next up, I will be thinking about the writers who saw a brave new world beginning in 1945.

A limited range of authors this month due to ongoing O Douglas and a big Angela Thirkell jag.
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