Life must be filled up

This morning, Amazon offered me AJP Taylor’s How Wars Begin for 99p. The two books in the set are transcripts of lectures he gave on television from 1977. You can watch some of these on YouTube, I found. A talking head, lecturing on history for half an hour with no autocue, props or film clips. Can you imagine this now? Of course not; far too élitist. This is depressing.

Laura’s Summer Ballet, Linda Blake. Children’s Press 1967. A sequel to Ballet for Laura, Children’s Press 1965. My copy of the latter is in The Seagull Library, which I hope to deal with later.



Laura attends a mixed ballet school in London. Building works cause so much disruption that the school decamps to the country for the summer. Why does one of the girls seem so dismayed when she hears where they’re going? And why does she pretend that she can’t dance when she’s really quite good? That’s one mystery. Another thread is a nasty girl who is jealous of Laura, nearly drowns her and tries to ruin a performance in which Laura will star. Laura is obviously a promising pupil but what I miss in these books are the kinds of technical detail about dance training which you get, for example, in Lorna Hill’s ‘Wells’ series.

First edition. On back flap: Children’s Classics. There is a later edition with printed pictorial boards and no dustwrapper.

The Gun, The Ship and The Pen, Linda Colley
Die Laughing Carola Dunn
Miss Granby’s Secret or The Bastard of Pinsk , Eleanor Farjeon
London Bridges, Jane Stevenson
The Marches, border walks with my father , Rory Stewart
From a Far and Lovely Country, Alexander McCall Smith
A Mourning Wedding, Carola Dunn
The Wintry Years, O Douglas
An Assassination on the Agenda, T E Kinsey 11th Lady Hardcastle
Fall of a Philanderer, Carola Dunn.
Quite a lot of Sherlock Holmes
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Holiday Summer by Decie Merwin (1960)



Decie Merwin was an American writer and this book was published in America as Somerhaze Farm. In the UK, it was printed first in The Seagull Library and then by The Children’s Press, with a new cover by Sheila Rose. The line drawings are not credited. This is a lovely, happy story for girls, see here.

‘This impression 1968’. Classics listed on back flap. It was also printed in an edition with laminated boards.

I was very disappointed yesterday evening to find that the 1952 film of The Importance of Being Earnest which I’d recorded, had been mysteriously swapped for a modern version which I didn’t like, in spite of Colin Firth, Rupert Everett, Judi Dench et al and deleted. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise. First, I watched the annual Schönbrunn Palace summer evening concert from Vienna. Beautiful setting, stunning lighting, The Vienna Philharmonic and a programme of popular classical music. It was very enjoyable. That was followed by The Composer behind the Moustache, about the composer Sir Karl Jenkins.

If you think you don’t know Sir Karl, just listen to Adiemus and you’ll find that you do. Like me, you probably didn’t know what he looks like. He claims that when the cameras picked out his hirsute phizzog at the King’s coronation, a wild rumour began that he was Meghan Markle in disguise. The programme traced his career from early days singing in a Welsh chapel to acclaimed composer. He studied for a B.Mus. while at the same time playing in a jazz band, which raised some eyebrows. He continued with jazz, then joined the avant garde jazz/rock group Soft Machine, one of my husband’s favourite bands when he was a student. What? I had absolutely no idea of this. He wrote music for advertisements and film scores. His great success came with The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace (2000), which has been performed all over the world. According to one commentator, the work died until the issue of the CD coincided with 9/11 and chimed with the way people were feeling. The Americans invited him over to conduct a performance for the tenth anniversary.

Rather wild and woolly-looking, modest, softly-spoken, he is still busy writing at eighty. This year, for the first time, music by him will be played at a Prom: Stravaganza, a saxophone concerto first performed by Jess Gillam last year. It was all rather humbling.

Just heard The Eagles on the radio, which reminded me that, uncool though it is to admit it, I love them. Hard to choose but here’s one, live performance 1977.

Chester House Wins Through, Irene Smith. The Children’s Press 1967.
This is one of two school stories written by Irene Smith. The first edition had green boards and a dw but my copy, illustrated here, has printed boards and states, ‘this impression 1968’.



A typical school story about rivalry between day girls and boarders. House captain Alison’s life is not made easier by the daft antics of her much younger twin sisters. Through her quiet strength of character, Alison manages to pull the house together and improve its standing. She and her sisters are day girls and all go home for lunch as, oddly, does their father. Unusual in 1967, surely?

My neighbour-over-the-road-with-the-perfect-garden keeps giving away bunches of sweet peas. So kind! As I no longer grow them, I couldn’t be more pleased.
I see I wrote an almost identical post a year ago. But you can never have too many sweet peas in my opinion.

Eleanor Farjeon is known today for her children’s books but she did write a few for adults. This one was apparently written in a bomb shelter during the blitz in 1940 and was published the following year. Set before and after the First World War, it’s the first Furrowed Middlebrow book to be published by the happily revived Dean Street Press and will be out on 5th August.

Miss Adeline Granby, Pamela’s great aunt Addie, has written forty-nine slightly shocking and very successful books and dies after starting her fiftieth. But, as Pamela says at the end, ‘what did she know?’ She seems to have been entirely innocent of the facts of life as shown by the title of her first, unpublished book, The Bastard of Pinsk, written when she was sixteen. She thinks a bastard is ‘a very noble Hero of Royal Blood’, which we later learn caused her trouble in real life.

The book starts with Addie’s death. Pamela and her parents are responsible for dealing with this and are amazed by the numbers of cards and floral tributes which flood in, especially an enormous tribute ‘from Stanislaw’, which Pammy’s mother considers quite unsuitable. Pamela is left Addie’s ‘old yellow trunk’, which contains diaries and the manuscript of The Bastard. It’s something of a shock to find the entire, ridiculous book printed here and my heart sank rather but it turns out to have clues to Addie’s life. It’s clear that Addie based what she called ‘my best book’ on events in her own life, which she turned into a kind of fairy tale. Was Stanislaw the love of Addie’s life? It seems so, as neither ever married. By a curious twist at the end, after Addie’s death, Pamela finds out who Stanislaw is. When Pamela (a thoroughly modern girl), had offered to explain the facts of life to Addie, her aunt declined. ‘Oh no, dear. It would inhibit me.’ By the end of the book, Pamela is still wondering just what Aunt Addie knew? A charming and unexpected book from Eleanor Farjeon.