dovegreyreader scribbles

Hay Festival again...

2013-06-18T17:00:00+01:00

Ellie's second report from the Hay Fesitival is crammed with amazing events, so if it's raining where you are perhaps just pretend you are in a deckchair and why not tag along. My thanks to Ellie again for doing this and with apologies for the belated posting (where do the weeks go?)

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Blusteryness gave way to warm sunshine for a couple of days, before bad weather returned and it has rained heavily on and off for several days and been cold. It was quite noisy at times if you happened to be in an event tent during a shower. Thank heavens for the covered walk-ways!

After a couple of days we soon learned the ropes of Hay. When and where to queue for the different venues, and which area of seating to aim for. Most of the events start and end at the same time to avoid overlaps, which means that there's a crowd surge when all the venues empty. Picking the right exit to your venue can help avoid the worst bottle necks!

Comedian Marcus Brigstocke played the largest venue on the first Sunday night introducing his own version of the 'Big Society' with his sharp satire. He also poked fun at festival goers who like to be seen reading a certain book but are actually peering over the top to check that people have noticed them! Our sides ached from over an hour of solid laughter!

Monday morning saw politician Jack Straw getting a grilling from the festival's interviewer, Peter Florence. A fascinating figure whose humble beginnings set him apart from many of his political contempories, and an unhappy childhood that sent him to seek comfort from books, Straw was Foreign Secretary at the time of the war in Iraq. The subject of the 'dodgy dossier' about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction came up several times. Hans Blix, who had headed up the UN weapons monitoring and inspection body at that time had been at Hay the day before, and many members of the audience had seen him so questions kept coming back to that subject. As Peter Florence said to Straw "this was never going to be an easy book tour for you".

Such was the popularity of American writer Barbara Kingsolver that she got bumped up to a bigger venue.
She has long been one of my favourite authors, and I have returned to her novel Bean Trees many times, and enjoyed her subsequent books. She was a delight - warm and funny, elegant and charming she spoke about the climate change theme of her current novel Flight Behaviour. She uses her background as a scientist to inform the novel and believes we are all in denial (she quoted country singer Pam Tillis's hit 'Cleopatra, Queen of Denial') about climate change, and are in danger of throwing our good life away through our abuse of our planet. She spoke about how the first sentence of the novel is important and makes a promise that the rest of the novel must keep. By reading a novel you remove yourself from your everyday life and experience life in a different way - through another's eyes. Most sessions at Hay are followed by a book signing. I had been anxious not only to buy the novel, but also to get my old battered copy of Bean Trees signed. My books are still packed so that meant going through several boxes of 'US female fiction' frantically trying to find it. I was booked to see Roger McGough immediately after the session though and I had to make a choice - whether to combat massive signing queues myself and miss the first part of the next session, or to send Adrian to meet Barbara. As it turned out he had come with me to the event and was happy to meet her and get both books signed.

It was a tough call as I would have loved to have met her too, but Roger McGough's performance was incredible. His voice is so familiar from Radio 4's 'Poetry Please' programme and of course poetry is best served out loud so to hear him read his own work was a joy. He has a very entertaining way of turning words and meanings around to capture the essence of an everyday truth. Adrian doesn't particularly 'do' poetry so wasn't joining me for this one, but I know he would have enjoyed it if he had.

I enjoyed a joint session with Maggie O'Farrell, another favourite writer, who appeared alongside Rupert Thompson, who I knew nothing about, but to whom I warmed immediately. I'm now itching to read his novel 'Secrecy' set in post-Renaissance Florence. The interviewer was scarcely needed as there was a good rapport between the two writers with some insights into their process aired. No neatly planned plotlines here, both writers shared what Maggie described as her very organic approach... well actually chaotic. The works evolve gradually almost as a sculptor creates from a piece of stone, but with many redrafts. Maggie O'Farrell held up her reading copy of her new novel 'Instructions for a Heatwave' and showed all her annotations. Words and phrases she wished she'd used, and those she wished she hadn't. No novel was ever perfect, otherwise you wouldn't need to write the next one.

Paul Roberts is the force behind the new blockbuster exhibition at the British Museum on Pompeii and Herculaneum. We visited both of these sites in the shadow of Vesuvius on our travels and were looking forward to rekindling our memories and finding out more. It was a fascinating illustrated account including behind the scenes views of the huge store rooms of artefacts in Naples he accessed for exhibits and how they were transported to London. The focus is on the ordinary people who were caught up in the aftermath of this devastating eruption and what has been discovered about their lives, and he really brought this to life in a very entertaining and easy to understand way, warning the audience to 'brace, brace' whenever he was about to show a slide of one of the more explicit objects of Roman life. He struck a chord with us when he was asked about the effects of mass-tourism. It is the cruise groups that have the greatest negative effects - so many people passing so quickly through, but it's the tourist euros that help fund further excavations and maintenance of the sites. And although he couldn't answer the little boy's question about exactly when Vesuvius would erupt again, a major eruption is apparently long long overdue.

I'm in awe of speakers like Paul Roberts who can entertain and inform holding their audience for a whole hour without a script, make perfect sense and not lose their thread. Linguistics guru David Crystal was another one. His new book is about the history of English spelling, very much my area of interest (yet another of them!). He looked at how our words have evolved to be spelled as they are today, the influences and the way the language is continuing to evolve.

There's so much to report on and I don't want to invade Lynne's blog indefinitely so I'll quickly mention that Ruby Wax, who completed a Masters in Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy last year spoke inspiringly and with her trademark humour about her own mental ill-health with Rosie Boycott. We also went to a panel session with war writers, most memorably Paul Conroy who was with Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times in a besieged town in Syria when Marie tragically lost her life. He spoke movingly of this experience and was obviously still recovering from being wounded himself. There was a wine tasting with Simon Hoggart - with anecdotes about life being too short to drink bad wine. Liebfraumilch was mentioned at least once! And the wines (not at all bad) we tasted were served to a large audience by the ever-efficient Hay volunteer stewards who contribute to all aspects of keeping the festival so slickly smooth-running.

After several days of bleak weather, and one day when some of the car parks were closed due to the rain, the weekend grew closer and promised a reprieve and we saw the sun again.

Umbrellas were exchanged for boaters and wellies for sandals as the temperatures and everyone's spirits rose again. The deckchairs had dried off and were in use again...

In danger of overload, so many events in a short period of time on top of a tiring move, we still had a session on green building, featuring among others Ben Law (he of the famous Grand Designs wooden house) and our last event - comedian Jo Brand to go. Then Adrian spotted a blackboard notice that Cerys Matthews would be doing an impromptu performance recording at The Daily Telegraph's stand the next day at noon. He asked about it, and no, no need to book, it wasn't ticketed. Just turn up. We arrived at five to noon expecting a crowd, but there were just a few people milling about and playing chess in the drawing room atmosphere of the stand. Yes, Cerys was coming and sure enough after a short wait she arrived and urged everyone present to make themselves at home on the sofas and comfy chairs, as she checked her guitar tuning.

What we didn't realise was that she has just brought out an anthology book of songs: nursery rhymes, childhood favourites, folk songs with a bit about their origins. She started by playing Baa baa black sheep urging old and young alike to sing along. She dipped into her book and played for us for about 40 minutes and we still can't quite get over that we were in on such a joyful interlude singing with a major star. A highlight of Hay!

Eventually it was time for us to drive back down to Hay festival one last time to see Jo Brand. A great end to a hectic ten days with lots of thoughts, ideas and impressions, chance conversations and catch ups with friends still whirring in our minds, and new books to read of course. And no longer any excuses keeping us from getting on with sorting out our new house and garden.

NW ~ Zadie Smith

2013-06-17T00:15:00+01:00

'When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?'

Those famous lines, written in the 14th century by John Ball, form the epigraph to Zadie Smith's most recent novel NW.

I knew of them and they had puzzled me for years so finally I look it all up and discover they were written during the Peasant's Revolt. Read with so many differing inflections and interpretations, the words can be made to say so much about gender and class distinctions and equality, that they do make the most perfect entry into a novel that really kept me very pleasurably on my toes and pounding the streets of London ... even if I was basking in the dappled sunlight of the Shire and gazing out on this view as I read. It was an incongruence that struck me with great regularity.

Ultimately so possessed was I by the mood and the spirit of the read that it had to be the book I took along to Endsleigh Salon last week for the reading theme of Fruit and Veg. This on the basis that I had meant to re-read Susan Hill's The Magic Apple Tree but hadn't, and really wanted to talk about NW anyway, so I winged it on the basis that Zadie's grandmother might have been called Granny Smith and thus had an apple named after her. It was tenuous but the salonistas let it pass, and my thanks to Simon Prosser, Zadie's publisher, who alerted me to the presence of the apple tree on page twenty-nine.

Thinking too of book as object. If you open out the French flaps on the cover of the new paperback edition of NW, this is what you get..

It was a bit of a bookish origami moment, and I was quite pleased with that clever design effect as I occasionally dragged myself away from the pages to have a play with the book, and to think about what I had read, before diving back in. In fact I had wanted some latter-day contrast, some anti-nostalgia, some get-real-and-of-the-moment reading to balance out that week of Coronation musing and I couldn't have chosen a more perfect read.

NW is relentlessly and minutely about London and a group of four Londoners, all from the same housing estate in Kilburn, all going to the same school and now all leading very different lives. Often disillusioned, frequently challenged and compromised yet returning to their roots and their origins for explanations and answers, and somehow, as I read of them emerging from each scrap and scrape, I had an innate sense of optimism that mostly all would be well.

Mostly.

There is no doubt that on paper it is Keisha Blake who has achieved the greatest success, changing her name to Natalie in order to fit into the world of the corporate lawyer for which she has qualified, but remaining inseparable from her Kilburn roots.

Perhaps it is Leah Hanwell, Keisha's best friend, who is overtly the one with potential and ambition the least fulfilled as she drifts into life as a council administrative assistant and grapples with her aversions to pregnancy and parenthood with her husband, hairdresser Michel.

Or maybe it is Felix with his ambitions to restore classic cars...and as you read you sort of know it's never going to happen.

And then there's Nathan...

Yet as the novel unfolds so do the surprises, contentment with life's pattern is hard won and not where you may always expect to find it.

For me, the best part of the book came with the 185 numbered vignettes that take the story right back to the early days and the beginnings of Keisha/Natalie and Leah's friendship, finally converging with the present-day story as the reader already knows it. We had an interesting debate about this at the Endsleigh Salon. Someone who had read the book (and enjoyed it) suggested these short pieces conveniently reflected the fact that Zadie had perhaps written the book on and off through interrupted time post-childbirth... it hadn't occurred to me but we did just wonder all the same. If so it was a clever use of time leading to a brilliant outcome (all I had to show for that time was a patchwork quilt that took me five years to finish...oh yes, and three lovely children) and by coincidence a few days later some thoughts on motherhood and creativity from Zadie herself.

The writing is so very clever but not too clever. The style, once I became accustomed to it, and to Zadie's omissions and inferences ...those tiny asides and hints that send the reader off to make some assumptions of their own, well it all felt astonishing, which may be why I had to keep calling a halt and taking stock. It is exactly like life, like being in a room and being part of the conversation. The way that not every single word needs to be said, that things are left unsaid because they can be, and that those present will cotton on to the meaning and go with the flow of the conversation and the situation regardless, and with what sleight of pen does Zadie Smith trap this on the page. I supect I'd be nervous should I ever (unlikely) find myself in the same room as Zadie when she is gathering book material, in fact I doubt she ever stops given her level of observation.

That playing with the French flaps just one of the many things I discovered you can do with a book by Zadie Smith apart from sending it to the charity shop that is. I am now very ashamed to admit that, having failed with Zadie's fiction to date, that is exactly what I had done with a half-read copy of White Teeth, only a few months ago in the Big Purge, though thankfully I had kept the half-read copy of On Beauty because it was a hardback and I had paid good money for it, and with all these half-reads around I hadn't bothered with The Autograph Man.

I had diagnosed myself as the wrong reader for Zadie Smith some years ago. Me old enough to be her mum, and I had declared this to be the writing of a younger generation that I just wasn't 'getting.' I can't decide if I feel happier to have discovered Zadie Smith will be thirty-eight this year, or mortifed because that makes me feel even older.

But I did love Zadie's book of Occasional Essays Changing My Mind so all was not lost, here was the razor-sharp intellect of a young woman who by her own admission agrees...

'When you are first published at a young age, your writing grows with you - and in public...I'm forced to recognise that ideological consistency is, for me, practically an article of faith.'

Hence the title of the book of essays, and hence maybe why I have suddenly clicked with Zadie Smith's fiction in NW, her fourth outing, and I have to admit I have been swept up and along and away by a book that I felt certain I wouldn't want to read.

NW is, amongst myriad themes, a book about class, and race, and prejudice (not necesarily racial) about ambition (or lack of it) and people doing the best they can with what they've got, or have inherited, or earned, or been given. Sometimes that 'best' is good enough, sometimes it falls short, but then who is anyone to judge. If you love the minutiae of ordinary people's lives then you might enjoy this one, and once you have settled into the narrative style will be pounding the streets of London with the best of them,

The oddest yet most pleasurable reading week I have had in a long time. I even had £10 at 5:1 riding on NW to win the Women's (now Bailey's Women's) Prize for Fiction, which sadly for Zadie (and for me) it didn't, but Zadie I forgive you.

So any Zadie fans out there??

Do I go back to the beginning and try again??

Beating the Bounds ~ The Belfry

2013-06-15T00:15:00+01:00

Not quite either of the belfries within my Beating the Bounds square mile, (though I did sing in the choir there for a couple of years,) but St Andrew's Buckland Monachorum near enough, because all these local churches were being built at about the same time. It is said that if you travelled around these parts in the mid-15th century you would have tripped over a half-built church every few miles. A number of them have a similar tower design topped out with very distinctive pinnacles, the same team working round and adding the icing on the church cake.

Tower building was all about attracting the eye and announcing grandeur and importance, a way of providing the people with an experience of heaven on earth. It was about rivalry between villages too, and each tower an example of the care and expense lavished on their church by the community. Rarely did those communities number more than 200 people, and towers were expensive additions which according to John Scott must have eaten up a huge proportion of the local wealth.

I'm not sure I had ever given much thought to who would have paid for these, but as John Scott affirms the main motive was the glory of God and we do the builders and the benefactors a great injustice if we allow 21st century cynicism to doubt it. Look what a glorious legacy they have left us, and sadly what an endless struggle it can be to raise the funds to maintain them now.

I had found John Scott's book in the reference library a while back, entitled Towers and Bells of Devon. Two hefty volumes in fact, and my interest in all things bells piqued by the discovery of a book which should, if the title is anything to go by, have been enough to send me to sleep. Far from it, all utterly fascinating. A meticulous history of each church tower in the Shire with date, size, weight, note and name of each bell ... bit like a very great big baby, but with a note of dedications and inscriptions as well. I hadn't known about the inscriptions but I discovered that the bells in our village church bear little gems like...

'Prosperity to this Parish'

and

' Tenor I to the Church the Living Call and to the Grave I summon All' .

This latter I assume a reference to the tolling of the sonourous Passing Bell, the death knell that seems to be getting a good work out as I read The Nine Tailors.

So at our allotted time there we were, first in the queue, Bookhound leading the way up the stone steps to the top of the seventy foot tower, built using local rubble and granite, and already we discover a design fault because though I could just about squeeze up the stairs, Bookhound found his top half was around the spiral with his legs still to waiting to catch up. If you look carefully you might just be able to see me 'going round the bend' this on the descent..

Tiny windows on the ascent giving a clue that we were rising higher, just in case the knees weren't telling us as much too..

and higher..

until eventually we emerged onto the roof, and what sights to behold..

...and a close up of one of those pinnacles.

On the way down (much quicker) we were able to stop and peek through the grill at the belfry itself,

From the church website I discover a little nugget of history.

The Buckland Monachorum tower design, with its high pinnacles at the limits of practicability, sacrificed strength for elegance, though mercifully the first four bells hung all stayed put. However when two more were added in 1723, within ten years and with repeated ringing, the tower was seriously weakened necessitating major repairs. It would seem luck that the whole lot didn't come crashing down.

Now that all makes me want to read The Spire by William Golding and The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner. I have started both books and failed to finish them, but (sorry *SPOILER* alert) don't the towers collapse in both??

In 1858, it was discovered that the wooden bell cage had rotted and that someone had misguidedly driven wedges between the timbers and the walls of the tower.

Tsk, tsk.

This had caused fractures in the tower as a result of the constant vibration. More worryingly it was not until 1905 that the bells were re-hung in a new wood frame, before being re-cast in 1947 and situated in the metal frame visible, with two tenor bells added to make a glorious peal of eight bells.

Eight bells can ring 40,320 changes which would take eighteen hours. just saying in case you were wondering. I think the sum might 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 etc, someone will work it through.

It's hard to imagine how on earth any work is done in a belfry. The space is seriously limited and claustrophobic, to say nothing of dangerous, and I have yet to figure how you get a hefty bell in and out unless it is somehow lowered down through here, the chamber below housing the clock mechanism.

Unusually the ringers gallery below the clock chamber overlooks the nave of the church which I am not sure I had ever realised in those years that I occupied the choir stalls...

and like many such galleries has some wonderful signs and notices in place. This little warning from 1755... (if you click on these pictures they should enlarge)

and this more recent one...

Imagine the clock chiming in and messing up the changes.

And so to the ringing, of which I know nothing beyond that which I have learned from the authorial campanology of Dorothy L.Sayers, so I am grateful to that Coronation edition of Picture Post for the low down.. or should that be the high down...or maybe the up down.

The ringers of St Paul's reveal the secrets for the man on the street down below in 1953. Basically you must learn how to pull on a rope to achieve certain results and without 'music' as it were, all has to be done from memory. You musn't move your feet while the rope's end is on the floor or you'll be swept off them and dumped back down with two broken ankles, and not surprisingly in this case the whole process requires absolute concentration.

World records were few back then. I am not sure about now but the 1922 feat of 21,363 changes in twelve hours with not a single ringer taking a break (no, not even for 'that') seems remarkable and knocks Lord Peter Wimsey's meagre nine hours into touch. Apparently records were rare because no one wanted to listen to bells ringing for thirteen hours.

For anyone who hasn't read The Nine Tailors, the Picture Post piece ends with another spoiler so look away now...

'Disillusioning fact is that even the combined noise of St Paul's twelve bells at their loudest wouldn't really kill the victim of a detective story, locked up in the belfry. It might make his ears tingle - not more.'

On This Day.... Dorothy L. Sayers

2013-06-13T00:15:00+01:00

On this day in 1893, Dorothy L. Sayers was born in Oxford, the only child of an Anglican vicar Henry and his wife Helen. I have chosen this picture of her in her younger days. There is an element of latent mischief in that face, almost ready to laugh; pictures of Dorothy in her later years reveal a sterner, more severe and matronly countenance.

By all accounts intelligent, precocious and much-loved and indulged by the various adults that surrounded her, Dorothy was heading for the Godolphin School in Salisbury and thence to Somerville College in Oxford, becoming one of the first women to receive a degree. A contemporary there of Vera Brittain and all a cue for me to dust off my copy Dangerous by Degrees by Susan Leonardi.

I'm sure some of you will know this book, an account of women at Oxford between 1912 and 1922 and six Somerville novelists, Dorothy L. Sayers and Vera Brittain as well as Murial Jaeger, Doreen Wallace, Margaret Kennedy and Winifred Holtby. I have only read Dorothy and Vera, have almost meant to read Winifred, have both Doreen and Margaret on the shelf and had never heard of Muriel. I have also been dipping into the biography Dorothy L. Sayers - Her Life and Soul by Barbara Reynolds.

All lives are fascinating but Dorothy's the more so for the fact that she bore an illegitimate son in 1924 whose existence was kept a well-guarded secret from the public until twenty years after her death. Fearing that the discovery would heap shame on her parents, Dorothy hid herself away, taking eight weeks leave of absence from her job with an advertising agency to give birth to John Anthony, who she then proceeded to breast feed for several weeks before appointing a distant relative as a guardian and handing him over; adoption was illegal until 1926 ( I didn't know that) and swearing the guardian to secrecy, a vow that Ivy Shrimpton appears to have kept faithfully, loving John Anthony as her own.

I had just one Dorothy L. Sayers novel on the Have Read list and that was Gaudy Night some years ago, at which point I did the usual and acquired a shelf full thinking how much I had enjoyed it and I must read more, and never quite got around to it, so this week I have been deep into campanology and The Nine Tailors.

It's all a tangled mass of sallies and clappers and Grand Sire Triples, and bodies in the wrong place, and poor old Peter Wimsey who finds himself stranded in the snow on New Year's Eve just as the village of Fenchurch St Paul is in crisis. A man down on the bell ringing team, and with fifteen thousand, eight hundred and forty celebratory Kent Treble Bob Majors to be rung for the next nine hours before morning. Obviously no one needs any sleep in Fenchurch St Paul, and as luck would have it Sir Peter is an accomplished campanologist, along with all his other competencies, and is ready (sort of) and able to slot into the team.

'Nothing would please me more than to ring bells all day and all night. I am not tired at all. I really don't need rest. I would far rather ring bells...'

There may be trouble ahead.

I haven't finished it yet but I am loving it all which is more than can be said for Q.D.Leavis who clearly had the knives out for Dorothy's fiction in general...

'... but no novelist with such a parasitic, stale adulterated way of feeling and living could ever amount to anything. And Miss Sayers' fiction,when it isn't mere detective-story of an unimpressive kind, is exactly that : stale, second-hand, hollow...it is only the emanation of a 'social' mind wanting to raise a snigger...'

Goodness me Queenie, that's bulldog-chewing-a-wasp writing if ever I saw it.

But reading The Nine Tailors was all enough to have me first in the queue and jumping up and down (in my mind) with excitement when we saw this at the summer fair in Buckland Monachorum last Saturday...

Chances to go up church towers are rare but there was the church dressed overall, not a cloud in the sky and trips up to the roof . More about our belfry experience to come, and how we squeezed up the ninety something steps and decided how very thin people must have been in them days and how on earth did they build this in 1490 ...

Buckland Monachorum village history reveals it was not just Fenchurch St Paul that was awake all night listening with copious joy to the music of the bells...

'Church bell ringers have always practised their art and skill with enthusiasm, but records reveal that in 1815, their fervour overcame their judgement and good sense. It seems that although forbidden to have the key to the belfry door by Mark Tucker, Clerk and Schoolmaster, they managed to enter the church late one evening and rang throughout the night. Understandably the village was not pleased, and for their "mutinous and riotous behaviour" they were dismissed.

That music as Dorothy L. Sayers writes it..

'Tin tan din dan bim bam bom bo - tan tin din dan bam bim bo bam - tan tin dan din bam bim bo bom - tan dan tin bam din bo bim bom...'

Are you keeping up...have you got your bell competently up and set up at the backstroke and have you adjusted your tuckings, and are you ready for the hunting up, the hunting down, making the thirds and fourths and laying the blows behind before working down to lead the dance again. I do hope so. I think I am almost starting to understand it, and if I tell the musical amongst you that the notes for the Buckland Monachorum bells (smallest to largest) are as follows...

E - D# - C# - B - A - G# - F# - E

Well look, you could almost sing it or replicate a Kent Treble Bob Major on the piano couldn't you.

But meanwhile Happy Birthday Dorothy... any fans out there??

Any bell-ringers who understand it all??

The Garden House, Buckland Monachorum

2013-06-11T18:00:00+01:00

Back in the dim recesses of time, as an almost qualified health visitor, I was dispatched to Tavistock to do something called Supervised Practice. This used to happen after final written exams and would involve (and may still) three months based in an area that had to be in complete contrast to your previous nine month student placement (mine had been a baptism of fire on the naval estates of Plymouth City) You would be given a mini-caseload of a hundred families to practise on visit in that time, before heading back into college at the end of the stint for a rigorous viva voce and hopefully a Pass.

Thankfully I passed but I doubt I will ever forget that Summer of '78.

Fancy being paid to drive around these lanes, and up onto Dartmoor; fresh-faced and mustard-keen I really couldn't get enough of it, so when a health visitor post came up in Tavistock while I was there, and was offered to me, I snapped it up. No matter that I would have to drive out from our flat in the gloomy Dockyard end of Plymouth every day, it would be worth it. Those were the days when you were given an NHS car, so I had an ex-Police Panda car cast-off (with the word POLICE barely sprayed over) sporting very random gears and the worrying number plate RTA, but about a month into the job I was offered an unfurnished 'Community Nurse' house too, in the village of Buckland Monachorum.

It's odd when you look back and realise how so much of your life just slots into place by luck and happenstance isn't it, and I'm sure similar things will have happened to many of you. It only took about three trips to move our two years-worth of married belongings to our new home, included the mandatory Swiss Cheese plant sticking out of the back window. We furnished sparsely... minimalist was us, decorated appallingly remembering that this was the era of the two-toned emulsioned room (Cinnamon and Spice ...a whole lot too much of brown) and got a Border Collie puppy as we proceeded to see what it was like to really live in the country.

Returning to Buckland Monachorum last Saturday, and walking through those same fields we had walked with Ben, it dawned on us both that this was where it had all begun, our road to where we are now and our love of country life and splendid rural isolation. We loved Buckland and would have happily settled there had we been able to afford it, but cottages were going for about £15k and we had a mortgage maximum of £12-14k... laughable when you look back, won't even buy a car these days. We had driven the ten miles or so for the summer fair last week but on the way turned into The Garden House just outside the village.

Now we hadn't been to The Garden House for years. To be honest we couldn't remember there being much that was of interest to us back in the day when it was a five minute walk away, but we had followed its progress over the years. We knew that the garden had been extended and that innovative head gardener Keith Wiley had wrought miracles before moving onto his own nursery along the road, that the garden has featured on Gardener's World and presenters Alan Titchmarsh and Carol Klein both adore it, and that Sophie Wessex had paid a Royal visit recently

The house was originally the Rectory for the village church and is now the tea rooms, the whole plot bought and developed by Lionel (an ex-Eton schoolmaster) and Kathleen Fortescue in the 1960s, this much we had known before..

I was, as usual, much in need of a cream tea and having had my cholesterol done last week and not yet been in receipt of the phone call to tell me off, thought in for a penny etc before I'm back on porridge. A pile of egg sandwiches, scones, jam, clotted, Earl Grey etc later we stepped out to look at the gardens before walking along the footpath to the village, and thinking the garden would only take us take us twenty minutes or so on the way and we'd moan at having payed £7 something to get in.

Cue...HUGE SURPRISES around every corner.. breathtaking ones at that

Acres and acres of it. The wildflower meadows in full flight as were the rhododendrons, this beauty (Vanessa Pastel) in a shady glade but pickled with glorious flowers...

and perhaps my favourite, unbeatable, biggest-gasp moment...

The meconopsis bed ...plant envy doesn't come close... I WANT A LOT OF THESE...

Everything looks so natural, yet planting schemes worked out meticulously to capitalise on the setting, its possibilities and above all the long gaze of the beholder...

There in the distance the village church and beyond that Kit Hill which we look across to from home. The church tower a reminder that we had meant to go to the summer fair, but we still had so much to see. Reluctantly we slipped down onto the footpath, did the village in quick order but couldn't wait to get back to The Garden House.

Far from begrudging the entry fee we were almost the last ones out, but not before we threw more money at them and became Friends, buying a year-long double ticket so that we can go whenever. Monty Don suggested on last week's Gardener's World (now avid fan) how important it was to go and look at other gardens to get inspiration for your own, and I was reminded of so much, not least that this is the only garden where we have failed to establish a good show of Aquilegias/Columbines which I love, so that is one of my many tasks for next year.

God knows what else I'll be wanting to grow after a year of seeing all this, watch this space, plus all tips for growing meconopsis, and while we're about it poppies too, gratefully received

The Exile ~ Betty Miller

2013-06-10T00:15:00+01:00

At last I am back with The Persephone Book of Short Stories and back too with my reading-a-story-from-each-end alternately method, the plan being that time will converge in on itself and eventually I will meet myself in the middle. The stories are arranged by date of publication so the time gap has shrunk from the original seventy-seven years when I started to a mere ten years now, 1937-1947, and with ten stories left to read the similarities of subject matter are becoming much more striking given the world events in that period.

I have said before how much I am loving this volume and would like a new one every year (please Persephone) and I am now quite pleased with myself for not gorging on it in two days, because so much thinking and revelation would have been lost. Witness the serendipitous way that reading connects with itself as I picked the book up again only to find that the next story to read (from the front end) happened to be The Exile by Betty Miller (1935). This just as I was reading The Exiles Return by Elisabeth de Waal.

I am new to Betty Miller but on the strength of this one story I will definitely read more. I have a copy of Farewell Leicester Square, and also the lovely old Virago edition of On

the Side of Angels with that fabulous cover. I did know that Betty Miller was the mother of Jonathan Miller but no more, so as always the Persephone website supplies the details...

'...was born in Ireland to a Lithuanian businessman and a Swedish teacher whose (Polish) family was distantly related to the philosopher Henri Bergson. She went to school in London and did a diploma in journalism at University College before publishing the first of her seven novels. In 1933 she married the psychiatrist Emanuel Miller (1892-1970)..'

It all sounds like ample experience to have grown up in the midst of (much like Resi in The Exiles Return) plenty to offer insights into the life of an exile there, and it was fascinating to read this story alongside Elisabeth de Waal's book to further understand the impact of the exile on those around them. There is much discomfort expressed in The Exiles Return which Betty Miller's story elaborates on with great insight.

Irina, the Russian emigree, works as a maid in 'this semi-suburban, semi-countrified village' but is mysteriously being passed around from one home to the next...

'Irina is not the ordinary type of servant. Mrs Clark told me on the 'phone that she was really a very cultured person.'
'Then why's she doing this sort of work?'
'She's an emigre, dear. The revolution in Russia, you know. Why, in Paris there are grand-duchesses who are waitresses and chambermaids.'

An excellent cook, 'adept and thorough at the housework'. willing and very hard working, there seems no apparent reason why once captured this 'real treasure' should not be kept at all costs.

But no one has bargained for the impact of the emigre psyche on those around them...

'There was in their midst someone to whom life meant really nothing: measuring themselves, their joys, their pleasures, ambitions against that awoke on each of them something curiously restive, something that undermined with alarming ease all their ordinary standard of values.'

The guilt at having so much ...'unthinking fleshly profligacy,' when someone else has lost everything and now has so little...

The seeming 'plenty' and the shallowness of the lives that Irina serves discreetly yet very obviously delineated to the reader...

'...prosperous of paunch beneath his waistcoat,'

'..her perfume tantalised the air...'

And then the willing revelation about her husband's brutal demise rapidly dispelling any aura of mystery surrounding Irina's past and invoking even more discomfort in those around her.

Slowly but surely the unease pervades....

'What sort of life are we living...what meaning, what spiritual value...just suffocating in day-to-day material things...doping ourselves comfortably, pretending we'll never die.'

It is clear that Irina is a painful reminder of so much that most would prefer to leave below the surface, and whilst the exile has developed survival and coping strategies borne out of extreme necessity, it is clear that those she serves can only fall back on the securities of home and castle, the exact same thing the exile has lost.

Written in 1935 how prescient this story and that fragility is, given that we know with hindsight that every man's castle is about be threatened beyond anything he could ever have imagined. But the story still feels of relevance now. Those who have been exiled will understand, those of us who may not have been may well be able indentify with the discomfort as we watch a news bulletin these days.

Ultimately Irina is too much of a painful reminder of how quickly everything can be taken away and the answer to that is ...well, I won't spoil it, but if you read either one of these alone, Elisabeth de Waal's The Exiles Return, or Betty Miller's The Exile, definitely seek out the other.

Bluebells...

2013-06-08T00:15:00+01:00

'And azuring-over greybell makes
Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes..'

The May Magnificat - Gerard Manley Hopkins

They seem to have been with us for weeks and weeks this year, or maybe it seems like that because we now have time to go and look and walk through them most days, but the bluebells have been stunning, especially on our sundown walk as the sun seeps through from the west. Rivers of blue that defy words...and every so often we find a brave little hybrid in their midst.

Our eyes seem keenly attuned to blue at the moment with some glorious June evenings to enjoy as we walk up the fields towards the woods...

And then, as we step inside, we are transfixed and have to remember to lift our eyes upwards too, for more magnificence...

It's now hard to remember it looking like this back in January.
Enough words from me this week, Gerard Manley Hopkins has the edge on the fabulous sightings we have enjoyed up in Berry Wood of late...

From Notebooks - May 1871

'But in the clough/ through the light/ they came in falls of sky-colour washing the brows and slacks of the ground with vein-blue, thickening at the double...It was a lovely sight -the bluebells in your hand baffle you with their inscape...the overhung necks - for growing they are little more than a staff with a simple crook... crisp, ruffled bells..'

And on the same theme, from Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Macfarlane ...