dovegreyreader scribbles

Grace and Mary ~ Melvyn Bragg

2013-05-20T00:15:00+01:00

I wonder if anyone else heard Melvyn Bragg on the radio recently, taking no prisoners as he urged the BBC to up its game with Arts programming in the face of increasingly high-standard competition from Sky and Channel Four. He was forthright and very direct ( thank heavens we still have people who can be, and broadcasters who will air such ascerbic criticism of themselves...I love the BBC for it) about programmes shifting from BBC One to the remoter outpost of BBC Four, as well as reducing in frequency, and as far as I can tell only seem to 'star' Alan Yentob these days. It would be nice to see a few new presenting faces. Sky Arts have snapped up super model Lily Cole who has a Cambridge double first in Art History as well as modelling for Alexander McQueen, Auntie would do well to take heed.

Anyway thus was Melvyn perfectly positioned upon my radar when his latest novel Grace and Mary arrived. I can't proclaim much success with his previous novels, and given the focus of this one on ageing and dementia, I wasn't hopeful that Melvyn and I were about to become friends, but on this occasion some disparate planets aligned favourably.

I watched the recent six part series The Village (a BBC success in my book, though not a universal one I gather) because it ties in wonderfully with some of my Beating the Bounds research in connection with our village war memorial. Two lads from the farm that surrounds us here died in the Great War and are named on the memorial. Having harboured all manner of imaginings about how that loss may have impacted on the family, and getting quite caught up in the emotion of thinking about them walking these fields, and what their last visions of home may have been as they lay dying in the trenches (maybe that view from our window even) I decided to find out more. I found out plenty about the family and it has all been a real revelation (which I am still writing up for a future post) but the BBC series gave me some context (fictional or otherwise) for how life may have been lived here at the time.

Grace and Mary, though set in the present day, is also interwoven with a narrative of village life through the Great War. John is visiting Mary, his elderly mother, in a nursing home..

'The mother and son meet mostly in the middle of the last century. After the war. Her disintegrating memory can still take her there... Now she is in her tenth decade, he has just gone seventy, and slowly the roles are reversing... they can still draw warmth from the embers of those days...'

John is treading a gentle path through the miasma of his mother's vascular dementia...

'It was as if it had been sent up from the deep to punish the audacity of the human race in so steadily and cleverly increasing its life span...this creeping undergrowth which strangled the roots of thought.'

Convinced he can still reach the mother he knows, John recreates the story of Grace, Mary's mother. In re-telling the story of Grace's life, and Mary's, and this mother she hardly knew, John hopes to rebuild memory for her, clinging valiantly to the glimmers and brief improvements he hopes this brings to Mary's condition. Except as we know, there is little that can be done to reverse the relentless progress of vascular dementia as it wreaks its trail of destruction...

'...broken and frayed, silted up, chokingly webbed in the intricate threads of ageing...'

Judging by many of my previous reading encounters with this subject, and for reasons various, I expected to find this all thoroughly depressing and far too painful to read. When someone you love has suffered this it can make for hard-earned reading pleasure best avoided. I felt sure I would be waving the white flag of surrender by page fifty, but Melvyn Bragg has been through this too, with his own mother, and his sensitivity to his subject and the depths of love and endless patience, and soothing and caring that John offered his mother won me over, as did the interwoven narrative of Grace.

Writer's take many routes with the subject of dementia and this may be one of the few that has worked for me. I'm a nurse for goodness' sake, I should be able to cope with it, and in real-life I can, but on the fictional page I am highly and subjectively censorious. I need to read of endless kindness being offered to anyone suffering from dementia and the minute an author strays from the path of compassion I'm afraid I just get too upset, invoke reader's prerogative, close the book and move on.

In Mary's world, as constructed by Melvyn Bragg, and in the ideal world that we would hope all dementia sufferers would be cared for, the nurses are endlessly patient, understanding that there will be 'differences of days' and these must be accommodated. When Mary spits her tablets back at them, or becomes abusive, they leave her time to regroup before trying again. But they do try again and with kindness, and they coax the food into her, and sips of drink from the spouted cup, and doubtless those drinks are within reach just in case Mary can manage it herself, and her personal care is dignified and thorough.

It is all sad and poignant, not sentimental... ultimately strangely heartening and giving me the courage to read on.

Strong-willed, single-minded and very determined, Grace's resilience will also be tested to the limits as she mourns the loss of her own mother who died shortly after her birth. It is well-recognised that childhood loss, even of an unknown parent will need to be grieved many times over and Grace is no exception. Finding her way in the world she eventually finds work as a maid in a local home for the wounded soldiers of the Great War.

You can perhaps now see how my walking, watching and reading planets aligned... the lads from the farm and The Village (with a lead character called Grace, brilliantly portrayed by Maxine Peak) all segueing perfectly into this book.

There is a moment in Grace and Mary when Grace and her employer are discussing fiction...

'Agnes enjoyed talking about the characters - were they believable? That was the crucial thing, she said. if you didn't believe in a character how could you possibly go on? And did the writers cheat with the plots?'

No cheating with plot that I noticed and I believed in every one of the characters, even the shadowy and deceitful Alan who Grace falls in love with in the convalescent home, and his embarrassed and evasive parents who Grace finally plucks up the courage to visit when it becomes clear ... no I couldn't possibly spoil it.

But talking of the word, do you remember the days of 'convalescence'??

Days of rest and recovery and recuperation from illness that would set you up properly for life again.

Now it seems you are just so many days post-op/post-viral/ post-chemo until you are well enough to go shopping again.

Themes of memory and loss, recollection and reconnection surround an underlying sense of belief ... in faith, in self, in the soul and in others, and in human nature to prevail for the greater good, as Melvyn Bragg weaves together three generations of a family in Grace and Mary to create a novel that I couldn't put down, and that I knew had been quietly and profoundly moving as I turned the final page.

Just to say...

2013-05-19T11:51:48+01:00

Some of you may recall, as part of the Edward Thomas project on here a couple of years ago, a lovely post that included some pictures of a beautiful, hand-illustrated and bound edition of Edward Thomas's poem Adlestrop, done by ninety-year old Harold Page, Fran H-B's father.

Fran has been a daily visitor here for years, comments regularly, and we meet up occasionally, and indeed Team Edward Thomas saw that work for real as Fran brought it with her when we took tea with author Matthew Hollis as part of the project.

On arriving in Sussex for a few days walking the South Downs with Fran last Monday, before I headed into London, she broke the news that Harold, now ninety-two, had been taken into hospital the day before. All was stable and family support was in place, and Fran had very much wanted my visit to go ahead.

We talked a great deal about her Dad during my stay, and I was almost brought to tears by the sight of the most beautiful book, hand-written and bound by Harold which displayed some of his work as a gift for members of the family. As an artist, with architect's training, Harold had quickly excelled at the art of calligraphy which he took up as a hobby in his seventies, rapidly gathering in diplomas which should have taken many years to achieve.

I had never met Harold, but I learned from Fran that he was a quiet, gentle unassuming man, immensely modest about his talent and utterly thrilled when he saw that blog post and imagined others seeing and enjoying his work.

It was with much sadness that I received Fran's e mail to say that Harold had died suddenly but peacefully on Friday afternoon, and I just wanted to send Fran, her Mum and her family, our love and thoughts and to wish them gentle days ahead.

Harold Page has left the most incredible legacy in his art work and we can but hope for an exhibition, or even a book eventually, I can promise you it would something to behold.

Home...

2013-05-18T00:15:00+01:00

I'm home and with my boots planted firmly in Devon for the forseeable future, and with my head teeming with so much that I have seen in just those few days away.... aren't A Few Days Away such a good invention.

The Fiction Uncovered evening was predictably amazing. It was a treat to meet up with my fellow judges again, and also the Fiction Uncovered team who have worked really hard to make this initiative work, and we all have everything crossed for their next round of Arts Council funding, and so good to finally meet and talk with all the authors after months of getting to know their books. Chair of judges Louise Doughty gave a brilliant speech, introducing each author's book before presenting them with a beautiful hand-bound edition in a slip-case,along with a Kobo e reader and six months membership of the very atmospheric and exclusive club where the event was being held. So exclusive there is no sign on the door and the building so Ancient London you need crampons and ropes to cross the wonky floors and get up the stairs. We suggested, rather tongue in cheek, that this membership 'gift' be extended to the judges in future, so whilst we may not benefit those ahead of us just might... maybe. I was separated from my camera by about ten foot of floor and about a hundred people, so no pictures from me though there was an official photographer so I expect some will emerge, but it was good to chat to lots of people about books and reading and this.

I still genuinely nurse very modest notions of the impact or the reach of dovegreyreader as I sit writing it tucked away here in Devon, and for me that's best because I still find myself amazed and slightly over-awed when people spell it out to me... lots of lovely people said very nice things, and in turn I spent a lot of time saying how much it depended and thrived on all of you too, so please take a minute to pat yourselves on the back... just don't put your neck out doing it or anything.

I couldn't resist heading out round the corner to look at Foyle's window ...

... which will have a display of the books for the next two weeks, and how good they those books looked, what breadth and depth there is to our choices, and how proud I felt to have been part of it all. That hard reading work coming to fruition and carrying on with it through the worst winter I have had for plagues and shocks and life-changes since...since... oh probably since the last time.

And alright, so I did ask someone if they would mind leaning slightly further long the window so I could get this shot...

and then asking them to move back again so I could get this one...

Thank you whoever you were.

But en route to London I had spent a few days walking the South Downs with Fran H-B. We gave ourselves a Ravilious Day and a Bloomsbury Day and my sincere thanks to Fran, a Sussex native, for giving me such a wonderful taste of the joys that are to behold in this amazing landscape.

The weather didn't stop us checking out the Long Man of Wilmington...

before heading up and over the top of his head for the heart-soaring Ravilious views.

The Cuckmere Valley, Beachy Head, the Seven Sisters followed, and the next much sunnier day Berwick Church, Monk's House (home of Virginia Woolf) and Charleston. More soon when I have thought it all through and have the dovegreyreader perspective on it all.

Meanwhile, should I ever think about getting even a little bit above myself, there is no greater leveller than coming back to the realities of home.

There is no more cold and desolate place than Paddington Station at 10.15 pm.

The waiting rooms are closed except for the glowing warmth of the First Class lounge, forbidden territory for us mere mortals, and there is nowhere to sit on the platform bar the ledge on the war memorial while you wait for the train crew to let you board. Realising I hadn't really eaten all day I could wait no longer so perched and ate my M&S chicken salad in the hope it wasn't deemed too irreverent..

The Night Riviera Sleeper cradle-rocked me back to Devon in that sort of almost-sleep that isn't quite, and where Bookhound was miraculously waiting for me at 5.30am. I had two loads of washing done and out on the line by 8.00am.. so as we were etc but refreshed and with lots to tell you.

It's @FictionUncovered Day

2013-05-16T00:15:00+01:00

So, if all goes according to plan, this evening I will be in London celebrating with the Fiction Uncovered 2013 authors and their books and guests various.

My thanks to chair of judges Louise Doughty and fellow judges Sandeep Mahal and Courttia Newland who have made the whole process such a pleasure, and to the team at Fiction Uncovered for inviting me to do this and for being so helpful and patient (Help... I've lost all the e book versions, can you resend them) and so accommodating when I was confined to my kitchen table and Skype for some of the meetings... and had to watch them all eating Sandy's homemade samosas at the other end.

I think we have come up with a great and varied selection of reading, and I have personally enjoyed each and every one of these books so I hope many of you will enjoy them too...

The Fiction Uncovered 2013 selection is

Lucy Caldwell - All the Beggars Riding

Lucy Caldwell was born in Belfast in 1981. She read English at Queens' College, Cambridge and is a graduate of Goldsmith's MA in Creative & Life Writing. She is the author of novels Where They Were Missed (2006) and The Meeting Point (2011), which featured on BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime and was awarded the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her stage plays, Leaves, Guardians, and Notes to Future Self, and radio dramas, Girl From Mars, Avenues of Eternal Peace, Witch Week, have won awards including the George Devine Award and the Imison Award. In 2011 she was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature for her body of work to date.

“The cul-de-sac that is an affair with a married man…loved precisely because he is the sort who won’t leave his wife and children for fear of hurting them. Patrick’s death exposes the fabric of this fragile and tangled web, offering a jagged, searing and intense perspective on love, loss, the chaos of memory and so much more. Grief is what you feel, mourning is what you do, and in this insightful and memorable novel Lucy Caldwell displays a real understanding of that as she explores the lives and the fall-out for the children.” Lynne Hatwell

Anthony Cartwright - How I Killed Margaret Thatcher

Anthony Cartwright was born in Dudley in 1973. He is the author of two previous novels, The Afterglow and Heartland. His books have been shortlisted for several established literary prizes. He worked as an English teacher in East London for a number of years and is currently a school writer-in-residence as part of the First Story project. He lives in North London with his wife and son.

“While some books capture the spirit of a specific time and place, others paint a broad canvas which speaks of timelessness and exact a relevance all of their own. Cartwright manages both in this masterful exploration that has the quiet power of a pebble thrown into a stream, creating ever increasing circles; a boy, a family, a community, a country; to explain not only what happened in ‘80s England, but how we reached the here and now. An urgently necessary work.” Courttia Newland

Niven Govinden - Black Bread White Beer

Niven Govinden is author of novels We Are The New Romantics, Graffiti My Soul, and Black Bread White Beer. His stories have appeared in Five Dials, Time Out, Pen Pusher, First City, BUTT, and on Radio 3. He has been shortlisted for the 2010 Bristol Prize and longlisted for the 2013 DSC Prize.

“A couple’s relationship exposed through the excruciating grief of an early miscarriage, and Niven Govinden’s novel explores every painful corner of this less-written about and much-misunderstood subject. Amal and Claud struggle to make sense of what has happened to them against a background of assumptions, high expectations and social pressures. This is a fluent, involving and beautifully written novel that takes the reader’s sympathies and emotions to the quietest, often most unrecognised limits of human pain.” Lynne Hatwell

Nikita Lalwani - The Village

Nikita Lalwani was born in Rajasthan and raised in Cardiff. Her first novel, Gifted, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and won the Desmond Elliot Prize for New Fiction. Nikita Lalwani was shortlisted for the 2008 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. She lives in London.

“In The Village, Nikita Lalwani goes to a world few readers will have heard about, a model prison in India, set up as a social experiment, where people who have committed murder live in a self-sustaining community. Ray Bhullar is part of a documentary team from the UK, living in the village for two months - but she soon discovers that issues of guilt and culpability are far more complex than first appears. Lalwani has a rare gift for getting inside character; you believe equally in the team from media London and a poverty stricken woman who has murdered her husband, in a tough, engaging and often funny read where all your preconceptions will be overturned and no-one is quite how they seem.” Louise Doughty

Nell Leyshon - The Colour of Milk

Nell Leyshon's first novel, Black Dirt, was long-listed for the Orange Prize, and shortlisted for the Commonwealth prize. Her plays include Comfort me with Apples, which won an Evening Standard Award, and Bedlam, which was the first play written by a woman for Shakespeare's Globe. She writes for BBC Radio 3 and 4, and won the Richard Imison Award for her first radio play. Nell was born in Glastonbury and lives in Dorset.

“Set in 1830, we follow the personal journal of a fourteen-year-old farm girl with hair the ‘colour of milk’. Mary is the youngest of four daughters who has a strong spirit and desire to learn how to read and write. This book follows the growing relationship between Mary and the local vicar where she is sent to live to care for his invalid wife and to serve as a domestic servant and where she also begins to learn. She sets out her story in her own unique, halting prose, telling the truth in her brutal surroundings. Imaginatively conceived, Nell Leyshon has perfectly captured characters of its time and beautiful prose filled with truth, hope and anticipation that makes this novel a pure joy to read.” Sandeep Mahal

James Meek - The Heart Broke In

James Meek was born in London in 1962 and grew up in Dundee. His novel The People's Act of Love (2005) won the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, the SAC Book of the Year Award, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and has been published in more than thirty countries. His latest novel The Heart Broke In (2012) was shortlisted for the Costa Book Award 2012 and his novel We Are Now Beginning our Descent (2008) won the Prince Maurice Prize. He is the author of two other novels and two collections of short stories. His journalism has won a number of British and international awards. He lives in London.

“James Meek is one of our best novelists and surely the nearest thing the UK has to a John Irving; his fat, compulsive, brilliant books have wide ranging narratives that cover world issues as well as the stories at the centre of the human heart. Ritchie Shepherd is a television producer with a dark secret; his sister Bec an idealistic scientist with a troubled love life. As both of them struggle to make sense of their father's death at the hands of the IRA and their own complex lives, Ritchie is forced to betray his sister to the tabloid press lest his own secrets be revealed. Few novelists writing today have such an acute ear for the nuances of family life and relationships - but Meek never forgets to set his human stories in a social context, making him a supreme contemporary satirist as well storyteller.” Louise Doughty

Amy Sackville - Orkney

Amy Sackville was born in 1981. She studied English and Theatre Studies at Leeds, and went on to an MPhil in English at Exeter College, Oxford, and an MA in Creative & Life Writing at Goldsmiths. Her first novel was The Still Point.

“A truly talented writer, Amy Sackville has finely constructed a beautiful, mystical novel of love, obsession and loss. Set on a remote Orkney island, Richard, a sixty-year-old English professor is captivated by his lovely young bride. The story unfolds slowly, beginning with excitement and the allure of romance, but the mood changes into something darker. The atmosphere is intense and the change dramatic, as Richard’s love grows obsessive. Sackville’s skill is in her poetic, lyrical writing, full of rich and emotive feelings, the ebb and flow of the waves and descriptions of the beauty, colours and wildness of the islands. An impressive novel.” Sandeep Mahal

Rupert Thomson - Secrecy

Rupert Thomson was born in Eastbourne, and educated at Christ’s Hospital School and Cambridge University, where he studied Medieval History and Political Thought. He is the author of eight critically acclaimed novels, including The Insult, which was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize, Death of a Murderer, which was shortlisted for the Costa Prize, and The Book of Revelation, which was made into a feature film by the Australian writer/director, Ana Kokkinos. In 2010 he published a memoir, This Party’s Got to Stop, which won the Writers’ Guild Non Fiction Book of the Year. His new novel, Secrecy, was inspired by the life and work of the eccentric Sicilian wax artist, Gaetano Giulio Zumbo. Rupert Thomson has recently moved back to London.

“A splendorous, dark examination of the artist's mind set in a politically tumultuous Florence where shadowed streets and alleys mask cruelty and beauty in equal measure. Secrecy, like one of Zummo's visionary creations, is a twisted hybrid of fantastical reality, stark and terrifying, that compels you to acknowledge its existence. Daringly bold and decadent, as only Thompson can.” Courttia Newland

This and that...

2013-05-12T00:15:00+01:00

Where on earth do the weeks go when you are happy and content??

I don't ever remember time flying by quite this fast before. It's Monday and then the next thing I know it's Sunday again, and the Fiction Uncovered announcement seemed weeks and weeks away when I booked my train tickets for London, and now it is upon us this coming Thursday.

But whilst it flies, nicest of all is the whole notion of having time to do exactly what I want to do when I want to do it, and yesterday that involved much hovering around NASA TV watching the hastily planned space walk to repair a faulty pump that was leaking ammonia outside on the International Space Station. I find it hard to believe that they are working out there on something that is travelling at 75,000 miles an hour or so, but all is good, I shouted instructions and the lads got the gist, got the new pump round the right way on the P6 truss (imagine getting it back to front and having to unpick it) and all is working fine so mission accomplished. Cdr Chris Hadfield, who has done much to enlighten and inform many of us who have been following his daily pictures of earth from space, returns to earth this week and I am not sure what I am going to do without his daily pictures. But here's to a safe journey, and let's hope the queue at passport control isn't overly long and that they can get the duty free past customs.

And let's hope the weather for re-entry is better than this; the storm that took the blossom off our apple trees earlier this week heading away from us to Ireland, but see too how the clouds sit perfectly over the English mainland clearly outlining its shape. A-M-A-Z-I-N-G.

Talking of space, I am going to be on the dark side of the moon in terms of internet and computer access this week as I will be on my travels towards London from Monday onwards, so dovegreyreader will be having a little rest. I have more great reads ready to share but I want to be around to chat in comments with you all... and thank you so much for the Life After Life discussions. I am inspired enough to be taking a new view on Kate Atkinson's writing, and she is another author I plan a Start to Finish read with, so I will taking Behind the Scenes at the Museum for my travel reading this week.

And in the wake of The Great British Sewing Bee post and all your comments, I have sourced a nice skirt pattern (amongst others) from Sew Essentials, flicking through the virtual catalogues I discovered new-to-me Kwik Sew patterns, so the task will be commencing on my return.

In the early hours of Thursday morning I can announce the Fiction Uncovered selection so look out for a blog post then. I will be heading for the celebrations with the authors and guests various that evening before heading home on the sleeper train. I have booked a cupboard cabin on the Night Riviera, about which I am stupidly excited.

In the meantime feast your eyes on this fabulous colour video footage of London in 1927, and then try and stop yourself wanting to read Mrs Dalloway once it has finished. Of course if you hate Mrs Dalloway you won't have that problem, but I have started it again already.

"In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.”

The Great British Sewing Bee.

2013-05-10T00:15:00+01:00

I'm wondering if any of you here in the UK watched The Great British Sewing Bee??

This the recent series where amateur sewers took on challenges as they competed to be named Britain's best home sewer. Ann was a worthy winner but I'll admit I wasn't quite sure how the series would work.

Might it be like watching paint dry...

Can you make sewing as interesting as baking on TV...

Can you introduce some stress and meltdown to add to the viewer's interest...

More to the point could Claudia Winkleman, and her canopy of a fringe, carry it off.

But no matter, I love Claudia, she's a breath of fresh air and clearly not a seamstress herself so brought her usual self-effacing wit and humour to the proceedings, whilst judges Patrick Grant (Savile Row tailor) and May Martin (W.I.) cast a critical eye over the resulting garments. I'd be quaking in my boots if the pair of them turned anything I had made inside-out, so when I get back to it I might impose the discipline of a few French seams on myself rather than let the washing machine fray the raw edges into submission.

I was quickly engrossed and ultimately I think Claudia's fringe might have been the only slightly annoying accessory to the whole series. Was I alone I wondered... half hoping that Patrick would pick up the Fiskars and tailor it just a little...

'Well Claudia...the aim is for a neat and tailored look so we must finish your edges properly.'

The stress was readily induced by giving contestants about ten minutes to make a ballgown. In fact that task was allocated about seven hours, ( I would still have needed a long week at minimum) and it was fascinating to watch the different approaches. Those who spent half the time prepping, tacking and making toiles ( a mock-up in cotton fabric) before the scissors came within a mile of the fabric, versus those who leapt right in and guessed, and the subsequent triumphs and disasters. Those who were calm under pressure, those who crumpled into a heap of tears, and they were hardly in a situation where, if it went wrong, they could shove it in a bag and turn it into cushion covers in five years time. I could feel myself wilting inwardly in spirit as someone unpicked a back-to-front something (oh, the times...)

I have no idea about the cumulative effect on the nation, or sewing machine sales, but I do know that every Wednesday morning all I wanted to do was get out a paper pattern, smooth out the fabric for cutting and fire up the Bernina. All I would need in that case was...well a paper pattern and some fabric. I fancied making a flippy summer skirt or two, home-made Boden-style, and how easy that would have been years ago, but how impossible it seems to be these days.

Where to buy paper patterns is the first hurdle. Online, yes, a possibility I discover, but that doesn't feel right at all. I have to go and stand in the shop at the sloping shelf, and leaf my way through the dog-eared corners of the enormous Simplicity, Butterick and McCalls catalogues, and keep an eye on that woman over there who is hogging the Vogue. Then of course I must brave the woman behind the counter with her glasses on a gold cord, and the 'This CANNOT be exchanged' stamp.

Certainly there is nowhere within a reasonable distance from here now, though I had felt sure (wrongly) that John Lewis in Exeter would have stolen a march on all this and stocked up with a little pattern department, and with dress-making fabrics too, so that was a wasted trip. And then dressmaking fabric seems obsolete too, acres of furnishing fabrics but who wants to go out looking like a Parker Knoll armchair. The whole industry seems to have wound down into a sad and sorry decline here in the West Country at least, and may need to crank up again if this series carries on.

But no matter, this is me after all, I have never thrown a paper pattern away, there'd be something in the loft. When I got the box down I realised that I get it from my Mum because she didn't seem to have thrown a paper pattern away either, and I had inherited them.

Just browsing the box was like a journey through a history of my clothes...

To the right, my first ever party frock. Mine was yellow and had that wonderful stiff lining that buoyed the skirt out.

Then, branching out on my own machine, I made every permutation of this lot, including that rather 1980s Dallas-style dress on the right which required 5 3/8 yds of suggested fabric... Crepe de Chine, Voile, Georgette, Crepe or Lightweight Cotton. I remember I chose something cheesecloth-like and was in a state of advanced and picklish turmoil from the off.

The obvious problems about using them again are style and ...ahem... pattern size. I am not huge but I know I will have altered the Size 12 patterns to a very snug fit forty years ago, and I'm not sure puffed sleeves and flared skirts are ready for the comeback yet.

But its not just my wardrobe. I know the 1980s passed in a blur of childbearing but I was delighted to see that I must still have found time to sew because there are plenty of more recent children's patterns in the box, and does anyone remember Lewes-based company Clothkits??

Quirky chidren's clothes and in days of yore the pattern was marked on the fabric so all you had to do was cut and sew. I wondered what had happened to them and I am delighted to see that Clothkits have been re-born.

I must confess I would cheat horribly back in the day because they were expensive. I'd buy one kit, make a paper pattern from the pieces and then proceed to make loads of them to my own fabric specifications and child-sizes various. Thirty years have passed, I should be let off for good behaviour.

I am no further on with my summer skirt, except that as I watched the programme I did realise that, thanks to my Mum's tutelage, I could probably have tackled many of the set tasks and so why not draft a pattern from an existing skirt. It has all re-kindled my 'alteration' courage too, so half a waistband completely unpicked on a pair of new Craghopper walking trousers, the firmly entrenched but unwanted elastic removed from the back, and the whole rejoined to make a much nicer garment. Bookhound walked in and said 'You have three minutes left for this task,' which admittedly did phase me momentarily, but I feel sure Patrick and May would be delighted with my efforts.

Anyone else out there making their own...

Anyone inspired to start..

Life After Life ~ Kate Atkinson

2013-05-08T00:15:00+01:00

'You can step in the same river but the water will always be new.'

I wonder what you all do when you turn the final page of a book.

On turning the final page of Kate Atkinson's latest novel Life After Life I just heaved a great big sigh of relief.

Relief that I had got there and that I had persevered through when I will admit there were moments when I wanted to give up. Could I really bear to go back to the beginning and read Ursula's life over again...and again...and..

By page 150 I had written ..

'Is this the cleverest or the most annoying and frustrating book I have ever read.'

But relief too that I had kept going because ultimately I think I have enjoyed it and the book has given me much to think about.

Mostly I am confused and mostly I think I am supposed to be.

I am not sure the definitive penny has dropped yet, and with many questions unanswered I am surprised that I feel any sense of satisfaction at all, but oddly I do. Compelled to read on for an answer, in the end I'm not sure there is one, and maybe that's the whole point. There is no single 'right' way to read or interpret Life After Life, of that I feel sure, and I suspect everyone will read a subtly different book which probably makes it very clever indeed.

The premise is indeed clever, so much so that I could only wonder why no one had thought of it in quite this format before (maybe they have and I have missed it) but what if you could live your life again and do things differently, and when it didn't go right that time either, just start again. Each new life seems to offer Ursula Todd the chance to alter events and redeem the traumas of a previous one; the assault can be neatly side-stepped, the violent marriage avoided, someone need not die, and in many ways there is a sense of deep satisfaction to this for a reader. It avoids all the 'wonder what would have happened if...' because Kate Atkinson deals with that to the point where you could be left with nothing to wonder about at all. Except that is not the case, I have thought of little else but Life After Life since I finished it, so I am grateful to Kate Atkinson for lightening the load a little.

Chance, fate, coincidence and free will are all cornered and addressed by Ursula's reincarnations, up-ending one of the many fundamentals of human experience... that you can't change what has happened therefore you just have to make the best and learn to live with it. Shifting too the reasoning behind that fundamental... that more often than not you did the best you could at the time, given what you knew, what you were capable of and which circumstances would allow. There is comfort in that if you can achieve the mindset but Ursula doesn't need to, she will be given many chances.

Underlying the premise of rebirth is Ursula's experience of deja vu, both alluded to in the briefest of moments...

'Catch me next time round,'...

'It was a long time ago and it was yesterday.'

I doubt we have any greater understanding of deja vu now than they did in the early 1900s when Life After Life is set; maybe even less given the need for evidence-based everything these days. But I also spent some time pondering the possible reasons for Kate Atkinson's choice of 1910 as Ursula's birth year. Apart from the obvious plot device of ensuring she was the right age for the wars I could only wonder whether Virginia Woolf's proclamation had some significance here too..

'And now I will hazard a second assertion, which is more disputable perhaps, to the effect that on or about December, 1910, human character changed.
I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless; and, since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910.'

(Virginia Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, 1923)

Change was the key currency here, and plenty of it. The book places the God-like power of the author centre stage as Kate Atkinson pulls the strings of Ursula's life this way and that. The impossibilities of life become the possibilities of fiction. An early initial outcome of that for me was a high level of reader anxiety, and I'll own up to some early doubts and dissatisfaction at having the story 'taken away' from me yet again, flicking ahead nervously to see if a chapter was going to end with the words 'Darkness fell', a sure sign that Ursula and I would be rewinding and taking a different path through the same landscape.

When I was about halfway through Life After Life, and in something of a fictional whirlpool of chaos and confusion with it, we happened to have one of those nights. It is a known fact that when the dogs are barking on and off through the night here because... well who can know why... maybe a fox or a badger is snuffling around the kennel, that by 4am it is incumbent upon someone to go out and let them out for a run or shout at them ask them nicely to be quiet, and settle them back down again.

It happens.

So I stayed put (you really didn't think it would be me did you?) and Bookhound went out along the lane in his dressing gown and wellies with three hyper-sprung dogs, hoping against hope that it wasn't the night that the Plymouth Car Club were having their Moonlight Rally (it happens too). By this time I am wide awake, Bookhound came back in reporting that the Tamar Valley was an echoing vale of noisy animals, he made a cup of tea and I settled down to read some more of Life After Life.

It is a book that was puzzling me on many fronts, and I couldn't have said hand on heart at that stage that I was loving it, though there is much in it that I was admiring for its cleverness and originality. Now it is about 4.45 am, the dawn chorus is in progress and I am on the iPad and skimming (for fear of spoilers) through some of the superlative reviews that the book has garnered. Truly not an ill word amongst them, and thence I went to the Radio Four Open Book Interview between Kate Atkinson and Mariella Frostrup for some more insight.

It was interesting to hear Kate Atkinson talking about the book and how she really had no plan, it just evolved... no post-it notes plastering the walls, everything kept in her head, which must have been like spinning plates on poles as far as I can tell, and a medal for anyone who has read this on a Kindle because I have spent my life flicking back and forth to check the dates. I read a bit more and it was obvious that when my next circadian rhythm came around and I dropped off to sleep, I was either going to dream about the book, Kate Atkinson, Mariella Frostrup, or all three.

In fact it was Kate Atkinson.

Kate Atkinson came round and offered to sign my copy for me which I thought was really nice of her considering the house is so hard to find. There was a sharp intake of breath, a tsk and a slight hesitation when she saw the book and how much I had written on the page where she should sign her name. Then she wrote (in red ink I ask you, and over my pencil scribbles) thanking me for reading the book so carefully and for writing such nice things about it.

Given that I hadn't even finished it, search me how Kate Atkinson knew what I might say about the book before I had even thought it... surely not deja vu or something, and I am not sure I have said nice things, but I am delighted to have read Life After Life. It is a book that will stay with me for a very long time, and though I am famed for my loyalty to our 'ilary' and Bring Up the Bodies, if this one wins the Women's Prize for Fiction I wouldn't be suprised, and nor would I be as disappointed as I might have been.

And I suspect Hilary Mantel would be gracious about it too. In a predictably brilliant 1996 London Review of Books piece on Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum (a book I loved and a piece I ended up buying online because having read the first quarter I then had to read the other three quarters, e mail me for details) Hilary Mantel is unstinting with her praise...

'Just when you think you have understood how her book works she will undeceive you....On a second anatomist's reading, the book's articulation shows clearly, its bones and joints almost perfectly aligned; Atkinson cares for structure and here is a delicate but robust skeleton on which hangs the muscle of narrative force and the tissue of loss and sadness...'

Right, over to you...I know quite a few of you have read Life After Life so please do share your thoughts, and even if you haven't read it, are you tempted...