Susan Green

Here, sweet peas are in full bloom. I have rigged up a set of wire coathangers on chicken netting and old poles to make a fence for them.  I found a set of wire shelves which I brought home and leaned among the wires so that the sweet peas could cling to them. And now they do.

Entangled in one of life’s more brilliant snares, which do not concern us here, the garden is a miracle of consolation. Even such a little thing as transplanting beetroot sown in the seed box months ago…is almost mystical in the way it soothes me.

Gardens are my obsession at present. Because the garden soothes, consoles and delights me, I suppose, and the wet, cold weather makes my dirt play sessions few and far between. So, books.

Currently on loan I have books on propagation, re-wilding, the genus eremophila or emu-bush, dry-climate gardening and Kate Llewellyn’s A Fig at the Gate. It’s a long time since I read her previous garden diaries, The Waterlily (Blue Mountains) and Playing with Water (north of Wollongong). This one, published in 2014, is a four year record of establishing her latest (last?) garden in Adelaide, only a kilometre from the sea.

I must be reading for contrast. Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time was set in an English village, the writer/gardener had plenty of water, fertile soil, the bones of a beautiful garden and importantly, lots of money for rare and special plants, hard landscaping and labour. Olivia Laing’s book is a complex, structured hybrid of gardening memoir, history and biography. Heavy going at times (slavery, madness, civil war).
Poet Kate Llewellyn’s is a meandering diary of creating on a shoestring on a flat suburban block, planting and watering and harvesting, learning how to keep chooks, prowling the streets to scavenge or salvage plants and building materials (and carry them back home on her pushbike!) and buying plants at her local Bunnings. And friendship, ageing, joy, stray thoughts and observations –  and poetry. Parsnips!

Earth’s long ivory tooth
is a  buried smile
which becomes
winter’s snarl…

All of which is much more my style at present.

Today I felt as old as Methuselah. And I understood, as I have for some time, that I would not be young again, which seems blazingly obvious, but it is a surprise, as I said, to find how slow one is to comprehend such a rational thing. For instance, when I serve afternoon tea to the children working in the garden, I feel I am pretending to be an old woman; just going through the motions, as if in a play. I am very convincing.

We have lived for over seventy years in a world of motorways, roundabouts, high-rises, cooling towers, malls and pylons. They are part of a century that is already way behind us, slipping quickly into history. The structures that we think of as ‘modern’ are in fact analogue relics of a bygone era before digital technology, mobile phones and the internet. Generations have lived and died among them, played among them, attached memories to them… They have been around long enough to be layered with stories as they gradually decay… However mundane or brutal they might be, these are places we remember, in which our daily dramas unfold…Inside each of us is a rich anthology of tiny , yet meaningful moments, played out in locations that have acquired dramatic qualities as a result – the hospital, the shopping centre, the service station, the cul-de-sac, the tumbledown wasteland.

I picked this book up for $1 at the last library sale. Bargain! It’s so good to read something that makes you look at your world in a new way. Or in my case, remember that I can. Gareth Rees travels to the overlooked places of Britain and finds magic and mystery in the most unexpected places. He finds people who are strangely drawn to electricity pylons, who believe that ring roads and roundabouts are ‘energy circles’, that housing estates and motorways can be haunted by the deep past or by recent tragedies, that the edgelands of industrial estates are ‘thin places’, where strange beasts roam and urban legends begin. Unofficial Britain is grimy, grotty, littered, decaying; the reverse of ‘Heritage Britain’ of stately homes and picturesque villages and meandering streams. But Rees makes the point that because Britain has been inhabited for thousands of years, the present-day built environment is constructed on top of a timeline of structures ranging from Neolithic grave sites to Medieval monasteries to Victorian slums. And the inhabitants have all left traces of gods, ghosts and demons.

British children’s writers have been especially good at exploring the myth and magic of this layered landscape, but often the stories are set in the countryside, on old houses, in ancient landscapes. One exception I can think of is Alan Garner’s Elidor. This book has encouraged me to find mystery and strangeness in the everyday, and not reject it because it’s not Country Style or Gardens Illustrated.

And finally, reading Unofficial Britain, I was reminded of the day when, almost insane with prolonged insomnia (it took nearly a year to resolve), I got out of the train at a suburban station and happened to look down at the track. No, no, I wasn’t going to jump; I was entranced by the detritus amongst the blue-metal. The brilliant flashes of colour from bits of plastic and discarded wrappers, the shapes of squashed plastic bottles, the patterns of cigarette butts and bottle tops. Because my poor brain had been taken to the absolute limit by lack of sleep, I didn’t identify ‘rubbish’; I was just flooded by amazement and wonder. Very trippy. I’d like to be able to access that innocent, non-judgemental, wonder-finding eye from time to time, but with sleep.

I was hanging out for the release of this book. I love Olivia Laing’s writing, I love gardens and gardening, I’d read the reviews (poetry and literature and history and digging holes and watching the green spikes of unexpected bulbs, right up my garden path) and I fully expected to love The Garden Against Time.
Well, I liked it.

It’s not that it fell flat, or was not up to Laing’s usual standard. Olivia Laing is a master of the art of intertwining. In the books I’ve read (To the River, The Trip to Echo Springs, The Lonely City, Everybody) she weaves memoir, literature, history, biography, sociology and politics with acute and often poetic observations of her environment. Rebecca Solnit is another writer who does this beautifully, but I especially enjoy Laing’s Englishness.

In this case – and it could just be that the broken-ness of the world is pressing down more than usual on my heart – it was all too much. I know that the slave trade funded many of the great country estates and their lavish gardens. I know about whole villages being demolished so His Lordship could have an uninterrupted view. I know that having a garden is an unimaginable privilege for millions. Or billions.

There was also lot I didn’t know – about John Milton and John Clare and many of the other writers and topics she introduced, and I read with interest. I agree with Laing that in a perfect world, a garden – a plot of earth, a green space, somewhere beautiful, somewhere productive –  would be a right, not the preserve of wealth or inherited privilege. But when I garden, I seek the moment, not time past. The sun on my face, the sound of a bird, the sensation of roots letting go – or not – as I pull a weed. Laing, when she actually concentrates on her own garden-making – the hands in the dirt, the dreaming and planning and watching – writes like an angel and I’m there with her. With her time, labour, love and, it has to be said, pots of money, we read along as a neglected but once lovely garden comes to life. It’s a bit The Secret Garden, and it’s what I was there for, not the other stuff, Philistine that I am.

I’ve seen photographs of Laing in among the greenery in a glossy British gardening magazine, and it’s a gorgeous bit of Paradise. My own is scruffy and weedy, a perpetual work in progress, a tussle with time and lack of it, with my ageing body and the changing climate. At the beginning of year, I had the thought that I would enjoy my garden more if I could only get on top of it. And it hit me that I was never going to get on top of it, ever.

So I should just enjoy it. And I do.

Neurotribes is a journey through the history of autism, and I’m sorry to say that some of that history is almost incomprehensibly cruel. Like the Nazi policy turning long-care institutions for the care of disabled children into death factories – actually run by the doctors and nurses. And the psychoanalytic theory that blamed ‘refrigerator’ mothers for their child’s condition. And the use of electric shocks to ‘train’ autistic children into neurotypical behaviour…

Asperger’s. Aspies. Hans Asperger was not the only scientist to study of autism, but it was his decade of hands-on research at the Children’s Clinic at the University of Vienna in the 1920s that led to the his name being attached to the syndrome.  Asperger realised that the condition was more like a continuum, and he recognised the special talents and abilities that it conferred on some of his patients; he called them his ‘little professors’. Then came the rise of Hitler, and the wholesale euthanasia – dubbed ‘negative population policies’  – of disabled children. (Killing was called ‘final medical assistance’!)  Asperger’s role seems murky, though he did try to advocate for his ‘little professors’ by stressing the possible uses of their unusual intelligence. After the end of WWII, Asperger’s original concept of autism as ‘a broad and inclusive spectrum…that was “not at all rare” was buried with the ashes of his clinic and the unspeakable memories of that dark time, along with his case records. Much of his writing was never translated from the German, and it was left to another European medico, Baltimore child psychiatrist Leo Kanner, to become the world’s foremost expert. By now, we are so used to thinking of autism as a spectrum that it comes as a bit of a surprise to find out that in the United States the concept was largely lost for decades.

After detailing this early history, Silberman hits his stride with a savage critique of the American medical and psychiatric establishment in the ’50’s and’60’s. Apart from the outright cruelty meted out to autistic children and adults, it’s the sheer wrong-headedness of the ‘experts’ that is so confronting. Kanner’s conception of autism ruled, and it was narrower than Asperger’s. In his opinion, it was was condition of childhood only (thus ignoring autistic teenagers and adults completely) and extremely rare. It became widely accepted that autistic children were not educable and should be institutionalised.
Desperate parents tried medication, behavioural modification, ECT, dietary interventions, psychotherapy and all sorts of expensive quackery. The search for a cause and a cure led to all sorts of theories, from genetic abnormality to toxic chemicals from industry to poor parenting. Imagine routinely telling mothers their child’s autism is their fault for being cold, unresponsive ‘refrigerator mothers’. No wonder autism was a devastating diagnosis.

But there are positive and hopeful stories in here too. One of the real heroes of the book is Dr Lorna Wing, the British psychiatrist who coined the phrase ‘autism spectrum’, and whose mission was to discover what kinds of treatment, assistance and services autistic people and their families needed. Did it help that she was a woman, and that she herself had an autistic child? All sorts of neurodiverse lives are better because of her compassionate, practical approach.

I could go on and on…but it’s a long book! I thoroughly recommend Neurotribes if you are interested in neurodivergence; Silberman has written a deeply human history and made sense of a complex, troubling and epic topic. It made me think about my time working in a ‘sheltered workshop’ with intellectually handicapped adults in the late 1970s.
If they’d been born in Germany in the 1920s and ’30’s, they could have been killed as babies or toddlers. I started to remember their unique personalities; I can still hear Joey imitating car engines, bird calls, radio hosts, pop songs and more with spooky accuracy, and the way Ellen would ‘twinkle’ her fingers when she was thinking (which is a little habit I caught and still, even now, revert to at times).  There were dramas, problems and meltdowns, but also laughter and much affection.

After reading Neurotribes I wonder how many of our clients were autistic. With the right kind of targeted education and therapy, would they have had more fulfilling lives?

The ‘Career Novels for Girls’ were listed on the back cover of this book, Catrin in Wales, which is actually almost an anti-career book. As you will see.

Our young heroine, 18-year-old Catrin, is restless after completing her secretarial studies. Before moving to London to share a flat with her girlfriend Penelope (a high-flying PA), she wants to spread her wings. So she leaves her father, stepmother and step-sister in their suburban home and heads off to Wales. It’s the homeland of her dead mother, and she intends to stay in youth hostels and simply wander. She’s shy and nervous, but determined.

Everything changes when she decides to stay with her aunt Mair, the guardian of a remote historical site, the Priory of Nant Gwyncwfn. When her aunt breaks her leg, a few days visit turns into months as she takes on the running of the Priory, gets to know her neighbours (especially brother and sister Gwenfron and Ifor Williams) and begins to take an interest in Welsh language, culture and history. Though at first she dislikes the isolation and loneliness of the countryside, she overcomes her fears, grows in confidence and competence and comes to love North Wales and the community in the valley. The book ends with Catrin’s engagement to farmer-playwright Ifor and the excitement of the International Eisteddfod.

Though Catrin in Wales was certainly readable (well, I read it, didn’t I?) I kept thinking about what I would do with the material. The story meanders along, with any excitement fairly muted (fears and alarms in the spooky old house, attempts to drive her away by a jealous rival for Ifor’s attention, her rescue of a little boy stuck on a high rock wall, the romance with Ifor). Frustratingly, Allan briefly touches on a lot of themes I think are worth exploring. Welsh nationalism, for one. The flooding of Welsh valleys to provide water for large English cities. Catrin’s cool relationship with her stepmother. Her lack of direction. Careers for girls and women.

Even the romance is a pretty tepid affair – Catrin’s real attraction seems to be to Gwenfon, who is a couple of years older than her. The two girls quickly form a close bond. Unlike Catrin, who did her secretarial training simply because it offered a job and independence, Gwenfon has a real passion. She’s going to train as a nurse.

I gave her a wondering look and went on my way alone, wondering about the difference in people…though I admired nurses with all my heart, I was always glad to get away from the  long wards full of sufferers and bleak, bare corridors. To make it one’s life, willingly and even eagerly, was beyond me. But perhaps I would learn to understand as I got to know Gwenfon better.

Catrin makes a success of managing the Priory, and even finds she has a flair for presenting its history to tourists. Without Ifor on the scene, there could have been a satisfying story in her friendship with Gwenefon and her discovery of a vocation. But she is  happy to become a farmer’s wife in the remote Welsh valley (and a playwright’s wife in London). Nothing wrong with that! I tell myself. But at 18?

Despite the very ‘junior fiction’ cover art, the book was intended for older girls. The YA of the day? I can’t imagine any 13- or 14-year-old persevering with it now, but I could be wrong.
It’s one to file under ‘History of YA – Early Modern Era’.

And a note about the author. Mabel Esther Allan (1915-1998) published an astonishing 107 novels for children and young adults, and over 300 short stories. And if that’s not a career, I don’t know what is. And I had never heard of her.
And actually, I had. Under the pen-name of Jean Estoril, she wrote 11 books about Drina, a young ballet dancer. I think I even read Drina Dances as a girl.

No, I haven’t read any of the (late 1950s) Bodley Head Career Novels for Girls. But if I had, I would have had a rewarding career in physiotherapy!

Begin at the beginning, go to the end, and there stop – that’s what Rickie, our English master, told me when it was settled that I should write the story. It sounds simple enough. But what was the beginning? Haven’t you ever wondered where things start? I mean, take my story. Suppose I say it all began when Nick broke the classroom window with his football. Well, OK, but he couldn’t have kicked the ball through the window if we hadn’t just got super-heated by winning the battle against Toppy’s company. And that wouldn’t have happened if Toppy and Ted hadn’t invented their war game, a month before. And I suppose they’d not have invented their war game, with tanks and tommy guns and ambushes, if there hadn’t been a real war and a stray bomb hadn’t fallen in the middle of Otterbury and made just the right sort of place – a mass of rubble, pipes, rafters, old junk, etc. – for playing this particular game. The place is called ‘The Incident,’ by the way. But then you go back further still and say there wouldn’t have been a real war if Hitler hadn’t come to power. And so on and so on, back into the mists of time. So where does any story begin?

Well, when it comes to children’s fiction from the late 1940s to the 1960s, the boys certainly did get more excitement and action. The Otterbury Incident was a wild ride from page one. The narrator, George – not quite fourteen –  sets the scene (above), and foreshadows some of the characters (Johnny Sharp and the Wart, Inspector Brook) and mentions  a gang of crooks. Then it’s on. The exciting imaginary battles flip into imaginative fund-raising for poor Nick who broke the window. The two companies make peace and combine in Operation Glazier to raise five pounds to repair the window. This is so that Nick, orphaned during the Blitz and living with a violent guardian, doesn’t get beaten (again) and have his puppy sold. The money is too much of a temptation for the obnoxious spiv Johnny Sharp, who with his minion the Wart, steals the funds. How the kids investigate the crime and punish the perpetrators is riveting. I loved the first-person narration; George was a smart, funny, quick-witted boy, not always brave, and on occasion self-doubting. I read the book in one go. A couple of unfortunate racist and anti-Semitic phrases stuck out in a book that would be otherwise a perfectly readable WWII-era children’s adventure in 2024.

And by the way, C Day Lewis is not to be confused with C S Lewis. C Day Lewis (1904-1972) only wrote a couple of children’s books. He was more famous as a poet; in fact, he was Poet Laureate of the UK from 1968 until his death in 1972. He also wrote highly successful detective novels under the name Nicholas Blake. It sounds like he had a busy but disorderly private life – is that typical of poets? – juggling marriages and mistresses with his literary and academic work. The actor Daniel Day-Lewis is one of his children.

And one more thing…
Like a lot of books that I love from this era, it was beautifully illustrated, by a top illustrator. There are 23 small black and white pictures places throughout the text. They match the writing – there’s such an impression of activity and speed. Edward Ardizzone (1900-1979) was, in his day, one of the most famous British illustrators, as well as being a war artist, designer and commercial artist, with an instantly recognisable loose, slightly cartoonish style. As a child, I loved his dreamy, poetic illustrations for a collection by Walter de la Mare called Peacock Pie. Wikipedia tells me that he wrote and illustrated over 20 of his own books, and did the pictures for dozens more.

It’s exciting to discover a new writer. I knew the name  – Penelope Fitzgerald – and I’d seen the film of one of her books, the 2017 The Bookshop starring Emily Mortimer and Bill Nighy. It was melancholy and in fact very disheartening, being about a woman who tried and failed to set up a bookshop in a small community. The movie tie-in was on sale in the bookshop where I worked, but I wasn’t tempted.

Why did I chose The Gate of Angels for my book group? Not for very admirable reasons. I’d forgotten about the depressing film, It was short. It sounded light, and possibly funny. I liked the title.

And – what a gorgeous surprise – I loved the book… but it drew very mixed responses from the group. One of the two men, who’d actually worked in Cambridge University, also adored it. It is such fun to share wild enthusiam with another reader! The other man read about 30 pages and gave up. Some of the women took their time to think about it (one even re-read it) and thought it worthwhile and somewhat enjoyable. One woman didn’t like it, and another said that life is too short to read a book like this.

Well, it is an odd little novel. Part love story, part mystery, part ghost story, part historical fiction. It’s set in Cambridge, in 1912. Fred Fairly is a scientist and fellow of the uncomfortable, draughty, all-male (not even any female servants or pets allowed) St Angelicus college in Cambridge. He grew up in an uncomfortable and draughty country rectory (so he’s used to discomfort and cold), the son of a vicar. He’s a scientist, an atheist and a cyclist. The adorable heroine, Daisy Saunders, was born and raised in south London, in extreme poverty. She ‘…grew up with the smells of vinegar, gin, coal smoke, paraffin, sulphur, chloride of lime from backstreet factories, and baking bread every morning‘, doing midnight flits to evade the landlord, with her single mother scrabbling to earn a crust. Daisy has pulled herself up by her bootstraps. She was a student nurse…but no longer. She’s resourceful, practical, kind, generous – to a fault – and also rides a bicycle. The two of them meet via a cycling accident.

The course of love does not run at all smoothly, but – spoiler – though the end is suspenseful, doubtful, thrilling, and nearly doesn’t come off … yes,  it’s happy.
But not quite a rom com, despite the ‘meet cute’. Pervasive sexism – including near-constant sexual harassment –  plus class prejudice, inequality and poverty form hurdle after hurdle after unfair hurdle for Daisy. The cloistered and privileged world of the university forms a barrier for Fred, too. He’s socially, sexually and romantically backward. And I couldn’t help being aware that this whole world is about to be shattered by WWI. All those young men…

There was no melancholy, nothing laboured about the social commentary, always a light touch. And the most luscious, witty, beautiful writing.
This is just the first of the many passages I marked to re-read and enjoy again.

The church and Rectory were once imposingly, now unacceptably, at the top of a steep slope. It took it out of you getting up there, if you wanted the Rector to sign a certificate. Elms sheltered the field, young elders and hazels filled the drainage ditches. All that ought to be cleared before winter, if someone could be found to do it. The Herefords chewed, every jaw moving anti-clockwise, as a tendril grows. Round them the grass stood unmoving, hazed over with a shimmering reddish tinge, ready for hay. The bushes too, were motionless, but from the crowded stalks and the dense hedges there came a perpetual furtive humming, whining and rustling which suggested an alarming amount of activity out of sight. Twigs snapped and dropped from above, sticky threads drifted across from nowhere; there seemed to be something like an assassination, on a small scale, taking place in the tranquil heart of summer.

They don’t make ’em like this any more…

I certainly can’t see Harriet and Cherry Pie being published today. Which doesn’t mean it’s bad, just different. In many ways, Harriet and the Cherry Pie was typical of many of the contemporary English girl’s books (and they were mostly English) I borrowed from the library when I was in primary school.
There’s a kind of formula.  12-year-old Harriet has no mother, and her father is sent to Australia for 6 months for work. That’s (1); absent parents or guardians.  So she and her little sister, Kitten, are bundled off to stay with (2) their great aunt Sophie. A friend or relative the children have never met before always adds a hint of suspense – what will she be like? Harriet assumes that her great aunt will be old and crotchety, but instead she’s young, and owns a tea-shop called The Cherry Pie in London. Which gives us (3): a very different place to home. Often it’s city children going to the country; in this case, Harriet and Kitten go from a suburban life in Bristol to the busyness of a business in central London.
There are nods to Noel Streatfeild – Harriet becomes an actress, more or less by accident and like Streatfeild, Compton takes the reader through the ins and outs of being a child performer. When I was a child, I always liked books that told you how things worked in sufficient detail for me to imagine it was me. So, Harriet has to audition repeatedly, rehearse, study her script, memorise her instructions from the director (including which chalk marks on the floor are hers!), master her nerves, learn to control her voice and so on. It’s not glamorous; it’s work. There’s a lot of waiting around.
And it’s work at the Cherry Pie, too. Again, there are all sorts of details about running a tea shop. And even some recipes!

Harriet is a clever, humble, helpful, good-tempered and generally very nice young heroine. All the adults are kind and helpful, though the thought of 12-year old Harriet being allowed to go off by herself with a variety of male theatre folk gave me a slight frisson. Little Kitten is a cutie. There’s very little suspense, no conflict and in fact, no real drama. Just a sweet, quiet, family-oriented girl’s story that ambles along until it’s finished.

And…something I love about older children’s books; they often had pictures. (I did daydream about dark, intricate, moody illustrations for Verity Sparks…) Harriet and the Cherry Pie was illustrated by Charles Keeping. He’s a very stylish, ‘modern’ (this was the 50’s and 60’s) artist, often quite graphic and – as you can see by the cover – with strong design elements. Not sure about these illustrations, though. Someone a bit more cosy (Shirley Hughes?) might have worked better.

My book club meets in members’ homes from 7.30 in the evening, and to myself I call it the “Wine and Cheese” group. Last night I was the host. There was indeed wine and cheese  – three cheeses, two wines, as per custom – plus a home-made cake to finish off with. Weighing on my mind was the fact that I only have eight random wine glasses, no cheese knives and a shaming lack of cake forks. Oh, and I forgot the cream for the cake. Our living room is perhaps a little too small for nine people, and I had to fetch cane chairs from other parts of the house. My usual FOE (fear of entertaining) surfaced.

It turned out that on a cold night our small living room was warm with all of us bundled in together and divested of overcoats, puffer jackets, hat and scarves. Cheese and biscuits disappeared with no problems about knives, glasses were refilled despite shortcomings. Conversation flowed as well. As host, it was my job to lead the discussion. Often there are lists of questions, but not for this title. I floundered around a bit, trying to keep us on topic, but without notes I was a bit lost and it all got away from me. Which was fun. More fun, probably, than if I’d dutifully followed someone else’s talking points. Discursiveness ruled.  No violent disagreements, because we all, to various degrees, enjoyed the book (I think I could read Helen Garner’s shopping lists with pleasure). Some of us liked the diary entries best, so on we went, to Garner’s dissection of her failing marriage to Murray Bail in her final diary volume, How To End a Story. The piece about Raimond Gaita and his ruined home at Frogmore had us talking about Romulus My Father, both the book and the movie, and the sight of the local reservoir, Cairn Curran, empty and with young trees growing where the water should be.  The unsentimental tribute to her teacher, Mrs Dunkley sparked a discussion about teachers who made a difference in our lives.  I was drawn to her occasional real tenderness –  the piece about her mother nearly made me cry – while others enjoyed that Garnerish wit, sharpness and bite. I read a few excerpts. We laughed a lot.

After everyone bundled up again and went off into the chilly night full of good cheer and perhaps some intellectual stimulation (plus wine and cheese and cake), I cleared away and resolved to banish that foolish FOE. And to scour the Op Shops until I find cheese knives and cake forks.