Susan Green

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.

Stocking up for winter reading. I feel it’s time for a snuggle into children’s literature from the past, and this little selection from the Friends of Castlemaine Library should do the trick, spanning as it does a whole century, from the years 1899 (The Treasure Seekers) to 1969 (Fireweed).

Books, which are usually a multi-purpose cure – solace, distraction or balm, exciting or soothing as required – have not been doing  it for me lately. Perhaps I needed one of those bibliotherapy experts to prescribe exactly the right one. The unexpected death of a very dear friend in the first week of April has had me borrowing piles of books but not finding the right one to transport me.

To be honest, I’ve been struggling with fiction for a while. Finding it hard to actually care enough about the people. Which is awful. I’m a fiction writer, after all! I’d been looking forward to the latest Ann Patchett, but I only made it half way through Tom Lake. The same goes for our book club choice, Michael Cunningham’s By Nightfall, but even more so. New York and smart gallery owners and artists seemed so far away and I didn’t like any of them. Lauren Groff’s Matrix was possibly fascinating, but the effort of imagining life in an English nunnery in the middle ages was beyond me. I nearly finished A Vicarage Family by Noel Streatfeild.

Non-fiction, then. A few pages of Stuck Monkey; the Deadly Planetary Cost of the Things We Love by James Hamilton-Patterson, and I shied away from too much reality. Retreating to the past, I tried The Bone Chests: Unlocking the Secrets of the Anglo-Saxons by Cat Jarman and The Road:A Story of Romans and Ways to the Past by Christopher Hadley but made no headway.

I did actually finish Some Shall Break by Ellie Marney, and Slough House and Bad Actors by Mick Herron, and they certainly passed the time and took me away to somewhere else. To be honest, the fact that the ‘elsewhere’ was somewhere fairly horrid probably didn’t do me all that much good. I started feeling pretty dark. I need a book! I need to read!

Cookbooks to the rescue. Especially Darina Allen’s massive tome The Forgotten Skills of Cooking. Allen is a famous Irish chef, with many honours and prizes and cook books to her name. She runs the Ballymaloe Cookery School at her  family home, Ballymaloe House in Shanagarry, County Cork. I borrowed it for the baking, not the advice on foraging (no Crispy Puffballs for us) or skinning and gutting rabbits. Allen’s Ballymaloe Brown Yeast Bread – made every day at Ballymaloe House for over 60 years –  has been keeping us in toast for weeks. I am looking forward to trying Irish Porter Cake (with Guinness in it!) and Irish Tea Barmbrack (in which the dried fruit is soaked overnight in tea.

When I got the news that my friend had died, I cried for a bit and then went to the kitchen and made a cake.  Making cakes and bread is soothing and positive and life-affirming.

Plus, you get to eat your therapy.

Joe Country by Mick Herron.
The Slough House series are my best thriller discovery of the past year. They’re cynical, twisty, tragic, surprising and very funny. Not so much the subject matter – betrayal and death aren’t exactly a hoot – but the writing.
Here’s the appalling Jackson Lamb, head of Slough House, talking to Catherine, one of the team. They’re at a funeral, and not exactly on the same page in terms of respect. Referring to the grieving grandson of the dead man, Lamb says,
‘Wonder if he’ll jump in the grave.’
‘This isn’t Hamlet.’
‘Does that happen in Hamlet?’ said Lamb. ‘I was thinking of Carry On Screaming.’
I’ve nearly finished the series so far…hurry up with the next one please Mick.

The House That Joy Built by Holly Ringland

Windswept by Anabel Abbs

Why Women Grow by Alice Vincent

Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield

The Storied Life of AK Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin
This was a library book group choice.
A top pick from one of our members (the only male); it’s taken us months to get it in, so it must be word-of-mouth demand.
A good book club title. For once, we all loved it. Heartwarming but not icky, funny, surprising, characters you don’t want to let go. About books and publishing and writers. Little rural bookshops. Complicated lives, tragedies, all kinds of love and an adopted baby.
I’m full of admiration when writers can tackle potentially heavy subjects with a light touch that nonetheless doesn’t trivialise. Gorgeous.

Last month I also borrowed big illustrated books on native plants, roses, gardening, travel and bread making. I read bits and pieces of text, but mainly just looked at the pictures. Best of all was this one, The Art of the Tea Towel by Marnie Fogg (great name for a children’s book heroine, a pity it’s taken). Tea towels! Yay! Joyous and bright and cheery. Who would have thought there’d be a whole book on tea towel design? My sister-in-law used to work as a designer for a firm that printed Australiana tea towels. Lots of cute and cuddly animals, pretty fish, shells and coral, and wildflowers.  Occasionally she’d try to sneak something not-so-cute, like a shark or a snake. They always noticed.

In the early 2000’s, we used to holiday at a friend’s beach house in Portarlington. No visit was complete without a trip across to Queenscliff for (a) fish and chips on the beach (b) ice creams and (c) a long, long browse in the bookshop. We used to take turns with our son at the playground so this last ‘must’ could happen. Barwon Books, a second-hand bookshop in Geelong, had an outpost at one of the old churches and we never went away empty handed. It closed a while ago.

But when I went to Queenscliff recently, I discovered a bookshop there, opposite where the old one was. The Bookshop, it’s called. New books in this one. It’s got a great selection, beautifully curated. The shop I worked in for 24 years was huge, and so the owner had the luxury of space so I think it’s quite an art to have a smallish shop, and yet pick so many delectable books across many genres. And I told the owner so. I could have come away with a great big bagful but restricted myself to two, Why Women Grow by Alice Vincent (seems to follow on from Why Women Walk) and Fabric by Victoria Finlay.

Why Women Grow: Stories of Soil, Sisterhood and Survival attracted me because of the subject matter – I have been thinking a lot about my gardening obsession lately – but if I’m honest, it was the cover. You do judge a book by its cover, and of course sometimes you are wrong. But that’s why publishers don’t do plain wrappers.

At first I thought that I’d been seduced once again by beauty. The cover! The endpapers! (You are so superficial, Susan.) I almost regretted the purchase. Maybe this was really a younger woman’s book. All that yearning, burning, churning (to quote the great Tom Lehrer) about who you are and what you want to be and is motherhood for you, or marriage…

But I continued with it and – a new thing for me. I realised very clearly that I was actually having a conversation with the book. Yes, you can have a conversation with a book!

I was already aware of Alice Vincent as a writer and journalist, and I’d read a few of her columns for the magazine Gardens Illustrated. At a particular juncture in her life – mid 30’s, partnered, new shared home, contemplating marriage and motherhood – Alice Vincent had a lot of questions about her life in general and gardening in particular. So she sent a set of questions into the world via social media. The key one was ‘what drew you to gardening?’ All sorts of women answered, 700 of them, from as near as the next London suburb and as far as Switzerland and New York. Conversations followed, and then meetings.

There was a woman in a prison horticulture program, and an older woman with an empty nest, a discarded marriage and enough money to make a paradisiacal retreat. There was a woman who can’t have children, and others with new babies or a young families. Some of them needed a space of their own, a place to create. Some of them felt that gardening was in their blood and bones, part of their heritage. There was a heroic woman in an urban council housing estate who made green, growing shared spaces for the kids to play in and families to gather in. Solace, retreat, replenishment, solitude, social and political action, self-expression, fascination, experimentation… There were as many answers to the ’why’ as there are kinds of womanhood.

When I wanted to know why women turned to the earth, I thought about some of the reasons. I thought about grief and retreat. I thought about motherhood and creativity. I also thought about the ground as a place of political change, of the inherent politics of what it is to be a woman, to be in a body that has been mothered, dismissed and fetishised for millennia. I thought about the women who see the earth as an opportunity for progress and protest.

And that’s where the sense of a conversation came in. I felt as if I could have talked to each of those women, saying ‘me, too’ or ‘this is where I’m different’, or ‘I never thought of that before, but it’s true for me as well’. I went away and wrote several pages about my garden life, my garden story. A beautiful and inspiring book, but not in the way you might think. From the gorgeous cover, you could assume it’s going to be full of pretty stories, but it’s not. The endpapers provide a clue – those massive thorns among the flowers. Making a garden for many of these women is messy, gritty work; time is often hard-won and fitted in amongst the daily tasks, the child rearing, the job, the health challenges, the lack of space and money and energy. For all the aspirational gardens in lifestyle shows and magazines, there’s also the weather, the season, the soil. Like life, it’s out of our control much of the time.

It has taken me time to realise that when I met with these women, I was seeking guidance. That I set out not knowing how to be or how to live, that I was uncomfortable with growing into a new stage of life, that I wanted permission to explain myself. I think about the stories I’ve heard and what I’ve learned from them, all the lives boiled down into cups of tea and walks around gardens. I will hold these close – I cherish them – but I know now that I have to do the work myself. It is in me, this fierce womanhood, this state of being. It is time for me to trust her.

Better late than never, I suppose. I thought I would post a round-up of my last month’s reading at the beginning of each new month, but here it is, and March is two thirds of the way through. Am I the only person who finds time has sped up? I think it must be my age. A year was forever when I was a kid.

So: in February, I read Café Scheherezade by Arnold Zable, Old Filth by Jane Gardham, The Rosemary Tree by Elizabeth Goudge, Real Tigers, Spook Street and Slow Horses by Mick Herron, Tracks by Robyn Davidson and The Growing Summer by Noel Streatfeild.

They were all terrific! But I found I had copied these paragraphs from Cafe Sheherezade in a notebook, so I suppose it might be the one that has stayed with me the most.

‘…I would detour to a city garden. I would sit down on a park bench and observe a single leaf, covered in dew. Gradually a droplet would form. I would watch it slide on the leaf’s veins. For a moment it would balance, on the edge. I would be willing it to hang on, to remain poised, fixed in time. But slowly it would slip over, and fall. And I would say, “Ah, Now I can go to work.”

‘This is what my wanderings have taught me; that the moment itself is the haven, the true sanctuary. If only we could hold on to that. And savour it. Perhaps then we would not be so inclined to tear each other to pieces.’

On my final evening, the sun sinks behind the hills in a burst of fuschia-pink, lilac, gold. The moon appears, a cratered wafer of ice in a blue-black sky. I walk through the trees, listening to the chitterings and scufflings of countless invisible creatures, breathing in the scent of pine needles, sap, earth. I take off my shoes and feel the soft soil on the soles of my feet. A zigzag of breeze picks at my hair. I feel slightly unmoored, as if I’ve unexpectedly lost and found a part of myself. As if I’ve taken off an old dressing gown and discovered myself in sparking evening dress instead of dirty pyjamas.

I recently took myself off to Queenscliff, near the entrance of Port Phillip Bay, for a couple of nights by myself. ‘Carer’s leave’, a friend called it; my husband has just recovered from over a month’s intense agony from a trapped nerve. Equally, he probably needed a respite from being cared for. Windswept: Why Women Walk by Annabel Abbs was my solo travel book.

It was enthralling, inspiring, moving – but also (as I’m often finding as I age) dispiriting. The female walking alone provoked a range of reactions from men (and some women, too). Incredulity, disapproval, abuse, harassment, the threat of assault or rape, a refusal to sell food or let a room for the night. It may seem like a childish thing to say, but there is so much about being female that is just not fair. And it’s not about being female, exactly; it’s about being female in a patriarchal society.

Which is probably most of the planet, when you think about it. Sigh.

But back to the book. Windswept is a mix of memoir, travel writing and biography, organised around the theme of women who go rural or wild walking. Abbs recreates some of their journeys, travelling within Europe and Scotland and the US. Along the way, she reveals her subjects’ biographies and her own.

First, she walks with Frieda Lawrence in the Alps, describing the boldness with which Frieda escaped her suffocating marriage in Nottingham to go wandering in the Alps with her lover, DH Lawrence. Though the severing of the tie with her three children broke her heart, Frieda used the freedom of those days and nights to recreate herself. For Abbs, at a period in her life when her children are beginning to leave home and her role as a mother is diminishing, Frieda’s walk arouses strong feelings.

Walking the route of a woman renouncing her children, obsessing…why the sudden preoccupation? It took me three years to see that Frieda’s walk was also mine, an unbidden step in my own casting-off.

The other walkers are an equally fascinating group. Four of the women walked mainly in France. Simone de Beauvoir (bizarrely – for me, anyway, because I love a pair of sturdy boots –  in espadrilles); Daphne du Maurier; Clara Vyvyan, a now-forgotten writer, and Gwen John, sister of the artistic powerhouse Augustus John.

Gwen was an artist in her own right but overshadowed by her more famous brother and burdened by family life. Intriguingly, she is probably the better known artist now. Desperate for solitude and peace, she walked alone and occasionally with a woman friend, lugging her painting gear along the rivers of France. Other subjects are the artist Georgia O’Keefe in the vast, bleached  landscapes of New Mexico and Texas and writer Nan Shepherd in the Cairngorm mountains of  Scotland.

Is this a genre? ‘Women Walking’? I can think of Rebecca Solnit, Olivia Laing, Cheryl Strayed, Robyn Davidson – and there are probably many more now. I don’t know that I will be adding to them, but after reading Windswept, I’m actually feeling a little more emboldened. Not that I’m thinking of hiking the Larapinta Trail, or anything quite so gruelling. But after a couple of days spent pottering about the beach at Queenscliff, dabbling in rock pools, finding shells, becoming wind-burned and windswept – I can see ahead more little solo trips, more meditative walks and more essential de-cluttering of the mind in nature and solitude.

As the trees on either winding bank blotted out the landing stage, Edward, who had been struck dumb by the sight of Ada left alone on the tottering platform, began to scream ‘Ada, Ada, Ada!’ and to point back up river.  Auntie May held him tight, but he screamed louder and writhed in her arms. She spoke sharply in Malay and he bit her shoulder, wriggled free and seemed about to jump overboard. A sailor caught him by the belt of the shorts that Auntie May had brought and that had astonished him. The sailor lifted him high. Water poured down the sailor’s silky arms. ‘Hai, hai, hai,’ he laughed and Edward lashed out at him, sobbing. He was a tall strong boy of four and a half but the sailor lifted him into the air like a swathe of flowers. Something of the boatman’s smell and his happy eyes reminded the child of Ada, and the sobbing lessened and he went limp.
‘Why does she stay? Why is she not here?’
‘If she came with you, you would never learn English. You and she would talk Malay, as we are doing now.’
‘I will talk Malay with you always.’
‘Not after we get to the Port. You will learn something new. Ada will follow.’
‘Follow?’
“She will follow to the Port when you have to go Home.’
Edward gave a shuddering, hopeless sob. He had just left Home. What would Ada do without him at Home? He was placed in Auntie May’s lap and looked at her with eyes nearly mad. ‘Ada! Ada!’

This is our first book group title of the year, and isn’t it a terrific one? Who (or what) is Old Filth?

It turns out Old Filth is the immaculate Sir Edward Feathers, now retired, recently widowed and living alone in Dorset. The name ‘Filth’ is an old joke, ‘Failed in London Try Hong Kong’, but he is anything but a failure. He was a high-flying lawyer, rich and respected, and later a judge. And he is also Eddie, the Raj orphan, sent back to England from Malaya (and his beloved carer Ada) as a small child.

Most of my book group had never heard of Jane Gardam; she’s not exactly a household name, but she is a multi-award winning writer. Old Filth was perhaps her most commercially successful novel. Born in 1928, her first book (for children) was A Long Way to Verona, which came out in 1971. She’s written books both for children and for adults, and it is as a short story writer that I first encountered her. I read and re-read her collections The Sidmouth Letters and Missing the Midnight when I was trying to teach myself how to write. Reading her after many years, I can see her influence, and I could do worse than study her again. Old Filth is a model of economy and style as Gardam swoops boldly back and forward in time to tell the life story of Edward Feathers from birth to death, circling around his early childhood in Malaya, his traumatic time as a foster child in Wales, his oddly happy schooldays, his professional life and relationships.  Relationships! Never Old Filth’s strong suit. There’s his wife Betty, his old rival Terry Veneering and his fellow ‘orphans’,  Claire and Babs, his schoolfriend Patrick Ingoldby, whose family more or less adopted Old Filth, and his cousin Isobel. Even chance-met acquaintances like Loss, Chinese dwarf wheeler-dealer, or fleetingly seen characters like Alice, the maid of his loathsome aunts, are vivid and real. They build the sense of a fully peopled, whole life. Each scene has beautiful, sharp, convincing detail.
It’s a piece of beautiful writing, short (around 260 pages) book, but economical and brilliant in a way that contemporary writers of brick-like tomes could study. I’ll try to limit the adjectives; it’s a cynical, compassionate, funny and intensely moving portrayal of the way childhood neglect and abuse can percolate through a whole lifetime.

There are two companion books, The Man in the Wooden Hat and Last Friends; I’ve already borrowed them from the Athenaeum.

Miserable after reading Anna Funder’s Wifedom. Out of sorts. Dispirited by how little seems to change. Thinking about my own life and choices.  My mother, who wanted to be a historian. The artist wife of an artist friend of my parents, who only re-started her painting in her 80s, after the old bastard died. I resorted to Elizabeth Goudge.

The Scent of Water. I’d read it before, obviously too fast, and dismissed it as overly sentimental, one of her lesser efforts. And yes, it has its faults. But it acted as a corrective, a stern but loving buck-up, a gentle hand and encouraging smile coupled with high expectations – ‘you can do better, and you will’. One of Elizabeth Goudge’s themes – in agreement with the Buddha! –  is simply that life is difficult. You don’t always get what you want; anything can happen, at any time, and it does. We can’t change that, but we can do our duty, we can be kind, loving and forgiving and we can be decent. We can gain sustenance from the beauty of the natural world. As a mystical, nature-loving Christian, she links the cyclical nature of the world to her faith. Plants die and disappear and hide out underground and then are reborn to sprout and grow and flourish and seed (maybe) and then die again. I’m not a Christian, but I can cope with this strand of Goudge’s work; it seems spiritual rather than narrowly C of E. I can also cope with – or ignore – the strand of martyrdom she imposes on partners in unhappy or unfulfilling marriages (another theme of Goudge’s). It’s usually the women who cop it, but not always. I link this to her deeply held, conservative belief in the sanctity of marriage vows – and perhaps the fact that she was never married herself!

Mary Linton, fifyish, urban and cosmopolitan and just retired, impulsively moves to a derelict old house in a remote country village. It was left to her by her father’s cousin, also named Mary. What a wonderfully classic Goudge beginning. The pleasures of exploring an old house, restoring and renewing it, discovering its treasures and its history never seems to pall for me. (The description of ‘the little things’, a case of tiny ornaments, rang so many bells for me because as a small child one of my delights was to sit with my mother while she took her little treasures out from the glass case to dust and admire and tell me their stories).

Mary is quickly absorbed into the village and the stories intertwine. The “squire” and his wife, the Hepplewhites, hiding their working class origins underneath a show of wealth and smothering generosity. The Andersons, elderly siblings; the no-nonsense clergyman is perpetually irritated by his timid sister, a woman almost incapacitated by anxiety. The dear old couple whose one dream is a TV, and their caddish son.  The blind war-hero poet and playwright, Paul, whose vapid wife Valerie blames him for her unhappiness and makes them both unhappy. A cast of beautifully realised children and somewhat comical faithful retainers (yes, and a modern reader just has to cope with that issue, too).

The other major character is the dead Mary #1, the one who left her house to her cousin, the “now” Mary #2. From her diaries, Mary#2 discovers that the first Mary suffered from severe mental illness; deep, debilitating depression, hallucinations, breakdowns. Her state is vividly described, with real understanding and I imagine was drawn from the author’s own experience. How Mary#1, through her faith, came to accept and live with her illness, and rejoice in what joys she could find, is the over-arching theme of the novel and this message – of acceptance and gratitude – permeates The Scent of Water. There are no deliriously happy endings or indeed any startling resolutions for any of the characters’ problems or sorrows.

When I read this book before I just took in the story of the unsatisfied wife, the blind husband, and the caddish son (her would-be lover). I read a different book this time. Goudge’s book can be an odd mix of novellettish story lines combined with deeper, more spiritual and – for me – bolstering themes.  A bit of a mish-mash but if you love it,  you love it. And I do.