Susan Green

The Sicilian summer was bringing out the abs and pecs again. It would once more reduce all movements to the consistency of molasses while enervating people with the sirocco, plague the countryside with tiger mosqitoes and forest fires, and make people closet themselves behind their shutters more suspiciously than usual. But summer belongs to Sicily like mountains to Switzerland. It’s only during the long, hot months from May to October that the island is entirely at ease with itself, rediscovering its rhythm like a cat that has strayed and found its way home again. Summer would also bring mulberry granita, silken nights filled with promise and the scent of jasmine, and days bathed in the sand-coloured light of which you can never get enough. The coffee would again taste as it does nowhere else – in fact, everything would again taste like the very first time, for that is the Sicilian summer’s hypnotic trick; everything feels pristine, over and over again,

‘Auntie Poldi’ is Isolde Oberreiter, a 60ish Bavarian widow who retires to her late husband’s home town of Torre Archirafi in Sicily. She fully intends to to drink herself to death while taking in the glorious view. Fortunately, despite depression, sadness and excessive drinking, slowly but surely her formidable life force reasserts itself.  Instead she finds many, many reasons to stay this side of the grave. They include new friends, her husband’s family, the manly and attractive Commissario Vito Montana, plus wine, grappa, prosecco and solving crimes.

The plots are insanely complicated, as is Poldi herself. She’s lusty, bold, clever, crazy, annoying, changeable, ridiculous and adorable. She wears a huge black wig (and claims that Amy Winehouse borrowed her hairstyle), has a wardrobe full of incredible clothes and a thing for perving at traffic cops.

Sicily herself is quite a character as well. I loved the long, lush, lavish descriptions, the detours and digressions into Sicilian history, folklore,  food, crime (the mafia, of course), lifestyle and character.  Auntie Poldi’s adventures are narrated by her nephew, a stitched-up and timid would-be writer who travels from Munich each month to spend a week or two ‘keeping an eye’ on Poldi, working on his turgid family saga and inevitably getting caught up in Poldi’s schemes.

I’ve just read the first three  – Sicilian Lions, Fruits of the Lord and The Handsome Antonio –  in quick succession, and the bonkers plots have now amalgamated into a whirl of hair-raising sleuthing expeditons via Vespa involving mafiosi, real estate, pheromones, vineyards, decaying palazzo, ancient villages, psychics (a beautiful woman, an ugly man, a spooky child), a priest, a Finnish heavy metal band, a palm-tree growing magnate, corrupt practices in water supply, a quarry, several grisly murders, quite a lot of mature-aged sex and I can’t think what else but there’s LOTS.

Though I’ve got another one on the shelf, I need a little breather. One more book would be like having pasta al nero, spigole in agrodolce, pepata di cozze, lumache in salsa di pomodoro, calimaretti fritti, insalata di arance e finocchio selvatico, caponata siciliana, parmagiana alla Teresa, an expresso, half a dozen cannoli and a gelato al limone, all at the one sitting.

However (from the ridiculous to the sublime?) the Poldi books have given me a bit of a yen to re-read The Leopard by Guiseppe di Lampedusa…

A mother, father and daughter living in an inner-urban house in a state of perpetual renovation. A visiting grandmother. And a little mini-lop rabbit.

These are the protagonists of The Burrow, a short novel set in Melbourne during the final days of the pandemic, when restrictions were lifting but the sense of tension and isolation had not yet lifted. It’s five years since baby Ruby died, and the whole family is drifting, stuck, living together but coming apart. Jin and Amy, the parents, live separate lives, while ten-year-old Lucie is quietly struggling with anxiety and intrusive images of trauma and death.

As the novel begins, the father, Jin, has just bought a baby rabbit in an attempt to cheer  Lucie. At around the same time, Pauline, Amy’s mother, comes to stay while recovering from a fall. The rabbit could be seen as a symbol of  vulnerability, I suppose, and growth, and finally, hope. But Fiver – named after a creature in Watership Down by Richard Adams – is as well observed in all its rabbitty ways as the other characters. Fiver and Pauline act as catalysts for change as Lucie bonds with them both. By the end of the novel, there’s been a shift, and their lives can begin to move again. More than that,  there’s hope.

This is a short (yay!), tender, reserved book. Cheng gently probes rather than thrashes out these big issues, using the alternating viewpoints of the four main characters. I enjoyed the delicacy and reserve of the writing.  Cheng explores so much about modern life, not just the effect of the pandemic. Loneliness and isolation, grief and guilt, the complexities and contradictions of love. For all that, it doesn’t seem like a heavy book; Chen has a delicate touch.

How good to discover a new writer! I’ve already ordered her other two books. Room for a Stranger and Australia Day, from the library.

Off the blocks and running in the 2025 Reading Stakes. I’ve finished 3 books so far this year – all fiction, and one of them was even a recent, Australian, literary fiction title. A good start, since I struggled with literary fiction last year.

Last year! It was so horrifying in the big bad world, with the general enshittification of everyday life for us here in Oz, and overseas the violence and horror of war, and a global posse of wannabe strong men doing their usual smash and grab and lie and bullshit with no shame… Sorry, ranting. I am trying to say that unapologetic comfort reading has become my …well, my comfort.

There’s a small pile of sure-fire novels that work that magic, opening a door into a place of well being and familiarity and  pleasure and forgetfulness. Pride and Prejudice is one of them, and the Damerosehay books of Elizabeth Goudge. The Sarah Kelling/Max Bittersohn crime novels by Charlotte Mcleod. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons and The Republic of Love by Carol Shields. And Margaret Yorke by Kathleen Norris.

I’ve written about Kathleen Norris (1880-1966) before, way back in 2016. She was the bestselling American author in her day, with a staggering output of close to 90 novels, plus short stories, journalism and feature articles. Margaret Yorke belonged to my Nan; it was on the shelf with a dozen or so mild romances from the 1910’s to the 1930s, and from the age of about 12, I was allowed to take them home, one at a time, to read. My favourites were Margaret Yorke and Jemima Rides by British writer Anne Hepple. I tried Jemima a couple of years ago, and the spell had been broken; her naivety, which I think is supposed to be piquant and charming, now seems simply idiotic. But Margaret Yorke still does the trick.

First published in 1931, it’s set in an enclave of wealthy Californians who live in lovely houses surrounded by lovely gardens near San Mateo, not far from San Francisco. They have maids and cooks, chauffeurs and nannies, social secretaries – and companions.

Margaret is one of those. She’s a reserved, thoughtful, conscientious young woman with a mystery in her past, and the perfect employee for faded Mrs Cutting. Mrs Cutting is a wealthy widow with an adopted toddler son, and a handsome, charming and thoroughly decent nephew, Stan, who runs the family lumber company. Of course, Stan and Margaret are increasingly attracted to each other. But (again, of course) Margaret has made a mistake in her late teens, a disastrous marriage, and she can’t move forward. Their relationship develops against a background of country club, bridge games and trips to the family ranch; the two characters come to know and respect each other, growing in maturity and understanding until they deserve their happy ending.

A pretty standard romance, actually. So what do I find so comforting about it? It’s the mesmerising flow of description, of adjectives and nouns in the service of clothes, food, gardens, faces, bodies. Margaret wears ‘a thin old white muslin with an untrimmed leghorn hat’ to walk around the milking sheds on the farm. On a hot afternoon, ‘a dark soft flowered gown in dull blue and brown; it was almost transparent, it was limp and soft, and seemed just fitted to the heat and brilliance of the day’. In the evening, ‘a frail black lace gown that made her gypsy coloring more brilliant than ever’ with ‘old gold and enamel earrings dangling almost to her shoulders’.

Not only do I want to ransack her wardrobe, I’d like to shove her out of the way at the dinner table, join her in a wicker chair in the drowsy autumn garden among bees and flowers or in the shaded cement swimming pool on a breathless hot summer morning. I want to ride in the limousine or the roadster and take tea (wearing a dotted swiss dress, a close-fitting navy blue hat and small pearls in my ears) at a fancy San Fransisco hotel.

Moreover, I want to waft through my days with nothing more to worry about than my beastly husband whose divorce from me is not legal though he thinks it is, who married and divorced and then re-married the devious flirt who was engaged to Stan but ran off with a married older man who died of a heart attack, and doesn’t know that my employer’s adopted son is his. And mine. Are you with me? Oh, did I forget to mention that he (beastly husband) is the child of her (employer’s) second cousin and they share the same lawyer? And that the devious flirt is engaged to Stan (again)?

Yes, there are plot twists and turns in an improbable Days of Our Lives manner but if you don’t think about it, it holds together. Almost. So it’s just as well the plot is the least important element of the book. I can read Margaret Yorke again and again and simply lose myself in the sensual fantasy. It’s sheer, blissful, undemanding, reliable comfort.

While waiting for Kate Constable’s annual reading roundup, I thought I’d attempt my own. My record-keeping is not great, but with the help of this blog, the history on my library account, book group lists and a look at my bookshelves…here it is. Sorry, no pie charts.

Grand total is 110 books. I think it’s probably a bit more; I vaguely remember a few stray novels and thrillers  borrowed from friends or bought from the Op Shop on holiday. And I haven’t included books I didn’t read properly. If I lost patience and then skipped to the end, they don’t count.

So, in order:

Biography and memoir 23
Children’s and YA 21
Crime/Espionage 20
Literary fiction 14
History 10
Health, psychology, human behaviour 9
Bestsellers of Yesteryear 6
Literary criticism 4
Miscellaneous 3

I’m surprised and also not surprised; two books a week, more or less, sounds about right, since I can polish off a children’s novel in a couple of hours, and a crime novel in a day.

This little accounting project has made me examine my reading habits. It’s obvious that I do more in winter. Short days, long evenings, rain and cold. Because of dodgy wrists, I can’t knit as much as I used to, so that’s upped the score. I don’t watch much television, either. We do stream a few shows, but there’s not a lot of bingeing. And as a retired person, I have plenty of time.

But, I’m also a gardener, and I would have thought there’d be A LOT less reading action in the milder weather, but not so. I am, let’s face it, just a reading fool!

Which books have stayed with me? I’ve chosen one for each category.

The Rescuers by Margery Sharp, for the sheer pleasure and delight of a sophisticated, witty, exciting, funny and altogether delightful children’s junior novel. With wonderful Garth Williams illustrations. Sheer joy.

Windswept by Annabel Abbs. I think I’ve come to the end of my ‘women walking’ phase,but this one I plan to re-read. I enjoyed the way Abbs linked these women, some famous, some not, to her own landscapes and trails and weather and family and life experiences.
One of the more graceful (as in not clunky, not strained) examples of the genre.

Gate of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerald. A new writer for me. Reading joy! Perfect,short, witty, moving, and beautiful, beautiful, beautiful language.

The Slough House novels of Mick Herron provided more reading joy, though of a totally different kind. I’m yet to watch Slow Horses, the series based on the books, because we don’t have Apple. Bloody streaming, why aren’t all the ones I want to watch on the one service?

Unofficial Britain, for sheer mad weirdness. And for alerting me to the possibilities of streets and towns, ruined spaces, building sites, wasteland, edge-land.
As a kid, when I first read Alan Garner’s Elidor, I didn’t like it because it was set in an ugly, blasted urban streetscape, not Alderley Edge like The Weirdstone of Brisengamen. My bias has always been towards country, green, forest, old houses, stone, rivers, hills. Blinkers off!

Hugh McKay’s The Way We Are gave me a lot to think about. It’s on loan to a friend, but I’m going to read it again.

The Scent of Water by Elizabeth Goudge. I read this one ages ago, and dismissed it as  inferior Goudge, but on giving it another go, I found it deeper and more moving than I’d realised.

My Lit Crit top pick was The Haunted Wood, and as for Miscellaneous, the ‘too hard to classify’ department – The Poetry of Birds, edited by Simon Armitage and Tim Dee, a  gorgeous anthology picked up from the library book sale. I try to read poetry before I go to sleep a couple of times a week. I haven’t dreamed about birds yet, but when I watch the wrens and spinebills and honeyeaters in the morning, lovely phrases come to mind, by poets I probably would never read. Like Tennyson, from ‘The Throstle’:

‘Summer is coming, summer is coming
I know it, I know it, I know it.
Light again, leaf again, life again, love again,’
Yes, my wild little poet.

I will remember this next spring, when the birds are going crazy.

Nearly the end of the year and the start of the next. I love the gap between Christmas and New Year; the week drifts by with no particular plan except to finish the leftovers and relax. Our son and his partner stayed for a few days, but now they’re gone, I am pottering contentedly between the garden, my laptop (my newest interest – family history) and the couch.
Snoozing, of course, and drinking cups of tea – but also reading. I am determined to finish the trio of books I started a week ago. Finished on Saturday was Her Secret Service by Claire Hubbard-Hall, in tandem with Bright Shining by Julia Baird, and now I’m whipping through The Grey Wolf, the latest instalment in Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache series.

Her Secret Service tells the story of women in the British intelligence services, a group who’ve been written out of official histories and described as ‘secretaries’ or ‘clerks’. I’d been waiting for this to be released. So excited! But while it attempts to set the record straight by detailing the work of these trailblazers, it’s actually a pretty pedestrian read. Many of these women were not doing the cloak-and-dagger stuff but sifting and prioritising enormous amounts of information (as Hubbard-Hall notes, information was ammunition), and Hubbard-Hall struggles to make their work seem compelling. And because there is so little known about them (Official Secrets Act!) she often doesn’t have a lot to work with.  It’s Hubbard-Hall’s first book; I hope she digs in and continues the research because it’s a fascinating subject.

In comparison, Baird is a skillful and polished writer. Bright Shining is one of those hybrid books, a blend of memoir and personal experience, interviews, observations, history, politics and more. She explores issues like reconciliation, ‘Me Too’ and restorative justice to discover the hard-to-define quality of ‘grace’. While sometimes seemed it like a series of loosely connected musings in search of an organising thesis  (what, really, was the point of the anecdote about Napoleon’s penis?), it is beautifully written, never dull, very readable and because I have been enjoying Not Stupid, Baird’s podcast with Jeremy Fernandez, I could hear her voice, talking just to me, as I read.

And The Grey Wolf? Politics, environmental activism, corruption, murder…
After reading the 18 previous Inspector Gamache novels, the disparate conjoined spheres of Montreal policing and the magical Quebec village of Three Pines are so familiar. Perhaps I should have seen out 2024 with something inspiring or meaningful… but given the year we’ve had in the world, some escapist thrills with – I sincerely hope! –  the baddies dealt with and disaster averted seems like a pretty good way to end the year.

In museums, libraries and the landscape, a memory remains of a wilderness of unquiet graves, riddling marshes and storm-beaten cliffs. The stories to come and the commentaries that follow them were inspired by these memories, found in cultural artefacts whose words and images shed light on the idea of the wild in early medieval Britain. I sought to capture flashes of the cruel garnet eyes that wink from the treasures of the Sutton Hoo ship burial, and the beautiful, haunting atmosphere of the Old English elegies, Welsh englynion and the Irish immrama. These survivals – whether poetic, artistic, carved from whales’s bone or cast in solid gold – were forged by cultures with a world view very different to our own. My aim has been to evoke and contextualise an ancient imaginative landscape.

In Wild: Tales From Early Medieval Britain, Amy Jeffs leads the reader through stories dating from the turbulent period circa 600 to 1000, through a landscape which seems cold, inhospitable and threatening, among people with not just ‘very different’ but almost incomprehensible lives and beliefs. Invasions, migrations and power struggles convulsed early Britain – depending on where a person lived, it was the Celtic Britons, settlers from various Germanic tribes, clans from across the Irish sea warring with the Picts, and of course, the Vikings… And the weather was really, really bad. An ‘ice-encrusted, storm-swept, eel-infested, midnight-sun-illuminated wilderness’.

I was expecting to read, as well as commentary, accessible translations or re-tellings of ancient texts. Instead, Jeffs has created a series of seven tales, combining elements of these texts. Even more unexpected was how visceral, immediate, vivid they are. The first, The Lament of Hos, begins:

Cold it is, cold and so close that I can feel my neighbours against me, their beards and bones rotting like stacks of winter branches. I hear the voices of elves, goblins and old gods that haunt these unhallowed halls. They whisper that I am friendless: that my old companions are dead, that my love has left me forever, that I must hope without hope until I am no more than an ache in the air.

The narrator is a young wife who has been betrayed by her lover, captured by her lord’s kinsmen, executed and thrown into the ‘unhallowed halls’ of a cave or an ancient burial mound where she lives on as a ghost or spirit. It makes me think of those terrifying scenes among the un-dead in The Lord of the Rings. Probably some of the genuine sense of claustrophobia comes from Jeffs’ research. She’s not just rootling around in libraries among Old English tomes; she goes on a caving expedition herself. Only fifteen minutes, crawling around at night under the Mendip Hills in south-west England, but as someone who’s pretty much cave-, cavern- and tunnel-averse, it was a bit too well observed.

What a weird, unsettling and unusual book this is. I mean that as a recommendation! And original wood engravings by the author are an added bonus.

I started reading The Children of Green Knowe by L M Boston for a Substack read-along (first I’ve ever done; will I do a knit-along next?), and immediately entered another world. It’s like being transported into a beautiful old-fashioned snow globe so as well as following Tolly’s adventures in the book, the story doubles so I see myself wandering alone around the castle-cum-house, going with Mr Boggis into the stables and little by little discovering the garden. I know by heart the carved mouse, the rocking horse, the birdcage. I know the topiary deer, the huge stone St Christopher and the laughter and pattering footsteps of the friendly ghost children. And I sit in front of the fire, leaning against Granny Oldknow’s knees, listening to the first story, Toby’s Story…
Which is where I have to stop if I am going to read along with everyone else. It’s such a special book; its magic has never faded with familiarity and I’m looking forward to being part of a little Green Knowe fan club.

The place where we stopped – Tolly, Granny Oldknow and a family story – echoes a project I’ve just started. My mother left a massive stash of family history research and I’ve really only had a superficial look at it. Until now. A friend has been researching her maternal line, regularly updating me on the discoveries and stories of this chain of fore-mothers. She’s following the mitochondrial DNA. After I had lunch with her recently, the bug has bitten, hard. Another friend – bless her! –  is now transcribing Mum’s handwritten pages and I’ve just subscribed to Ancestry.com.

And I’ve been thinking, too, about my own family stories.  As a small child, I used to ask my parents about when they were little. There was the tale of Dad, sick of being bullied, finding a pair of pliers and using them on his brother’s big fat bum. Mum, walking along the (strictly out-of-bounds) railway line and getting her foot stuck in the track. Luckily for my future existence, the train stopped, the driver got out and released her with a severe scolding. Then there were the stories of their parents. Mum’s father running away to sea and Dad’s father (unbelievably, since he was a grim and crusty old chap) playing in a dance band. Going back into the far past, there were tales of blood feuds and romances among Border Scots from Mum, and religious persecution in Silesia (now part of Poland) from Dad. I only half remember most of them, but Mum, amazingly, made a file called ‘Family Myths and Legends.’ She wrote that she couldn’t vouch for the truth of them, but because they were told and re-told for generations, they make part of her heritage. Part of her.

And therefore part of me. There’s a family surname on my mother’s side that has, for six generations, been carried down as a middle name. I forgot about it for my own son, but I know my cousin’s oldest son has it. I’m hoping that Ancestry will shed some light. Who were these people, where were they from and why did they remain so important to their descendants?

But like Mum, I don’t intend to let the truth get in the way of a good story.

The idea that children’s writing is a lower form – a  brain-injured version of writing for adults, as (writer Martin Amis) Amis caricatured it – is as persistent as it is misguided. Children’s literature isn’t a defective and frivolous sidebar to the grown-up sort. It is a platform on which everything else is built. It’s through what we read as children that we imbibe our first understanding of what it is to inhabit a fictional world, how words and sentences carry a style and tone of voice, how a narrator can reveal or occlude the minds of others, and how we learn to anticipate with excitement or dread what’s round the corner. What we read in childhood stays with us.

When I first read a review of Sam Leith’s The Haunted Wood in the Guardian’s book pages, I practically drooled (sorry, but you know…book hunger). I knew I would love it. And I did.

In the foreword, Leith lays out his ambitions for the book – in the role of a literary historian, to discuss the books and writers he thinks are important. He does so much more, though; he treats children’s literature seriously. I don’t mean solemnly; Leith doesn’t write as an academic, and the book is wide-ranging, lively and often funny. I loved that he gets just how important books can be to a child, how they can help make your world. And I loved how he digs into the often complex and troubled lives of some of the most influential writers – like JM Barrie, Kenneth Grahame, Frances Hodgson Burnett – to make sense of their work.

The most effective writers for children almost always seem to be the ones who have the most invested in it emotionally. Often, they are writing from a wound – whether a wound sustained in childhood, or the wound of having had to leave it behind in the first place.

If you accept that it deals almost exclusively with British writers (and Leith explains why; he thinks what he calls the British canon has had an outsized influence on the world), it could become a standard text. I could have used it when I was studying for my Graduate Diploma in Children’s Literature. Its great strength – which is that Leith writes about his chosen authors and their work in depth – could also be seen as a weakness, because he’s had to leave out so many (and some of them are my favourites, too*).  But at 578 pages, The Haunted Wood is still a weighty tome. I’m both a reader and a writer of children’s books, so this was a long, luxurious wallow in a subject I love.

*Joan Aiken, for instance. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase was one of the pivotal books of my childhood – I nearly wore it out! – and as an adult, it’s informed my writing for children. And then there’s Penelope Lively, William Mayne, Leon Garfield, John Masefield, Dodie Smith, Mary Norton…

One of the gifts of growing older has been birds.

My parents used to sit by the big window in this house, sometimes with binoculars or an old pair of opera glasses, and watch the birds in the garden. I thought it was basically an old-people thing; in particular a thing for old people with limited mobility, like my folks. It was quite charming, the way they’d get excited about the appearance of this or that species.

I didn’t think that one day I would sit by the window, eyes peeled for bird action outside. Now, first thing in the morning, I check to see who is out and about. I’ve placed three birdbaths where we can see them, and scarcely a day goes past without one of us beckoning to the other and pointing at a honey-eater, a silver-eye, a firetail, a wattlebird – or a blue wren.

Blue wrens were much beloved by my elderly neighbour and friend, Margaret. Friends and family gave her a constant stream of blue-wren cards, notepaper, embroidered handkerchiefs and mugs; for some reason I never knew, they were ‘her’ bird. And now they are mine (though I haven’t gone for the blue-wren merch – at this stage, anyway).

I started with just wanting to encourage birds into the garden. There were always plenty passing through- like magpies, bronzewings, parrots and cockatoos – but how to get them to stay? I thought a bird feeding station might be just the thing – a delight – but the sulphur-crested cockies hogged it, made a mess and a racket so we canned that idea. Little birds, I decided. So I planted lots of shrubs and bushes, and over the years they’ve grown into sizeable thickets, and now… I have little birds.

I have blue wrens. My heart’s desire, I tell people. For months I’ve seen them every day; they are nesting snug and hidden from view in my next-door neighbour’s cypress. I think some might even be nesting somewhere in our yard. So far, I have no sense of familiarity. Each time I see one, it’s nothing less than a tiny blue miracle. I still do that involuntary in-drawing of breath, my heart still leaps, I still identify the feeling as joy, or delight. The brilliant blue of the male, the softer brown of the females, their long upright flirty tails and little round bodies, their loud chattering calls and darting flight. All of this a good antidote to the shitty gang of shitty world leaders – madmen, basically – who infest the shitty world at present. Maybe they’re no worse than they ever were, but I’m finding it doesn’t pay to dwell. I’m still avoiding the TV news but somehow I seem to read bits and pieces, and know – for instance –  that Trump has picked an anti-vaxxer to lead the Health Department, and Musk to kill off the public service.

And so this memoir by Frieda Hughes seemed to fit the bill as comfort reading. But it was not the light-hearted, heart-warming animal tale I might have expected. It was the story of an obsession, an overwhelming one, almost an addiction.

Hughes rescues a little magpie nestling found in the aftermath of a storm. She saves its life, and goes on to care for it and love it … and let it live inside, destroying and thieving and shitting all over the place, attacking neighbours and generally being a horrible nuisance. It is a wild bird, but she wants it to be a pet and along with the obsessively detailed and repetitive accounts of her struggles with George’s behaviour, Hughes documents the long breakdown of her marriage. Not my place to comment, I know, but at times I felt sorry for the poor man, ‘The Ex’, with not only a chaotic wild bird practically attached to his wife, but dogs that have INSIDE LITTER TRAYS.

Though she does mention her famous and tragic parents (Sylvia Plath, she says ‘deserted’ her when she committed suicide), it’s not a misery memoir. Or not in that direction. But misery it is. Understandably, Hughes has a life-long quest for ‘home’, for love, for stability and permanence. One of the most poignant episodes from the book was a description of a visit with her father and an Irish friend to a small island. No one lived there, and the animals had no fear. It was like a dream; she was able to put her hands down into rabbit burrows and stroke their fur; she was able to handle the birds that roosted there. A little, underpopulated Eden. When it was time to go home, a storm brewed up and the boat trip away from that perfect place was nightmarishly terrifying. The symbolism made me want to cry for her as I thought about the two-year-old sleeping in her cot, while downstairs in the kitchen her mother was turning the gas oven on.

George: A Magpie Memoir is a strange, sad and also quite fascinating story – but when I read the puffs from other writers I wondered if they’d read the same book. ‘Charming, funny, tender, moving?’ Did it really show that ‘connecting to wildlife has the power to put our troubles into perspective, teach us lessons about life and provide solace for a bruised soul’ (Charlie Corbett)? George was a terror. In Hughes words, ‘a little shit’. There were occasional moments of connection, but as she herself recognises, she was really looking for a creature to rescue, and to love. Wild animals need to be wild, and eventually she had to let George go. She’s gone on to rescue more birds, mainly owls.  No doubt with the same patience, tenderness and huge amounts of disinfectant.

Sometimes even murder stories or favourite children’s books don’t do the trick, and such a time is now. I have been avoiding any news about the US elections (or the war in the Middle East – and poor Ukrainians, they’re still suffering, too) but I can’t help feel the shadow of it. My feeling, in common with a lot of other people, is that Americans are stuffed if Trump wins, and stuffed if he doesn’t. Though ‘stuffed’ depends on your viewpoint, of course. And looking backwards, it’s just what’s always happened. Good and evil, an eternal struggle? The angels and the devils of human nature? As a post-war baby, a baby-boomer if you like, I grew up in a country and a world that seemed on a path of becoming fairer, more peaceful, less violently prejudiced. In a word, better. Ha! My old neighbour Margaret, who died a couple of years ago at 98, would be shaking her head right now. She saw a re-run of the 1930’s unfolding around her, and could scarcely believe that it was all happening again, re-jigged with a new cast of villains (Putin, Trump and the rest) for the 2020’s.

But back to the consolation of books. Books with pictures. Books of pictures! The Anglophile in me turned away in disgust for many years, and quite righteously, as I learned more and more about just how bloody awful the English were to everyone else on their many colonial adventures. However I realise that I can still love a certain kind of Englishness. And this lovely book, Wild Light: A Printmaker’s Day and Night is just SO English, harking back to the woodcuts of Thomas Bewick, an accompaniment to the poetry of John Clare and William Blake, a peek into a fantasy world of  bucolic perfection.

I haven’t gone so far as to make any actual prints yet, but I’ve been inspired to buy some lino (not the old-fashioned kind which was hell to carve, especially if it was cold; you had to put in front of a heater to warm up, and I usually ended up with a wound or two from the tools) and get out my sketchpad. I learned how to do linocuts when I did printmaking as part of my Diploma of Teaching, and over the years I’ve had phases of doing a run of them. Making linocuts is the ultimate in DIY printmaking, I think. You don’t need a lot of space, you don’t have to use chemicals or oil-based inks and most importantly, you don’t need a press. It can really be a kitchen table thing.

Harding was born in 1960, and studied art at Leicester Polytechnic and then Nottingham Trent University. She’s a prolific artist and illustrator; her kind of nostalgic ‘British countryside’ vision is having quite a moment, which is a bit ironic given that the British countryside is in deep, deep shit with so many species – like hedgehogs! –  endangered. A bit like here, eh? She recently illustrated a children’s version of Isabella Tree’s book, Wilding, about the experiment at Knepp Castle. And many people would be aware of her covers for Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path, The Wild Silence and Landlines. I was toying with the idea of buying one of her calendars for 2025 – but maybe every day is a little too much of the Englishness.