Susan Green

I’ve just returned from a week up in Far North Queensland to gale-force winds, rain and grey skies. And it’s Spring! In like a lion, out like a lamb is the old saying. In between tottering out for swims, beach walks, coffees and gelato, I lounged about and read.
My holiday reading was not very diverse. Murder seems to go with relaxation, somehow.

I borrowed this battered and well-read omnibus from the ‘crime room’ at the Maldon Athenaeum.
Dorothy Simpson is a new writer to me. Her detective, Inspector Thanet, works in a small English city and is – for a change – happily married with no drug or alcohol problems. Almost boringly well balanced. The 3 books I read were Midsomer without the bizarre elements; classic English village and small town characters, and the crimes all satisfyingly rooted in the past. The sensitive Thanet and his more stolid sergeant Mike Lineham snuffle like hounds through the lives of victims and suspects. What fun. Simpson wrote 15 Thanet novels in the 1980’s so I can work my way happily through all of them as the need arises.

My other crime spree was with a Brother Cadfael omnibus, this time on Kindle.

They’re set in and around the city of Shrewsbury in Shropshire at the time, in the 12th century, when a civil war, known as ‘the Anarchy’ was raging between supporters of the two claimants to the throne, King Stephen and the Empress Maud. Brother Cadfael is a Welsh Benedictine monk, a herbalist, healer and very excellent detective. Ellis Peters wrote 21 Brother Cadfael mysteries (I’ll bet there are plenty at the Athenaeum) and there was also a TV series starring Derek Jacobi.

Cadfael is an older man, kindly, wise, experienced and well-travelled (once a crusader) but now happily tending his herb garden and making up medicines in the Abbey in between crimes. The mysteries are middling but the historical background is fascinating. ‘The Anarchy’. Empress Maud. Who knew? Not me.

When I think about it, much of my knowledge of history comes from novels. I first fell in love with historical fiction when as a 14-year-old I read a big fat novel called Katherine by Anya Seton, and soon I was working my way through the Plantagenets and Tudors and Stuarts in fiction and in fact. I think this is where my interest in the history of fashion comes from, too. When I read about characters wearing kirtles and wimples and parti-coloured hose, I just had to look them up. Now, I’m wondering if Katherine is at the Athenaeum. I hope it has the 1970’s cover, which is the one I remember.

When faced with an overload of distressing, worrying and just plain awful events swirling around in the friendship and family circle, not to mention in the wider world, sometimes I just need comfort reading. Lately comfort has come through gardening books. But when talking about the need for distraction to my brother, he dug out a book he thought might be just the ticket. He’d read the whole series to my niece when she was 8, and she’d loved them. Would I like to give it a try? My inner 8-year-old said, yes please.

Hermux Tantamoq is a quiet and rather shy fellow who repairs watches for a living. Just how he does this is, I can’t imagine because he is a mouse. Actually, all of the characters in the book are small mammals and some would say vermin (especially my friend whose upcoming odyssey to the outback has been postponed because mice ate out the wiring on her new motor-home). But it’s fiction, and Hermux is a sweetheart of a mouse who would never eat electrical wiring; he likes soup and chocolate donuts. He lives by routine, going to his shop, people-watching during breaks at his favourite café, and returning to his apartment in the evening to spend time with his pet ladybug.

But his quiet life is turned upside down when the fascinating aviatrix Linka Perflinger strides into his shop, requiring urgent repairs to her watch. She’s insistent, and so he agrees – therefore when she fails to pick it up, he’s annoyed. Then a sinister rat comes into the shop demanding he hand over Linka’s watch. Hermux refuses, and worried, decides to play detective.

The twisty plot takes in a sharp satire on the art world, a swipe at wellness culture, industrial espionage, opera and a cast of eccentric rodents. There’s a nail-biting finale, and I’ve already been around to my brother’s to borrow a couple more in the series. Fast-moving, fun and absorbing, the book did the trick of both cheering and distracting.

I read Wilding by Isabella Tree at breakneck speed and now I wish there was a sequel. So I could see if more peregrine falcons, nightingales and Purple Emperor butterflies arrived, and find out what happened with the pigs, and did they successfully introduce beavers into the river? What an uplifting and exciting book! It’s English (nightingales is a clue) but has so many parallels to Australian farming practices and preconceptions about our forests and wider landscape. I am sure if I dig a little, I will find a book or maybe an ABC doco about Australian wilding  or as it’s often called, rewilding.

Writer Isabella Tree and her husband Charlie Burrell own Knepp Castle and its farm in Surrey. Years of intensive farming had brought them to their knees, financially. But instead of following conventional wisdom by putting even more land under the plough, using more pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers, increasing the size of their dairy herd and expanding their markets, they chose to do something very different. They didn’t do more; they chose to do less, much less, by returning 3500 acres to nature. Wilding is the story of that journey, and it’s heartening to think that sometimes, doing nothing can have such amazing results.

The speed with which the degraded pastureland changed and regenerated astonished Tree and Burrell. It took nerve, at times, not to intervene. When thistles took over a large area, they knew the surrounding landowners would soon be up in arms, demanding action. But that year, a migratory butterfly species called the Painted Lady descended on the farm and ate all the thistle leaves. The animals stomped all over the what was left, and the ants took care of the debris. The thistles were all gone, without Roundup.

Not that all of the property was left to fix itself up. The owners did a great deal of fencing, introduced animals like deer, pigs and cattle into selected areas to coppice woodland, add manure and break up the soil to regenerate vegetation. They did remediation work to the river that flowed through the farm, removing the canal and returning it to its floodplain because wetlands are not only home to wildlife, but assist with flood prevention by soaking up excess water. (They also filter run-off from farming).

Though all the work at Knepp was informed by of sound environmental science and research, as well as similar wilding projects in other countries (notably the Netherlands), the surrounding landowners took a lot of convincing. As did various government departments and funding bodies. They wanted to see what was going to happen before it did, and the couple were not equipped with crystal balls. Outdated studies on British woodland, which wrongly decreed that many species required a closed canopy to thrive, hampered their progress. I was reminded of the struggle to have Indigenous cultural burning practices accepted as part of normal forest management.

Burrell and Tree were brave souls in going against the accepted picture of an ideal English pastoral landscape because the wilded landscape is messy and ungroomed, unpredictable and surprising. Wilding, with its mix of memoir, science, history and practical environmental activism, was a feel-good and hopeful book to read in dark times.

William Mayne is one of the cohort of writers who formed the ‘second golden age’ of British children’s books. From the late 1950’s to the 1970s, writers like Rosemary Sutcliff, Alan Garner, Phillipa Pearce, L M Boston and Joan Aiken produced future classics. They were the books that I read avidly. Yet I can’t think of any of Mayne’s more than 100 books that I actually read when I was a kid.

Now I’ve finished Earthfasts, I think I know why. It’s his style. It’s hard to describe, but the best I can do is ‘spiky’. You think you’ve got a grip on it, and then you get snagged on a sentence or even a single word.

Darkness began to lie more heavily now. In a gap in the cloud overhead a star looked out, then drew the curtains on itself and went back to its empyrean concerns. The drummer boy was still solidly there, but he was less easy to see. Keith looked at David, and David was less easy to see as well, so that the drummer boy was not unnaturally fading as he had unnaturally come…

It’s not easy to read; Mayne makes you work. It’s challenging. There is a lot of description.
‘Empyrean concerns’?  I had to look it up. And I don’t understand the last sentence. Which is OK, and as an adult reader I can cope – however reluctantly, because I’m a lazy reader –  with challenge. So I persevered.

Keith and David, who seem to be around 13 or 14, are both unusual boys, serious, intense and intelligent.  It’s a midsummer evening, and they’re on the outskirts of their rural Yorkshire town when they hear what sounds like drumming coming from under the ground. They see a mound of grass move and change shape – and out of the hill comes a boy from another time. He’s a drummer boy called Nellie Jack John who went into an underground tunnel 200 years ago to find King Arthur’s treasure. I won’t give any spoilers, but there are giants, an heirloom boggart, wild pigs, and a candle with a mysterious, addictive, un-extinguishable flame. The two boys, both science-minded,  try to make logical sense of events. Detective work brings them a number of clues from the past. There are episodes of fast moving adventure and even some humour. However a nightmare-prone child might be advised not to read it until they’re older; by the last of the four parts, the story has turned dark, scary and sometimes disturbing.

Some of my very favourite things are here – time slips, supernatural events, myths and legends that seep into everyday life, ancient rural landscapes, the peculiar, stratified social world of post-war Britain – and I certainly kept turning the pages. I recognised the quality and originality, the beauty of some of the writing, the intensity Mayne brought to the characters of Keith and David and above all the genuinely weird character of the events  unleashed when the drummer walked out of the hillside. Really, there was a lot to like about Earthfasts… but I didn’t love it. And I’m not sure what a child reader would make of it today. According to some of the articles I read, Mayne’s books were never widely popular among children. In fact, they were more popular with adults.

However, I still thought I’d like to find some more Mayne to read.

But maybe I will have trouble finding more books. They were apparently quietly removed from many British library collections in 2004 after he was convicted of 11 counts of indecent assault against little girls. He spent a couple of years in prison and was placed on the sex offenders register for life. (He died in 2010.)  It would be difficult to reissue the books of a convicted pedophile, even if he is a neglected master.

I recently found out about the famous Canadian writer and Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro. Munro stayed with her second husband after he not only pleaded guilty to sexually abusing her  daughter, but described the 9-year-old  girl as a seductress and home-wrecker.  She downplayed the nature of the offences, used her fame and reputation to quash publicity, and effectively chose her husband over her child.

I feel so sad! Munro’s Lives and Girls and Women is one of the touchstone books of my early adulthood. I learned not to feel inferior because my literary aspirations weren’t heroic. I learned that short stories about seemingly ordinary and quiet lives – female lives, interior lives –  can outshine the Big Male Novel. I read and re-read her books, buying each new one when they came out. I learned so much, not just about writing and language, but about womanhood.  I don’t want to lose any of that, but…

It’s a whole other big question, isn’t it? What to do, how to think, about writers like Mayne and Munro, whose private lives reveal such flaws? I’m afraid I don’t have any answers.

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!