Susan Green

How good to find a new author! I bought The Sea in the Op Shop last year and put it on my ‘to read’ shelf where it’s sat for months. This is the first of Banville’s novels I’ve read and I will be going back for more. Luckily, there are lots more; this, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2005, was his 18th.With a long train trip ahead of me – to visit a friend in Barwon Heads (by the sea!) I wanted a shortish novel…

Shortish it is, but intense, beautiful. I’ve since read Banville described as a great stylist, and I’ve had this idea that I don’t like writing with loads of ‘style’, but I think I’m quite wrong. (As I so often am, and which is a very good thing, actually – but that’s another story altogether). Perhaps I’ve read and not liked prose which draws attention to itself – there’s a particular kind of American writing that I have in mind – but this is something different altogether. Lewis Jones, in his review in the Telegraph, puts it better than I can:

And Banville’s prose is sublime. Several times on every page the reader is arrested by a line or sentence that demands to be read again. They are like hits of some delicious drug, these sentences. One has to stop for a while, and gaze smiling and unseeing into the middle distance, before returning to the page for one’s next fix. For a shortish book, it takes a long time to read.

Here’s a sample; I just opened the book at random.

At times the image of her would spring up in me unbidden, an interior succubus, and a surge of yearning would engorge the very root of my being. One greenish twilight after rain, with a wedge of wet sunlight in the window and an impossibly unseasonal thrush piping outside in the dripping lupins, I lay face down on my bed in such an intense suffusion of unassuageable desire – it hovered, this desire, like a nimbus about the head of my beloved, enfolding her everywhere and nowhere focused – that I broke into sobs, lavish, loud and thrillingly beyond all control. My mother heard me and came into the room, but said nothing, uncharacteristically – I might have expected a brusque interrogation, followed by a smack – only picked up the pillow that the thrashings of grief had pushed off my bed and, after the briefest of hesitations, went out again, shutting the door soundlessly behind her. What did she imagine I was weeping for, I wondered, and wonder again now. Had she somehow recognised my rapturously lovesick grief for what it was? I could not believe it.How could she, who was merely my mother, know anything of this storm of passion in which I was helplessly suspended, the frail wings of my emotions burned and blasted by love’s relentless flame? Oh, Ma, how little I understood you, thinking how little you understood.

I have just had a Pride and Prejudice blow-out. A customer ordered a remastered DVD of the 1980 BBC series, with David Rintoul and Elizabeth Garvie in Darcy and Elizabeth roles. So I ordered it as well, and binge-watched the whole series one hot day. David Rintoul did the rudeness, snobbery and arrogance so well that I wondered if there was  any way that my bad opinion of him could be reversed. But of course, it was.
This P&P was not perhaps as romantic as the later BBC version, but very true to the tone of the book. It ended with great restraint. Darcy and Elizabeth escape from Mrs Bennet’s endless loop of chatter to walk along a country lane together – they talk, Elizabeth thanks Mr Darcy for saving Lydia, he tells her he did it only for her… and we know how it ends. However, their delight in each other isn’t expressed in a kiss or an embrace; rather, they walk and talk, telling to each other the history of their regard, not even holding hands, and finally the camera pulls back, leaving them together under a tree. The canopy hides them, and in leafy privacy they may have kissed at last but it was not for us to see.

Well, then for comparison I had to watch the one we all think of as the classic, the 1995 Colin Firth-in-wet shirt-and-breeches one. Not on the same day, but all in one go, and well into the night.
There was much more emotion on display in this one – more romance – but here’s a funny little difference. In the earlier series, Lady Catherine’s daughter was played as a normal-looking but shy, young woman. As Elizabeth says goodbye to the Rosings menage, Miss de Bourgh steps forward and takes Elizabeth’s hands in hers, mutely expressing her liking for the other girl. It was a moving little scene, and made you think how hellish to be Lady Catherine’s daughter. In the 1995 version, Miss de Bourgh is played for laughs, not pathos, as a snotty, sickly caricature.

Next, the 1940’s movie with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier. I loved that film as a young teenager, but now I find it almost unwatchable. Both the leads are way too old and their performances are embarrassingly mannered, and Garson in particular overdoes the arch, playful charm. Moreover, the costume department for some reason decided to make the clothes early Victorian, with huge puffed sleeves, full skirts and massive bonnets instead of Georgian, and it’s all so wrong. So is the tone of the thing – soft-hearted and broadly comical, instead of ironic and rather cool. However, the supporting cast is a treat. The Mrs Bennett of Mary Boland is fabulously vulgar and garrulous, and the sisters are a fine gaggle of girls.

Finally, I read the book. My Penguin classic contains a couple of wonderful essays and now I feel quite enlightened and full of a new admiration for Austen’s writing. I’m ashamed to realise that in all these years of re-reading P&P, while delighting in the language, the irony, the sharp, clever perception, even the exploration of morals and manners and values in the characters’ journey of (what an out-of-place phrase this is!) personal growth, I’ve really read for the romance. And though I’m an ordinary reader and by no means a student of the  social, economic, political, philosophical and fictional contexts, I found it added to my pleasure in the novel to consider these things. I’ve ended by questioning my own perception, which is nearly half a century old, that Pride and Prejudice is a romance at all.

Here is a rather long but lovely quotation from the introductory essay by Tony Tanner for the 1972 Penguin Classics edition.

…Jane Austen was brought up on eighteenth-century thought and was fundamentally loyal to the respect for limits, definition and clear ideas that it inculcated… In the figure of Elizabeth Bennett, she shows us energy attempting to find a valid mode of existence within society…In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake writes: ‘Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. Energy is  eternal Delight.’ As I have said, I think that Jane Austen’s suspicion of energy increased in her later work. But in Pride and Prejudice she shows us energy and reason coming together, not so much as a reconciliation of opposites, but as a marriage of complementaries. She makes it seem as if it is possible for playfulness and regulation – energy and boundaries – to be united in fruitful harmony, without the one being sacrificed to the other. Since to stress one at the expense of the other can either way mean loss, both to the self and to society, the picture of achieved congruence between them offered in Pride and Prejudice is of unfading relevance. It is perhaps no wonder that it has also proved capable of giving eternal delight.

I’m just about to start something new – I’ve joined a Book Group. My one and only try at being in a book group was about 10 years ago and it wasn’t a success. Our first book was The Vagina Monologues and our second book was Geraldine Brook’s March and that was it. I was quite eager, what with my internet researches on  ‘how to run a book group’ (notes and questions and checklists and all) but it didn’t gel and was mainly about afternoon tea. Which was absolutely fine. My world runs on tea.
But this one is the real thing, administered by the CAE, with a box of books arriving monthly, and proper study notes in a little booklet. Our first book is one I’ve never heard of, Our Father Who Art in the Tree by Judy Pascoe. I’m excited!

My neuroscience reading jag continues. On Monday I bought a new release, Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body by Jo Marchant. It’s very interesting, and a review in Saturday’s Age suggested that it could be a new The Brain That Changed Itself.

It’s interesting, yes –  but my goodness, how it suffers in comparison to Oliver Sacks. The depth, erudition, curiosity and above all, the compassion of the man just shine. You just can’t help loving him. And after having read his autobiography On the Move: A Life, I can see why. It’s because he really understands suffering and pain. And guilt, self-loathing,  excess, addiction, passion, speed, drugs, sex, work, obsession, failure, success… He is, also, a very fine writer. He understands ‘story’ as well, and each case history is a beautiful piece of writing. I have borrowed his final book, Gratitude, from the library but haven’t read it yet, even though it is very slim. Because I know I shall be in floods of tears.

Not a flood of tears, but I was definitely moist-eyed at the end of Bel Canto by Anne Patchett.
In an unnamed, poor, Latin American country, a group of amateurish terrorists break in to the Vice-President’s home. There are a lot of guests that evening – a grand party has been arranged to promote foreign trade – but the President, target of the attack, has stayed home to watch his favourite soap opera. The would-be kidnappers are trapped, along with their hostages…a beautiful American opera diva: her devoted fan, a Japanese CEO and his loyal translator: a French diplomat in love with his wife: a cast of young freedom fighters, the Generals who planned the whole fiasco, the Red Cross negotiator who’s seen it all before ….
As the blurb says, ‘…a horrific imprisonment is transformed into an unexpected heaven on earth’. Beautiful, funny, poignant, surreal, romantic, loopy and finally, heartbreakingly sad.

It’s the end of January, last day of the first month of the New Year. I have read six books so far in 2016, and they’ve all been terrific. The two Siri Hustvedts got me so keen that I ordered another of her titles, The Blazing World, from the library. But I think it will have to go back unread; it’s not the right book for now.
I have a half dozen or so ‘to read’ books on the shelf and I hesitated between Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, Ben Lerner’s At the Atocha Station and Bel Canto by Anne Patchett. I took a punt and plunged into Bel Canto and by the first page I was hooked. It’s such a lovely feeling! And I have made yet another cup of tea, checked the rain gauge (20 mls!), put some vegies on to roast for tonight’s dinner… I know it’s the last day of January, but with the rain and dull grey sky and chill in the air, the hot tea and the cooking smells from the kitchen, it feels like winter. Perfect reading weather.

I whizzed through Alex Marwood’s thriller/mystery The Darkest Secret in a rush during the week. Clearly drawing on the Madeleine McCann disappearance, it’s a page turner and cleverly done, with a very effective structure (note to self!). It’s set in two different time periods – September 2004, when three-year-old identical twin Coco went missing – and fifteen years later, in the aftermath of the death of Sean, the twin’s father – and it’s told from a number of viewpoints. You get a kind of rush, reading a good thriller. I can see that they could become quite addictive, but one’s enough for me right now. Too much darkness.

I went straight on to Oliver Sack’s An Anthropologist on Mars. I’m ashamed to say although I knew who he was and the kinds of things he wrote, I’ve never read anything by Sacks before. I have been missing out. I bought this in the Op Shop the other day, in spite of the spooky cover and the fact that the book has obviously been dropped in the bath. I’d been primed to pick it off the shelf, I think, because in the last couple of  weeks I’ve had several customers in the shop to order Gratitude, a series of four essays he wrote during his last months, in which he explored his thoughts and feelings about completing his life and facing his death.

The subtitle is ‘Seven Paradoxical Tales’. Case histories, I suppose, but told with compassion, humanity, humility, care and love. From my online reading of comments and reviews, I see these qualities (and more) are the hallmarks of Sack’s work. I feel I’ve got a better – bigger – idea of what it is to be a human, to think and feel, to create and act and relate. Since the bee in my bonnet is always memory, my quote of the week is this, from chapter called ‘The  Landscape of his Dreams’, about Italian Franco Magnani, living for many years in the US, but painting obsessively, exclusively, with photographic detail and accuracy, the village of his birth, Pontito,in Tuscany.

One may be born with the potential for a prodigious memory, but one is not born with a disposition to recollect: this comes only with changes and separations in life – separations from people, from places, from events and situations, especially if they have been of great significance, have been deeply hated or loved. It is, thus, discontinuities, the great discontinuities of life, that we seek to bridge, or reconcile,, or integrate, by recollection and, beyond this, by myth and art. Discontinuity and nostalgia are most profound if, in growing up, we lose or leave the place where we were born or spent our childhood, if we become expatriates or exiles, if the place or the life we were brought up in is changed beyond recognition or destroyed. All of us, finally, are exiles from the past.

I’m not one of those people who can’t let go of books. Book shop customers often love to talk, and to talk about their love of books, and for some their book collections have an almost sacred character. They would never dream of letting them go, selling them, giving them away; it’s as if they are part of them, part of what makes them who they are. I wonder how far away some of them are from having some kind of hoarding disorder – you know, where your possessions are part of you, like your hair or nails, like a limb, and no matter that you can’t move in your house, the books must stay.

Last week I did a big cull of my bookshelves and donated 4 shopping bags of books to the Salvo’s Op Shop. The building has decent-sized eaves out the front, and it’s under those that we locals pile our bags and boxes of donations when the shop’s not open. There was so much other stuff piled up outside that my bags weren’t really under cover; when I drove past the following morning I realised that they’d have sat all night in the rain (11mls in my rain gauge, so yes, quite a wetting). I was a bit distressed, actually. A waste of books. I didn’t want them anymore, and I wasn’t upset or sad to see them go. It wouldn’t have been so bad if they’d been your bog-standard ordinary paperbacks – thrillers or self-help or airport fiction –

But quite a few of them were my mother’s books, uniform Everyman volumes of Anglo-Saxon poetry and Jacobean plays – books on literature and language and drama, all with her name and address and the date inside, in that clear, left-slanting handwriting that never changed, not even when she was very old. I’d hoped that someone – the right person – would snap them up and treasure them. Some people can’t bear books that have been handled or owned (I have a friend who won’t borrow from the library) but I like a bit of personality with my books – inscriptions, names, dedications, bookplates…
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the bookshop where I work  had a second-hand section. Tracey, the owner at the time, would often buy from deceased estates; whole libraries, hundreds of boxes, a life-time of reading and thinking and collecting. We both still remember one lot from an old lady in a nearby township. Each book was stamped in blue ink with

BIENVENUE
Barker’s Creek

She had a fascinating collection – lots of European works in translation, lots of history, left-wing politics and philosophy, lots of poetry and literature. As I sorted and priced, I used to make up stories about her. I’ll always have a friendly feeling towards that cultured and interesting lady from Bienvenue and I hope that whoever buys Mum’s un-soggy books will feel the same about Helen Harris of Elsternwick.

Anyway, the moral of the tale is that next time I am donating books,  they’ll be delivered while the shop was open. Or at the very least, packed in plastic bags.

It’s odd how sometimes everything connects.
In last Saturday’s Age was an article titled The Day the Dog Died… by Aisha Dow. The dog died in the living room, at the foot of the sofa, and it stayed there, decomposing, until  ‘all that was left was a large, perfectly formed skeleton and a muddy brown stain.‘
Horrible, yes? But there was worse. The owner of the dog and living room was a 79 year old woman who’d been in hospital. When a social worker and an occupational therapist visited her home, in order to get it ready for her discharge, they found not only the dead dog, but floors covered with bags of rubbish, cigarette butts and piles of Wheels on Meals containers. Oh, and a cardboard box filled with toilet paper and faeces. As Dow writes, ‘…the workers had stumbled across a squalid household.’
She goes on to explain that ‘domestic squalor is not a distinct medical condition, but rather is described as a living environment that has become so unclean, messy and unhygienic that people of a similar culture would find cleaning and clearing essential’.

This article, combined with my current book, The Making of Home by Judith Flanders, led to much meditating on the notion of ‘home’. My family home, in its three different locations. The various homes I’ve made for myself, by myself and with others. Homes I’ve visited and stayed in, some of which were so ‘unclean, messy and unhygienic’ that it was only an over-developed sense of politeness that made me sip tea from the dirty cup and gingerly nibble the food I was offered. I remembered the house of a childhood friend which was so clean, so neat, so full of light and shiny surfaces and admirable storage solutions that I was homesick, even though our place was always a bit of a tip. This family had no art on the walls and no books. I noticed that more than anything. It felt weird. And the house of an acquaintance that was not especially dirty, but so messy that it looked as if a giant had come along and thrown all her stuff in the air. To find something – the phone, keys, a book, a plate – she shuffled the stuff around, thus covering and hiding other things. Also, weird. But both ‘home’.

Flanders looks at the evolution of the house in Northern Europe, Britain and the USA from the 16th to the early 20th century and shows that what we think ‘home’ is and what it actually was are two very different things. In earlier times, furniture and what we now call ‘home-wares’ were so expensive that nobody had much. The household furnishings of a moderately prosperous family well into the late 17th century formed a very short inventory: a table, some benches and stools, a chair (that is, one chair and one only, for it was not uncommon for the father to eat sitting while everyone else stood), a cupboard, a modest batterie de cuisine and a few tubs, buckets, blankets, trunks and the like. These goods were valuable. They were mentioned in wills; they were handed down the generations. (As were clothes. Another story).
The house was as much a work-place as a living place. The household needed to produce much of what it took to keep everyone fed, clothed and sheltered, and some family members may have also earned money from trades such as weaving or knitting. There was no expectation of privacy. Beds – and only the well-off actually owned beds, the rest of us slept on straw – were in public rooms, for there weren’t separate rooms for separate occupations such as sleeping, cooking, working and relaxation as there are now – it was all in together. Warmth from fire or stove, and light from lamps or candles was concentrated in one area – another good reason for togetherness.

What changed these houses into ‘homes’ as we commonly think of them – as special and separate, almost sacred; retreats from the harsh outside world; places of ultimate comfort and intimacy where you can ‘be yourself’ – was, according to Flanders, the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism.

The article and the book connected with my visit to the Op Shop which has – hooray – just re-opened after the Christmas break. The stuff! (We won’t even talk about the clothes.) It felt wrong, somehow. The piles and shelves of perfectly good, serviceable, not unattractive (and yes, let’s face it, some frankly hideous) crockery and cutlery and bedding and table-linen and assorted home-wares… For under $20 I could have taken home stuff in  quantities that the ‘moderately prosperous family of the late 17th century’ would have found astonishing. They’d have thought I was super, super rich. This stuff has been donated, in most cases, because the folk who owned it have bought different or better stuff. I do it myself, of course. I buy stuff. We all do.

But I also use that brown Derby casserole that my parents brought back from England in 1952.

Home. I have often wondered what it would feel like to live in a house where nothing had a history. Where it was all new. As would happen to us if, for instance, we were in the path of a bush-fire. How would I feel ‘at home’ if my personal history was invisible?

I’ve just finished the Philip Larkin biography and I’m left with a sense of cramped Englishness, a quality of ‘life lived small’. His parents weren’t very good at being happy  – and there’s a famous and much quoted poem about that – and neither, really, was he. His working life was spent as a librarian – for many years at the University in Hull in the north of England – he never really travelled, he generally stood apart from the literary circus, he never married or had children. He died at 63.

A previous biography by Andrew Motion apparently caused a bit of an anti-Larkin uproar by revealing him to be racist and sexist as well as a duplicitous and grumpy old git. This biography tries to tilt our perception of him the other way, by explaining, excusing, demonstrating that whatever yucky things he might do or say or write, he could also be likeable, kind, generous and…well, human. Do I really need to know that he collected pornographic photographs and wrote, as Brunette Coleman, stories about lesbian school-girls ? That at times he affected a rather nasty Tory intolerance? Or that he had two and at one point three mistresses on the go but was never going to marry any of them?
Poor man! Though this is a sympathetic book, I can’t help picturing the private and self-contained poet spinning in his grave. Though at least he was dead when the biographers got at him. Imagine what it must be like to be alive and read your life –  with all its mistakes and inconsistencies and not-so-pretty parts – laid out for everyone to gawp at.

Photo by Peter Symonds

I don’t actually care about the naughty school-girl tales and the tangled love life and the nastiness. After reading this life of ‘The Hermit of Hull’ (isn’t that a great nick-name?) I went back to the poems. There are defeated and bitterly funny and pessimistic poems, but there is also An Arundel Tomb. In 1986, in the UK with my mother, I visited Chichester Cathedral. I didn’t know about Philip Larkin’s famous poem,  but there it was, displayed near the tomb itself.

Side by side, their faces blurred
The earl and countess lie in stone…

These effigies of knight and lady are not uncommon; what is unusual is that he is not wearing his mailed glove.

One sees, with a sharp, tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

Perhaps they were known to have loved each other deeply; perhaps the sculptor thought it was a nice touch; we don’t know.

…The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

Happy New Year! I am off and running with my 2016 reading.

I have just finished reading Siri Hestvedt’s What I Loved. I raced through it as if I was reading a thriller. Because it was thrilling.

I bought it at the Op Shop months ago, but only started it on the train to Melbourne on Wednesday. I was immediately captured and just read until I finished, close to midnight, the same day. I haven’t done that for a while, probably not since I read The Goldfinch.

Actually, in some ways it’s very like The Goldfinch. Not only does it range far and wide in the New York art world but it’s a big, serious novel with a huge scope and great intelligence. What’s it about? Oh, the usual – it’s about thinking and feeling; about families and marriage and sex and desire; about how we perceive and think of and order our shifting, changing worlds; about art and ideas, memory and grief, trust and truth and love. And so beautifully written.

As I read, I did something I’ve not done before; I underlined the passages that caught me. Vandalism? Maybe, but I’ve recently become frustrated by my inability to remember where I read what. There was so much in this book that was witty or wise or well-put, so why not try to catch it as it flies? (And the grumpy kid in me mutters, “Anyway, it’s my book and I did it in pencil.”)

 I suppose we are all the products of our parents’ joy and suffering. Their emotions are written into us, as much as the inscriptions made by their genes.

We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.

Lies are always double: what you say coexists with what you didn’t say but might have said. When you stop lying, the gap between your words and inner belief closes, and you continue on a path of trying to match your spoken words with the language of your thoughts, at least those fit for other peoples’ consumption.

Useful objects, like chairs and dishes, passed down from one generation to another, may briefly feel haunted by their former owners, but that quality vanishes rather quickly into their pragmatic functions. Art, useless as it is, resists incorporation into dailiness, and if it has any power at all, it seems to breathe with the life of the person who made it. Art historians don’t like to speak of this, because it  suggests the magical thinking attached to fetishes and icons, but I have experienced it time and again…

I got stuck two thirds of the way through My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. At the start I read eagerly and with a kind of thrilled recognition – I, too, was a little girl with intense and complicated friendships. The child Elena’s Neopolitan world was so real and highly charged, I could feel myself with her in the sun-baked, squalid streets, the neighbourhood staircases and cellars and balconies. I could feel too the poverty, ignorance and struggle, the constant undertow of violence. In the end, it was so claustrophobic and  stifling I just didn’t want to read any more. The good book at the wrong time! I put it aside, and moved on to one of my favourite times and places, cold and stitched-up 1950s England.

And now I am well into a biography of Philip Larkin; Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love by James Booth. Here is what the poet has to say about being with people…

Viciously now, I lock my door.

The gas-fire breathes. The wind outside

Ushers in evening rain. Once more

Uncontradicting solitude

Supports me on its giant palm;

And like a sea anemone

Or simple snail, there cautiously

Unfolds, emerges, what I am.

Booth comments that Larkin was ‘determined to resist the intimidation of his socially responsible super-ego, and live life rather than allowing life to live him.’

A New Year’s Resolution?

A week or so before Christmas, my local Opportunity Shop closed for the holidays. Not only were all clothes only $1 an item, but there were other magnificent bargains to be had as well. Magnificent? Bargains? I guess it depends on your perspective. Anyway, I staggered off with around 70 copies of Country Life magazine  for $10.

 Country Life is a weekly English magazine that has been going for about a million years (actually, since 1897); originally it had an emphasis on country sports of the death-dealing kind (foxes, grouse, partridges, deer and fish, beware!) but that later extended to gardens, great houses, antiques and collecting, livestock and agriculture, and other aspects of – well, of country life.

I first encountered it at the Frankston Library in 1970. My mother, who was the Deputy and later Principal of the High School I attended (yes, it was hell, but only until Form 4 – after that the bullying stopped) was a very very busy woman but she made the time, once a week, to meet me at the library, borrow books and then have a slap-up afternoon tea at the Svendborg Coffee Lounge.

I don’t know why we started borrowing Country Life. It was certainly not for the hunting, shooting, fishing content, which we glossed over fairly quickly. However we didn’t skip the real estate advertisments; we got much pleasure from the many pages of houses, illustrated with grainy black and white photographs and with evocative descriptions.

At that age – early teens – I was in love with the idea of The House. I loved Gothic and historical novels (Daphne du Maurier, Victoria Holt, Dorothy Eden, Jean Plaidy, Anya Seton, Elizabeth Goudge, Jane Aiken Hodge, Catherine Gaskin) and in these, the house was often a character in its own right… just think of Manderley. I still have the Gothic I wrote as an English assignment in form 2 – it is called Burnt House. I got the title from the Country Life real estate pages and the style from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.

The real estate pages are still a feature of the magazine, only the pictures are now full page and full colour, styled and glossy, fabulous fuel for those Escape to the Country fantasies. How about an Exquisite 18th century hall standing amidst breathtaking private parkland, 10 miles from Alderley Edge. With hall, 4 reception rooms, games room, snug, breakfast kitchen, 9 bedroom suites, 2 additional bathrooms, wine cellars, pool, jacuzzi, gym, steam room, garaging, office, chapel and helicopter hangar? Not sure what the price is, but on the facing page, a superb Italianate country villa with 7 bedrooms is  around 2.5 million pounds.

I don’t remember the 1970s prices. Perhaps the Escape to the Country dreams weren’t quite so expensive then. What I do remember is our imaginings, our romantic alternate existences in Elizabethan manors, Queen Anne rectories, Georgian village houses and Scottish castles. When, in the late 1980s, Mum took me to England with her for 3 weeks, we bolted around the countryside and managed to fit in amazing number of such places. I remember walking (it was with a tour group, but nothing could take away the sense of embedded history) up the staircases at Knole, and seeing how the wood of each step was worn down from centuries of footfalls…and now my foot, too…

My pile of Country Life is proving to be a bargain already. With the solar-powered air-conditioning blasting away, I am sitting in the cool, imagining myself in mansions, manors, rectories and castles. In Itchen Abbas, Meysey Hampton, West Wittering, Ulcombe, Inkpen, Guilden Morden, Michelmersh, Southrop, Pitlochry and Carlton-in-Cleveland…

As the old joke says, “Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.”
My trip to Chelsea was a rather melancholy pilgrimage. My old house is gone, almost every house I knew in the street is gone, the playground and bluestone wall at the end of the street are gone, the way down to the beach through the dunes is gone. Everything is shabbier except the boatsheds, which have been tarted up with bright colours and new paint, and at first even the beach itself didn’t seem the same; was it really that narrow?  Perhaps it was time to get that gnawing nostalgia of my system. Though I lived in our family house (deduct three years spent in the country in the middle 1960s) until I was 19, and then again for about a year in my early 20s, it’s my first 7 years that are most strongly imprinted.  My child’s eye view is gone because the child is gone. Almost.

I guess I expected the house to go. It was always a bit of a dump; a family holiday home that grew, bit by bit, from the 1920s to the 1970s. A rabbit warren of a place, with odd doors and passages and steps.  was the kingdom of childhood, a land of adventure – many lands, in fact, for there were different zones – the dusty, spidery narrow behind the bungalows, the overgrown sandpit under the tree, the path at the side lined with orange-flowered cliveas thriving in the dry shade, the lavatory wall covered by a passionfruit vine, the pincushion hakea and the wattle in the back courtyard, the sweep of tough grass where I’d run under the sprinkler, the cubby house, the eyrie built by my father for the express purpose of viewing sunsets, the path up to the beach gate made of rejected marble slabs (my great-grandfather was a marble and gold-leaf importer), the twisted, witchy ti-trees along the back fence, and the gate itself, opening onto sand-dunes and sea and sky.

It was only when I saw the drifts of tiny white shells, like flaked almonds, that my Chelsea self began to awake, but it was walking barefoot that really filled me with silly joy. As if a memory was held in the soles of my feet. It was the firm, crunchy sensation of those particular crushed shells, that specific gritty sand, the hard surface underfoot at the tide-line softening into sinking sand a few steps up from the shore. And then seagulls and sky and clouds and blue and waves and the breeze on my face and I was seven again, running like the wind along the sandbar chasing gulls and making them take off and fly in front of me, and feeling like I myself was flying…

I’ve put my remembered Chelsea beach into a novel.

February. The hot brazen disc of the sun, the arc of the bay, the faint shapes of the You Yangs in heat haze across the water. Judith and I would stand ankle-deep in the sea watching the cloud banks change colour as the sun sank lower and the last gulls, crying, winged home. Under our feet the sand was gritty with shell fragments and marked with corrugations left by the waves. Wading out, we would go up to our knees, thighs, and then step up onto a smooth sand-bank. The neighbours, Dutch immigrants, all tall and blonde, would pass by in their little boat, calling our names.

A heat wave. When it was dark, mothers carried fretful babies down to the sea’s edge to catch the breeze while the men and children took torches and spears out for flathead. Later, whole families arrived with pillows and bedding to sleep on the beach.                   

            ‘Like we did in the Underground,’ said Judith.

            ‘No, Ju, not the same thing,’ said Rob.

            ‘Sleeping in public,’ she explained. ‘The Henry Moore drawings.’

            ‘But we’re not in danger, are we?’

            How could they even think in this heat? I paddled away from them and their talk. When something moved under my foot, I screamed, lost balance and subsided into the water.

            ‘Bliss? Are you all right?’ Rob and Judith splashed after me, but I just laughed and lay back with my wet dress billowing out and they each took one of my hands and towed me along, Rob singing Roll Out the Barrel, and Judith harmonizing. I was giddy with the dark, the moon, the heat, the cool, the love.

Near Rob and Judith’s house, there was a rest-home for nuns. They walked in pairs in the early evening, ominous and black-clad, their habits and veils flapping in the breeze. When I read in the local paper that one of them had drowned, I was surprised. As I wrote to Felix, I could not imagine a nun in a bathing suit.

Some mornings a kind of jungle telegraph would draw us down onto the beach with buckets ready to buy fish. The fishermen pulled their boats up onto the sand and from the full squirming nets they first threw back what they didn’t want. Into the shallows went the bony, the undersized, the puffer fish all stuck with poisoned spines and stingrays that flew immediately away from the shore, dark and demonic on their undersea wings.