Susan Green

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plus, you get to eat your therapy.

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

The House That Joy Built by Holly Ringland

Windswept by Anabel Abbs

Why Women Grow by Alice Vincent

Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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