WELCOME TO COUNTRY

I’m only just back from nearly a month away from home. Alice Springs, King’s Canyon, Uluru in NT, and SA’s Coober Pedy and Wilpena Pound.
I’d never been to Central Australia before, and it was amazing. Beautiful, and so profoundly different to where I live that as soon as I arrived in Alice I felt like I was in another country. Not just the landforms and rocks, the sky, the colour of the earth – the people. I was on Arrernte and Anangu country.

Though I have heard many Welcome to Country ceremonies, this was the first time I have ever heard Aboriginal people speaking in their own language in the shops, in the street, on a bench alongside the tourist track around Uluru. I suppose in truth wherever I am in Australia I am always standing on other people’s country – but I have never felt it with such force.

It was like a seismic shift, and though my understanding of the issues facing Indigenous people is probably as just as superficial as before, my support for the Voice referendum is more heartfelt. I can’t believe it’s so political.
Anyway, enough of that. It just makes me feel sad.

The trip was a trip. An indescribable wow.
Being at Uluru was like looking at a hundred cathedrals all at the same time. The dramatic red rock domes of Kata Tjuta against the blue of the sky were mind-blowingly sublime. The ‘supermoon’ over the Rock was awesome in the real sense of the word.
Sunsets lit up the red rocks and earth with a fire-like glow; I woke in the night to the sound of dingos howling in the distance under a sky full of stars. A steep gorge with rock holes full of water, trees and ancient cycads in the middle of Watarrka/King’s Canyon was hidden away like a secret or a surprise in the middle of a rocky and strenuous climb.
I was filled to overflowing with awe and wonder. I had been told that being at Uluru, the ranges, the desert could be a spiritual experience, and it was.

From the sublime to the slightly ridiculous.
I rode a camel, and I liked it!
We stopped at the Yellow-footed Rock Wallaby viewing area in Brachina Gorge in the Flinders Ranges and, right on cue, they popped up, in ones and twos, long striped tails becomingly arrayed, and posed for the camera.
I ate a quandong pie in Blinman and stayed in a dugout B&B in Coober Pedy and looked at Crocodile Harry’s underground lair full of 1980s porn mag pinups and trophy underwear and sculptured breasts.
I toured the Nocturnal House at the Desert Park with my sunglasses on, effectively seeing almost nothing. (“What’s the point of this?” I thought as vague animal shapes scuttled about behind the glass. “It’s dark!”)

 

 

Back at home, I am already dreaming up my next trip. In one of those serendipitous coincidences, I found Marcia Langton’s Welcome to Country in an Op Shop, so I’ll be better informed.

 

 

 

 

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ENGLEBY

This is our Book Club choice for this month, and I think I can guarantee it’s going to create a lot of discussion. It might even be “love it or hate it”. We shall see.

Mike Engleby narrates his own story with what seems like total candour.
When the novel starts, he’s in second year at Cambridge University. It’s the ’70’s; he won a prize to go to university, after winning a scholarship to a minor public (read: private) school. He’s not posh; his family are working-class and poor. He drinks a lot. He takes prescription and recreational drugs. Crime? He does a bit of dealing, a bit of stealing, but nothing violent or sexual.
He’s highly intelligent, with a phenomenal memory. Observant. He’s got a wide general knowledge – politics, history, literature, music – and seems to soak up information like a sponge.
But quite quickly, the reader realises he’s an unreliable narrator. He’s also seriously creepy.

Engleby’s a stalker.
He’s become obsessed with another student, a girl called Jennifer. He watches her, attends the same clubs, starts going to one of her classes. She’s been cast in a film, and he manages to inveigle his way into the shoot in rural Ireland. He thinks he has some kind of relationship with her, but it’s mostly imaginary. When she vanishes, he’s the prime suspect.

Repellent, yes? Well, yes and no. Mike’s account of his dead father’s violent abuse, and the sustained bullying he experienced at his school are truly horrifying. There’s a sadness in his attempts to connect with Jennifer and in his solitary pub crawls and time spent hanging about on the fringes of student life. He knows there’s something not quite right with him, and at times, he’s perceptive enough to describe his mental state.
As in this scene. He has travelled alone to Istanbul:

It was one a.m. in the grey sodium light with the wailing music and the black ground with its spattered chewing gum and cigarette ends. I had started to pay too much attention to things. It was almost as though I could see right through them into the molecules that made them. And that awful music. I suppose my wind was trying too hard to get a grip on this place, to anchor it for me, because I had the strong impression that I was really outside time or place, that the hostile otherness of my surroundings was such that my own personality was starting to disintegrate. I was vanishing. My character, my identity, had unravelled. I was a particle of fear.
I guess I was a little lonely then.
In general, in less extreme circumstances, lonely looks after itself. It helps you develop strategies that reinforce it. The comfort of the dark cinema and the company of the screen actors prevent you from meeting anyone. Lonely’s like any other organism: competitive and resourceful in the struggle to perpetuate itself.

Engleby is not charged with any crime relating to Jennifer. He goes on to become a successful journalist. He forms a relationship with a woman, and they even move in together. She has a young daughter, and he enjoys her company. Life’s going well. Warning, there’s a spoiler here – but most readers will guess this is going to happen.
A body is discovered in a drainage ditch. And it all unravels.

Close to the end of the book, when Enderby is in his 17th year of imprisonment/confinement in an institution for the criminally insane, he reflects on his life and the reader gets a sense of what made him.

Once I saw a mother in a supermarket in Paddington – an obese, poor woman with bare legs and a small child who was making a noise. She swore at him and slapped him in the face, which only made him howl more. It wasn’t her fault really; she was clearly exhausted, broke and stretched to snapping point. But I knew that when she got the child home she’d beat him more, and if there was a father (a bit unlikely) he would hit him too.
And that child would slowly ascend towards full awareness in a world whose sky was violence and horizons were fear. And however resourceful he was, however patient and fortunate in the events of his life that followed, he was like a creature in a nest of imprisoning boxes who could never really break free. That was his world and any attempt to persuade him that it was merely a ‘subjective’ or ‘individual’ experience could never convince him.
And all of us, I think, are like him.

Dense with multiple themes, the  book is disturbing, tragic and at times weirdly funny (Engleby’s experiences with the legal and mental health systems are beyond absurd). When towards the end of the novel, Faulks takes us outside the closed world of Engleby’s deluded mind, his disconnect from reality becomes even clearer. Weirdly, I found the section where his Cambridge friend, Stellings, describes him as others saw him was almost heartbreaking.
Poor Jennifer. Poor Engleby.

 

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HOW TO DO NOTHING

Nothing is harder to do than nothing. In a world where our value is determined by our productivity, many of us find our every last minute captured , optimized, or appropriated as a financial resource by the technologies we use daily. We submit our free time to numerical evaluation, interact with algorithmic versions of each other, and build and maintain personal brands. For some, there may be a kind of engineer’s satisfaction in the streamlining and networking of our entire lived experience. And yet a certain nervous feeling, of being overstimulated and unable to sustain a train of thought, lingers. Though it can be hard to grasp before it disappears behind the screen of distraction, this feeling is in fact urgent. We still recognise that much of what gives one’s life meaning stems from accidents, interruptions, and serendipitous encounters: the “off time” that a mechanistic view of experience seeks to eliminate.

From the introduction to How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell.

My phone is on silent most of the time. I leave it in the house when I’m gardening. It’s off when I’m writing. I use only a few apps. I’m not on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. I know I annoy my friends by not being connected – and I have compromised by using Facebook Messenger – but after a brief flirtation I realised social media is addictive. And it’s not what I want to do with my time.

So in a way, Jenny Odell in How To Do Nothing is preaching to a convert. However I enjoyed having my distaste for social media and 24/7 “connectedness” clarified and explained. And it’s as simple as this: I hate knowing that my attention is being manipulated, gamed, algorithmed, stolen, bought and sold by big tech companies for money. And I try, wherever practical, to refuse to let them do it.

But this isn’t a rant, and though it’s dense, it isn’t dry reading. Odell is great company as she explores the ways individuals and communities have tried to refuse to participate in their own exploitation. She talks about the “dropping out” hippie culture of the 1960s and ’70s, sit-ins and protests and strikes, individual and collective action, parks and libraries and other kinds of non-productive public spaces. She explores hiking and bird-watching and learning about and simply being in your local environment. And above all, she talks about paying attention.

Odell’s antidote is looking and really seeing the place where you are. Being there with your mind, body and all your senses. Learning about your local environment – the geography and geology, the history, the flora and fauna. The birds – she’s big on birds. She talks about paying attention, and then deepening that attention.
Which I think equates to love, doesn’t it?

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VESPER FLIGHTS

The natural world is not, to me, a fabric of stuff that gleams with revelation of a singular creator god. Those moments in nature that provoke in me a sense of the divine are those in which my attention is unaccountably snagged on something small and transitory…things whose fugitive instances give me an overwhelming sense of how unlikely it is that in the days of my brief life I should be in the right place at the right time and possess sufficient quality of attention to see them at all…

I have just finished Vesper Flights, and as with the best writing, how I see the world has changed, just a little. Helen McDonald writes with such beautiful clarity, and it feels as if she’s made sense of and put into words some of my own half-realised thoughts and feelings about my encounters with the natural world. Even though she is a British writer and so the creatures she describes are not ours, it seems the intensity and fascination of our human encounters with nature are the same the world over. Though obviously I would rather encounter a kangaroo than a grizzly bear…

I suppose you could say that birds are McDonald’s major subject (though here she does touch on pigs, deer, hares, squirrels and university students) –  but that’s putting her into too small a box. Spirituality; grief and loss; science and research and the climate emergency; philosophy, history and literature – all these and more are interwoven with her own complex personal history in this series of essays. Above all, she illuminates what she calls ‘the numinous ordinary’, those moments that ‘open up a giddying glimpse into the inhuman systems of the world that operate on scales too small and too large and too complex for us to apprehend’.

Part of the numinousness in these encounters with nature is how unpredictable they are. There is no point in searching for them. In my experience if you go out hoping for revelation you will merely get rained upon.

And oddly enough, the day after I finished Vesper Flights, we had a bird encounter of our own. I don’t know that I would call it numinous, but it was intense. A bronzewing flew straight at our window. It’s happened before. The last time, the bird died and the replacement glass cost nearly $700. This time, there was a mighty bang, but no smash. When we ran into the room, we saw a smear of oily brown on the glass and a motionless bird lying on the path below. We watched anxiously. Was it dead? Was it terribly injured? Did it have a broken wing, and would one of us have to go down and wring its neck so the neighbourhood cats didn’t get at it? Little by little it began to move. Eventually it stood up. It was just stunned. I felt like cheering.
We tried to imagine what the bird must be thinking, or feeling. Do bronzewings think? Why do they keep doing this? Why can’t they see it’s a living room, not a flight path? What does it think happened to it? Will it remember, and stay away?
But not being inside a bird brain, we can never know.

The title, Vesper Flights, refers to swifts:

On warm summer evenings swifts that aren’t sitting on eggs or tending their chicks fly low and fast, screaming in speeding packs around rooftops and spires. Later, they gather higher in the sky, their calls now so attenuated by air and distance that to the ear they corrode into something that seems less than sound, to suspicions of dust and glass. And then, all at once, as if summoned by a call or a bell, they rise higher and higher until they disappear from view. These ascents are called vespers flights, or vesper flights, after the Latin vesper for evening. Vespers are evening devotional prayers, the last and most solemn of the day, and I have always thought ‘vesper flights’ the most beautiful phrase, an ever-falling blue.

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THE GREAT FIRE

Leaving Brian Talbot to his lunch in the common room, Leith loped across the spongy upward ground into which the weightless house seemed, that day, to be scarcely set. When he came in shrugging the storm from his shoulders like any Westerner and slapping his cap against his leg, his coat was at once removed by light hands: a gesture seeming to relieve coat as much as owner. But the house itself would not enclose him or identify. Translucent structures are not welcoming in cold rain.
The day had been unfortunate, all omens adverse; and the man himself at odds with the eagerness that quickened his step.
It was now, however, that his luck – if that’s what is was – turned.

 

Last week, my new book group had its first proper meeting. Our book was The Great Fire (2003) by Shirley Hazzard.
Very briefly: 32-year-old Aldred Leith, a decorated English war hero, is in Japan to report on the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. Staying with a repellent Australian couple, he befriends their two children. Benedict is dying of a rare disease and his younger sister Helen has become his comforter and carer. Aldred falls in love with Helen – they are separated by her parents and his work – they reunite in the end. There are many other minor characters, backstory showing Aldred’s troubled relationship with his father, his love affair with the mother of a dead friend and his failed marriage. A sub-plot features Peter Exley, Aldred’s Australian friend, trying to investigate war crimes and negotiate post-war life in Hong Kong.

I’d read Hazzard’s 1980 The Transit of Venus when I was a young woman and remembered enjoying it, so I thought this novel would be a safe bet.

Well, no, not really. I didn’t like it. I finished it because I felt I had to. And it turned out that some members felt the same. A couple gave up on it. Only two felt they’d read it with genuine pleasure, and interestingly they were ex-English teachers who were armed with all sorts of analytical skills that I lack. Both of these members actually read it twice. That’s dedication!

So, do I mark it down as a book group fail?

Not at all. I’d come prepared with all sorts of generic book group discussion questions, but the session just ran itself. The book elicited so much discussion, so many differing opinions and from some of the readers, such strong feelings that I’d have to count it as a success. One reader loved all the detail and description; another felt it dragged the story down. One person found the writing style brilliant; another kept having to find words in the dictionary. Two readers just hated it! As for me, I could admire much of the writing and the skill with which Hazzard manipulated the intertwined strands, but the effect was detached, even cold. And a bit too Henry James at times. One of the group described Hazzard as ‘a writer’s writer’, and I did think that if perhaps I read more carefully, my appreciation would grow. And at some future date, I will give The Transit of Venus a whirl.

We all agreed, however, that the central love story between 32-year-old English officer Aldred Leith and the 17-year-old innocent Helen Driscoll was problematic. Poor Helen, sensitive, intelligent and so totally innocent. She talked like a book and seemed like someone for Aldred to project his dreams onto rather than a real person. Aldred himself was a wooden hero; the flawed Peter Exley was much more interesting.

And times have changed. Aldred was an experienced man in his 30s; Helen had only just turned 17. The scenes where they skulked around in the gardens of her parents house, lying on his coat fondling and caressing gave me the creeps. Ugh.

I’m looking forward to our next book group meeting. It will be much less interesting if we all agree!

 

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DID I NEED MORE BOOKS?

A rhetorical question. No, of course not. I have plenty, including quite a few I haven’t started yet. But I went to the legendary (in Castlemaine they are!) Friends of Castlemaine Library book sale. Not only went to it – I am on the committee so I was there the afternoon before to set up and to assist with sales on the big day.
So I got to inspect thousands of books before the hordes of frenzied bibliophile locals even set eyes on them.
And almost against my will ended up taking a few home with me. Even after I’d done a big cull and donated around 50 unwanted books to the sale…

Did I need more books? Emphatically, no. But I am weak-willed. And they were cheap! Only $1 for fiction, $2 for non-fiction and a few special volumes a bit dearer.
Plus, I got to choose some for free as a gift for volunteering. Surely this makes it OK.

I had proper reasons for my choices, too.

I’d watched the SBS documentary on the Cambridge spies only a few days earlier, so A Spy Among Friends leapt out at me. I have had (past tense, hopefully) some long and intense bouts of insomnia, and the topic interests me. English writer Diana Athill (1917-2019) had a long and distinguished career in publishing – she worked with Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth, Jean Rhys and VS Naipaul among others – before she became an award-winning writer herself, with a series of memoirs. This is the last, so perhaps not the best place to start, but I never mind  knowing the end of a story. It will be a good introduction. And I remember meaning to read The Life of I when it first came out, and never did.


I’ve already skimmed through the book on novel writing. It is, as Lynne Truss says on the cover, extremely funny. Laugh-out-loud and tears-running-down-my-face funny. The authors parody bad prose with excruciating accuracy. I’ve read most of Penelope Lively’s novels for adults and children; I admire her writing and look forward to this memoir. Storr’s Solitude is something I re-read every few years, yet I’ve never read anything else by him. And now I can. And Out of the Woods is nature, walking and thinking. Right up my alley.

Oh, and so are the 35 copies of a beautifully produced English magazine called Hortus, which should keep me in armchair gardening all winter. Aren’t the covers lovely? Worth the 20c per copy they cost me.
This catalogue of utter gorgeousness was $4! How could I resist?


This is why I have book culls. Because I really do need more books.

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THE WELL GARDENED MIND

I discovered the pleasure of wandering through the garden with a free-floating attention, registering how the plants were changing, growing, ailing, fruiting. Gradually I thought about mundane tasks such as weeding, hoeing, and watering changed; I came to see that it is important not so much to get them done, but to let oneself be fully involved in the doing of them.

What a gem this book is.  A wise and gentle guide, psychiatrist and psychotherapist Sue Stuart-Smith walks the reader through the ways in which a garden – being in it, working in it, looking at it, even just thinking about it – can bring healing and solace. Whether people are struggling with trauma, addiction, incarceration, ill health and hospitalisation,  stress, mental illness or grief, there are multiple reasons why a garden can be therapy, medicine and a life-enhancing and life-affirming joy.

Stuart-Smith combines research in neuroscience and psychology, personal anecdotes and stories, literature, history and anthropology with lyrical description to prove her point. Garden schemes in prisons, institutions, hospitals and with veterans, refugees, the aged and at-risk young people came as no surprise, but I had no idea that soldiers, chaplains, doctors and nurses on both sides on the Western Front in WWI created ‘dugout gardens’.

They grew vegetables – enough to make some areas self-sufficient in fresh produce. But they also grew flowers. Families sent seeds; one British officer sowed nasturtiums, marigolds, poppies and stocks under cover of darkness.

What feels homely, what gives hope, what strikes the eye as beautiful, are all dependent on the surroundings in which we find ourselves. Cultivating the earth in the context of a battlefield throws the power of the garden into sharp relief and when so much is beyond repair, to be able to change something for the better is extremely important.

I don’t need convincing. The garden is my ‘happy place’. We don’t live in a battlefield, but at times it feels like it. The constant barrage of bad news and the low-level sadness and anxiety it engenders needs some kind of balance. For me it’s found in planting, pottering, weeding; in planning and dreaming; in standing still to look at new growth or emerging blooms or the birds enticed to the shrubs and trees by berries, fruit or nectar. The seasonal cycles – even the pesky weed oxalis that blankets everything in winter – remind me that ‘this too shall pass’. If I could live in the garden, I wouldn’t have to take medication for high blood pressure! And if I feel that my garden helps me to escape from reality, it also brings me back.

In this era of virtual worlds and fake facts, the garden brings us back to reality. Not the kind of reality that is known and predictable, for the garden always surprises us and in it we can experience a different kind of knowing – one that is sensory and  physical, and stimulates the emotional, spiritual and cognitive  aspects of our being. Gardening is, in this sense, simultaneously ancient and modern. Ancient because of the evolutionary fit between brain and nature, and also ancient as a way of life between foraging and farming, that expresses our deeply inscribed need to attach to place. Modern, because the garden is intrinsically forward looking and the gardener is always aiming for a better future.

 

 

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MOVE!

I like a bit of popular science, and find recent books dealing with the emerging and amazing research on the brain are especially fascinating. This one, by science journalist Caroline Williams, has a practical element too, which makes it fascinating and useful.

Her basic point it that the relationship between brain and body is not best likened to a super-computer running a machine. It’s deeper, more complex and more intertwined. In fact, she says that a better analogy is the brain as chat room, where all sorts of different messages from all over our bodies – internal organs, skin, muscles, joints and the rest –  are humming and buzzing and pinging all the time. And that’s the way it’s meant to be, because as human animals, hunting and gathering in forest or savannah, we evolved from creatures for whom movement was survival.

The brain evolved not for us to think, but to allow us to move – away from danger and towards rewards. Everything else, from our senses to our memories, emotions and ability to plan ahead, was bolted on later to make these movements better informed. Moving is at the heart of the way we think and feel. If we stay still, our cognitive and emotional abilities become seriously compromised.

What happens if we stop moving? I guess we all know – we can put on weight, lose fitness, damage our cardiac and respiratory health, possibly become anxious or depressed or even lower our IQ.
Williams has talked with scientists and researchers all over the world to come up with a lucid and illuminating explanation of why we need not just to move, but to incorporate different kinds of movement into our lives for our mental, emotional and physical well-being.
Walking, developing muscular strength, dancing, strengthening our cores, stretching, paying attention to breathing and finally, resting are all covered in short and readable chapters with a little action plan at the end. She stresses that you don’t need to go to the gym. All of these movement types are possible within our daily lives without special equipment or the ‘weekend warrior’ mindset.

And Williams solved a little puzzle of mine. I am (or used to be) extremely flexible; as a kid I was what we called ‘double jointed’, and could do all sorts of contortions and body tricks. I used to think that being flexible is good, but I now know that it’s actually a case of lax ligaments.
And lax ligaments don’t ‘talk’ as well or as quickly to the joints, bones, muscles and tendons. Which seems to explain why I am a tad clumsy – the toll on our glassware will attest to that – and why I am wearing out my hands and wrists. I exert more pressure than I need to when I use my hands or when I walk. That’s why I have deformed the nib of my fountain pen and wear out my shoes so fast. And why I need to go to a hand surgeon to see if anything can be done about my wear and tear and damage.

Most of us know we need to move, or move more and I found Move! a motivating and encouraging ‘movement manifesto’.

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A DREAM IN THE HOUSE

I borrowed A Dream in the House from the Bendigo Library one sweltering summer in the early 1980s.  I thought it was very weird. Possibly the weirdest children’s book I’d ever read.
Or was it just the heat, and fever dreams?
Whatever it was, its strangeness and unique poetic intensity haunted me (like another book – Moon Eyes –  by the same author) and after searching for  years, I finally managed to get hold of a copy a month ago.

It begins:
Here is a large green garden, and you are in it.

Poole describes the trees and flowerbeds and the river nearby, and the house, two-hundred and fifty years old, “solid, comfortable and matter-of-fact”.

But look again at the house, now that the sun has set and only gilds the rims of the chimney pots and the highest copper beech trees. Aren’t the straight windows staring very like eyes? And the straggle of wistaria over the porch gives the place an untidy, almost hairy look. Now, would you dare to go up to that green front door and pull the old-fashioned bell? And if you did, would anybody answer it? And if they did, who?
You are standing on the lawn in front of the neat West Country residence called Colt Lunges. What will happen next?

I will tell  you – not the ghost story or supernatural mystery you might expect (think the Green Knowe books, or Tom’s Midnight Garden) from this fairly standard beginning.

Our thirteen-year-old heroine, Jane, arrives at Colt Lunges with her parents. Jane is a twin, but her sister Ann was lost in a storm at sea when she was a baby.  She explores the house and garden, makes a friend of the motherly housekeeper, avoids her overwrought mother, meets the vicar and his daughter, finds an old diary, learns a little of local and family history. Her ancestor, a judge, had a group of teenagers transported to Australia for stealing the church treasure. The boys were shipwrecked, and drowned. And then his daughter, another Ann, was kidnapped and never seen again.

Dream-like events (some magical, some terrifying) multiply. Plants sing and dance. The river tries to drown her. A ghost gardener, Tom, who speaks in rhyme, joins her in dreams. They search for Ann. For the two Anns; Ann, who disappeared over a century ago, and Jane’s drowned twin.
Tom and Jane find themselves on an island located through a crack in the wall, hidden behind a turtle shell, in the attic. On the beach, Jane is menaced by an army of crabs – “as big as dinner plates, they crouched like armoured spiders among the rocks, blue-black, bow-legged and malevolent”. Up on the land, plants and flowers seethe with vicious insects and snakes. Guided by Tom, she crawls through tunnels and caves, a stifling slimy maze under the sea, until she finds herself in a huge cavern, “a chapel shaped cavern, whose walls were a mosaic of rubies and pearls”.

It was indescribably splendid, immeasurably rich, and should have been infinitely beautiful but it was not. The rubies that studded the walls and hung from the ceiling glowered crimson, as if they would burn at a touch, and the pearls that should have been as pure as lilies were cold and hard and it was from them that the foul smell came.

It gets more bizarre. They find Ann, mute and cold as a statue, guarded by a mythical, magical serpent.

In its eyes was the solution to all mysteries: if you looked into them you understood the  language of birds and animals, you saw into the depths of the sea, you heard what was spoken under the earth and the music of stars. Those eyes stared at Jane and willed her to stare back into them and lose herself in their magic.

After a battle to the death (both Tom and the serpent) the girls struggle back through the caves and tunnels into the attic, and down into the house.
Where their parents seem to placidly accept Ann’s reappearance. And life goes on at Colt Lunges…
Jane has gained Ann, but lost something of herself. Is it her imagination, or in fact the gift of seeing the unseen?

It is odd, Jane thought, that I had to sacrifice for Ann that bit of myself that I valued the most, and yet instead of holding it against her I love her the more for it. It has made her even more precious. Perhaps that part of me went with Tom. That part of me with wings that could fly through time, and the eyes that saw roses dancing, is waiting now with him. I must always remember that the magic has not gone out of the world, just because it has gone out of me…

Yes, I was right. It wasn’t the heat, all those years ago: A Dream in the House is a seriously weird book. Unsettling, intense. Magical, and macabre. Nightmarish. I can’t imagine it getting published today. I can’t actually imagine the child who would really enjoy it, either. But I may be underestimating children.

 

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THE TASTE OF WAR

Book groups. I’ve been in a couple, and they’re fun. Held after dinner, with wine (always with wine!) and something (from basic cheese-and-biscuits to lavish platters) to nibble. There is always a lot of talk, and only some of it about books. But a growing dislike of going out at night and a disinclination to drive out into the back-blocks (my night sight is awful, and there are always kangaroos leaping out in front of the car) has seen me take a break from my evening group this year.
At a recent meeting, the library manager told the Friends of the Library members that the staff are often asked about whether the library could run a book group. Could the Friends help?

Was she looking straight at me? Maybe, maybe not, but I put my hand up and this week we’ve just had our first meeting. A do-able time of 5 till 6, no wine but tea/coffee and TimTams on hand. A lovely bunch of people, and even a waiting list. Our local library system has over 300 sets of 10; I’ve asked the members to select something from the list but in the meantime I chose, more or less at random, The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard. I had a memory of enjoying The Transit of Venus in my twenties. I kind of assumed this was about the Great Fire of London. One of the book group members put me right.
“The Great Fire,” he said, “is the atomic bomb. It’s about World War II.”

Which seemed like a fitting coincidence, because the book I’ve just finished was also about the war. The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food is a fascinating popular history that provides an unfamiliar slant on the causes and conduct of the wars in Europe and the Pacific. Cycling through the different phases of the war, Lizzie Collingham first examines the situations in 1930s Germany and Japan. In both countries, the vulnerability of their own food supplies and reliance on imports hampered their potential as world powers.
The solution? Create an Empire. Germany and Japan both looked enviously at Britain, with its colonies and dominions supplying the nation’s needs for food and raw materials and acting as a market for British manufactures. How did they go about empire building? Invading neighbouring countries, for a start. Germany saw Eastern Europe as a massive farm and the Soviet inhabitants expendable. Japan had a similar plan when it invaded Manchuria.

From this beginning, Collingham takes in the logistics of supply and distribution, agricultural and nutritional science, politics and military strategy, and national and class differences. It is at times difficult reading. Over 20 million people starved to death or died of the diseases of malnutrition in WWII. Sometimes the deaths were incidental to the prosecution of the war; sometimes they were part of a deliberate policy of withholding sustenance. The Nazis “Hunger Plan” was basically the intention to starve whole populations to death by requisitioning all supplies. When, later in the war, this plan proved too slow (the Soviets, used to food shortages, were particularly resilient) the murder of so-called “useless eaters” was stepped up in the gas chambers of the Holocaust.

Both Germany and Japan exported hunger, but the Japanese government and military did not spare their own people. Soldiers and citizens alike were expendable; fighting spirit and national pride was supposed to sustain them. I was astonished to read that Japanese fighting men had to fend for themselves. Initially when there were still supplies, they cooked their own meals. Later, malnourished soldiers foraged for whatever they could find, existing on boiled grass and leaves, frogs, snakes and insects and eventually resorting to cannibalism in some cases.

The Allies don’t come out of this book as angels, either. Churchill attributed the millions of deaths from the 1943 famine in Bengal to “too many people” rather than bad policy on the part of the British. His refusal to lift the blockade resulted in the deaths of thousands of Greeks. And the American insistence on a virtually non-negotiable content of around 4,000 calories per day for its soldiers led to the situation of Allied civilians and military on an austere diet while the GIs in their midst were gorging.

Finally, Collingham’s look at global farming and agricultural networks through the lens of WWII history makes for sobering reflections about the future of food in the ever-warming climate of the 21st century…

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