Susan Green

I’ve been going places with Patrick Leigh Fermor. He is the most delightful travelling companion; interested in history and art and architecture and plants and birds and clothes and popular songs and cloud formations and politics and cigarette cases and love and water buffalo…actually, in everything.

The remarkable story behind these remarkable books – A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water and The Broken Road (which was left unfinished by the author’s death; it was edited by Colin Thurbron and Artemis Cooper and published last year) is…well, remarkable. In 1933 at the age of 18, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out from England to travel on foot from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. More than forty years later, he published the first book, A Time of Gifts. I’ve been reading a little about Leigh Fermor (I think that’s correct, though I think of him as ‘Paddy’, which is what his friends called him) and it seems that most of the time he wasn’t working from old diaries or notes; he was writing from memory. Remembering…or recreating? Just because I can’t remember in such detail doesn’t mean no-one can, but it is a phenomenal accomplishment to (seemingly) capture the fresh gaze of a very young man so in love with life that everything he looked at – or so it seems – was turned to gold.
I have opened a page at random and copied out a couple of random paragraphs.  All  through the first volume, and now reading this, the second, I’ve kept sighing and telling whoever will listen that it is almost too beautiful to bear. Deliriously beautiful – and sometimes pretty much delirious –  and though I thought I would mark  pages or underline or copy out this or that wonderful sentence – I haven’t done it. But simply opening a page at random does the trick, I think.
This is high summer in rural Rumania, and Leigh Fermor is staying – as he did all over Hungary and Rumania – with the friends of a a friend of a friend – in their kastely (manor house) which is in the middle of farmland.

Waggons creaked under loads of apricots, yet the trees were still laden; they scattered the dust, wasps tunelled them and wheels and foot-falls flattened them to a yellow pulp; tall wooden vats bubbled among the dusty sunflowers, filling the yards with the sweet and heady smell of their fermentation…

And still at the same place, sitting up with Istvan,his host, into the small hours of the morning, smoking and drinking and talking.

Just past its full, the moon laid a gleam of metal on the river and a line of silver wire along the tops of the woods. The July constellations and the Milky Way showed bright in a sky empty of vapour and as the moon waned, stars began to shoot, dropping in great arcs, sometimes several a minute, and we would break off our talk to watch them. They were the Perseids, meteors which shower down late that month and in early August, from the bell- or flower-shaped constellation of Perseus, where Algol blinks among minor starts with a restless flash. El Ghul -the Ghoul or Fiend – is the Arabian astronomers’ word for the Gorgon, and the starry hero, grasping the snake-locks, flourishes her head across the North and shakes the fragments loose; or so we decided after a decanter or two. If we were late enough, nightingales filled in the rare gaps in our talk; the Pleiades and then Orion followed the slant of Cassiopeia and Perseus above the trees.

I am sighing again as I type. A beautiful (that word again) lost world, beautifully remembered, recreated, created… It doesn’t really matter, does it? I wouldn’t even care if it was totally invented. I just love travelling with Paddy.

I posted Rembrandt’s shell last week , before I headed off  for a beach holiday at Phillip Island (for anyone who’s not a Victorian, it’s an island connected to the mainland by a bridge, and quite famous as the home of  – take your pick – a colony of fairy penguins or a huge motor sports track). I always like to bring shells home – handfuls of them – and put them in little bowls in the house where I can look at them and remember happy days of salty air and seawater. But really they look best when wet, so they usually end up living among my pot-plants. I’d anticipated spending  hours on the beach looking for shells, but it didn’t happen this time.

I’d been collecting shells since I was a young child – our back gate opened onto the beach, so there were always shells handy. Though I’m short-sighted, I’ve always been good at finding things like beach glass, pebbles, butterfly wings, feathers, dead beetles, beautiful leaves –  and shells. People often gave me shells as presents (and they still do); I have a fine collection of cowries – but this Rembrandt etching is special to me. It makes me think of Chelsea, where I grew up, and my father.

Our back gate opened onto the beach, and nearly every day I used to walk along the beach with my Dad. We were beachcombers together. Port Phillip Bay doesn’t cast up rare and exotic shells like Rembrandt’s; they tend to be little and undramatic. I remember flocks of bivalves like pale butterflies, blue-black mussel shells, fan-shaped scallops; lots of tiny turbans with chequered patterns and rosy tips. I always preferred the mysteriously enclosed whorled ones to the simple, happy bivalves, but they all fascinated me. We used to bring them home to put in a shell garden we made along the side of the outside toilet, along with driftwood, bleached bits of sponges and sea-weed, sea-glass and bottles.

It’s not surprising that the  shell became a bit of a personal symbol for me. I have kitsch shell vases and shell-patterned china and a mirror made by a friend from reclaimed timber surrounded by glued-on shells. I’ve bought shells, too. The first time was when I was about sixteen, on a family holiday in Sydney. My Dad had found a shell shop – until then, I’d had no idea you could buy them – and I chose a flashy green snail-shell and a pearly polished turban… but they’re not dear to me as the found or given shells are. I was in my early teens when my Dad framed a postcard of Rembrandt’s shell for me. Here are some shell words – mysterious, secret world, secret self, secretive, hidden, self-enclosed, indwelling, protected, safe…

Rembrandt’s shell is conus marmoreous or marbled cone shell. They’re found in SE Africa, Polynesia and Hawaii. Rembrandt depicted this exotic thing 1650, in the days of  sailing ships, and it would have had a long and arduous voyage from its home to sit in Rembrandt’s studio in Holland. I wonder if he held it to his ear and listened to the whispering of far away waves? So more shell words – sea-voyage, sea-world, depths and deeps, full fathom five, pearl and coral, waves, tide, moon, whisper, sshhh…

I went to Melbourne on the train yesterday – well, by train as far as Gisborne, where we all had to troop off and catch buses in to Southern Cross. The bus trip enabled us to see where the weekend’s fires had been. Right along the freeway, close to homes, jumping roads. The train was back in service for the trip home; that journey showed that the grass-fire had roared right up to Riddell’s Creek station. The paddocks were blackened, still smouldering; everything seemed very still and the acrid smoke smell infiltrated the train. Tonight, too, the air here is full of bushfire smell.

“Feeling hot, hot, hot!”

This heatwave has really caused a bit of a meltdown in my reading habits. I took a vow a few years ago not to confine my reading to –   well, to re-reading. I was especially severe on myself for re-reading books that aren’t actually all that wonderful in the first place. Re-reading Jane Austen, George Eliot and even Barbara Pym was acceptable, but not my favourite forgotten best-sellers of the 1920’s and ’30s like Kathleen Norris, nor those children’s novels that I’d read to death back when I was actually a child. Like the Anne of Green Gables books.

Well, this week, in the heat, I’ve been on a L.M.Montgomery binge. Not the Annes, though; I’m saving those. I started on the three Emily books – Emily of New Moon, Emily Climbs and Emily’s Quest. Then Jane of Lantern Hill and The Blue Castle. It’s going to be 41 degrees where I live today, and I have A Tangled Web at the ready.

I have learned to skip and skim through the long passages of purple prose. These are mostly descriptions of the landscape and the weather and the seasons. Some of them are actually quite beautiful and I imagine were genuine responses to the world around her. I have been to Prince Edward Island; it’s a gorgeous as she says it is. And on last year’s travels in Canada in spring  it hit me like a groundhog to the head – this is why people in the northern hemisphere get so excited about spring. It was miraculous. But too much is too much, and Montgomery, when really worked up, lets loose with words like ‘amethystine’. But her real skill, and the thing that has kept me reading on these hot days, is her understanding of neglected, misunderstood, ignored, unloved children.  And of women whose lives have been starved and stilted by righteous, tyrannical families with their notions of duty, conformity and obligation.

Little Emily’s mother married against her tribe’s wishes – and so was shunned. With her mother’s and then her father’s deaths, Emily has to be taken back into the family fold. There’s  a happy ending – Emily wins the love of her adopted family, and even her stern Aunt Elizabeth comes to show affection and approval.  But there are some tremendous struggles along the way. Montgomery describes so well the feelings of a young woman whose elders think they own her. That means having the right to read letters, diaries, private writings – know her thoughts – direct her energies and affections. Emily, of course (she is our heroine after all) rebels and not only gets her man, childhood sweetheart Teddy, but a college education and a career as a writer. The childhood scenes are the ones that I find most real. They seem uncannily true,  and even on repeated reading – or am I just a big softie? – moving.

 The Blue Castle has an adult heroine, the plain and repressed spinster Valancy Stirling. She sees herself as a failure in every way – but the most galling is her failure to attract a man. She lives at home with her cousin and mother, hedged in by a lifetime’s unwritten rules and too scared to rebel. As anyone who knows their romances can see, she’s ripe for a make-over.
It comes when she gets a diagnosis of terminal heart disease. Why not live before she dies? After a series of small rebellions – even those make her family think she’s gone mad – she leaves home to nurse the dying Cissy. She’s an old schoolmate and daughter of the local reprobate and drunk. Cissy’s had an illegitimate child and that, plus her wicked dad, put her well and truly beyond the pale.
But Valancy loves her, loves looking after her and even comes to feel great affections and understanding for the naughty old man. She makes friends, then falls in love with mystery man Barney Snaith and – with nothing to lose – asks him to marry her. Her life from then on is pure, improbable and satisfying romantic fiction. The plain heroine blossoms into a happy, sensual woman. She and her husband are lovers and pals – they’re outsiders, living on a beautiful island in a lake, away from oppressive community obligations.
They’ve got enough money for a simple and happy life; when it’s revealed the mystery man Barney is the estranged son of a patent medicine millionaire, they’ve got more than enough. As novel ends, after a minor hitch – it turns out the diagnosis was mistaken (and she’s going to live after all!) – they’re planning to travel the world

All good fun and famously accidentally plagiarised by Colleen McCullough for her The Ladies of Missolonghi – but it’s the first chapters, which show her hideously humdrum life as an unmarried daughter living at home with  a monster mother, which are the real meat in the novel. The author knew about the lives of unwanted and unloved children from personal experience;  I can’t help thinking that she knew about the death-in-life of the ageing spinster as well.

Her early days were very like those of her child heroines. Her mother died when she was 21 months old, her father left for the North West Territories and she was brought up by her harsh, unloving grandparents. She worked as a schoolteacher and began to have stories published; she married, when she was 37, Ewen McDonald. He was a minister. They had three sons, one of whom was stillborn. I’d love to think that the author had her own happy ending, but sadly she didn’t. She suffered from depression  and perhaps it was no wonder, for she had to cope with motherhood, the demands of her husband’s career and church life, her writing life and her husband’s mental illness – he was prey to religious melancholia. She nursed him for decades. She died, in 1942. From a note she left, it seems possible she committed suicide. So she never found her Blue Castle.

I have just finished The Wealth Beneath Their Feet: A Family on the Castlemaine Goldfields by Marjorie Theobald.  Though it is a history book, I read it as I’d devour a  fascinating novel – quickly, almost all in one go, finding it hard to put down and disappointed when I closed the covers for the last time.

It’s the history of the various branches of Marjorie Theobald’s family tree – German, Scottish, English and Irish –  from the time each emigrated from their homeland to settle in Castlemaine from the mid-19th century onwards. In order to do this, she mined her own childhood memories of older relatives and their reminiscences; investigated family myths and legends; read letters and postcards and family documents; tracked down photographs; walked the town to look at old houses (her great-grandparent’s house is just down the road from mine) and travelled to Scotland to “come home” to her heritage there. She found that there were relatives at the same time separately engaged in family research, and they were able to share information and fill in gaps in the record.

Of course, one of the things that made this so relevant and real is that many of the locations in this history – houses, roads and tracks, hills and gullies and creeks, goldmines and gold-mining scars and ruins –  are known to me. This is where I live.
I was especially interested in the section that dealt with the German branch of the family. Their home – called  The Hermitage – is only a couple of kilometres down the road.  Ever since I returned to Castlemaine in 1986, I’ve looked a little enviously at the place as I drove past. I’ve loved the look of the warm old sand-stone buildings settled with such rightness and permanence in the landscape; I’ve wondered too about its name. I never knew that it was originally a vineyard, and part of Central Victoria’s thriving wine industry.
As well as personal resources, Marjorie used research skills honed as a professional historian to ferret around in all the varying kinds of public records. She discovered some truly tragic stories in those records – such as two little boys “arrested” for being neglected children and put into a home (so-called – more like a prison farm). As well, she uncovered some “skeletons in the closet” – like children born out of wedlock, or just inside it – that would have meant silence and shame in the past, but thankfully do no longer.

I read The Wealth Beneath Their Feet because I am doing research for my latest Verity Sparks novel. More than getting my facts right (though I do want that, too), I want to get the feel of Castlemaine in Verity’s time. Verity, Papa, Connie and Poppy come up on the train for a peaceful country with a long-lost friend of Papa’s –  and become involved in (what else?) a crime and a mystery.
This story is set in 1880, and the stories in The Wealth Beneath Their Feet helped me see and feel the life of my town of nearly 135 years ago.  Much of the built environment remains from that era; Castlemaine has a wealth of splendid Victorian era buildings, both public and private. So it’s not a big stretch to imagine the town. Though there was still mining activity in the area, especially in the adjoining town of Chewton, the rough and ready”tent city” days of the gold rush are long gone.  Castlemaine in 1880 was humming with a different kind of activity; there were shops and businesses and industries, a market, churches and schools, pubs and clubs, a hospital and Benevolent Asylum, concerts, balls and sporting events. That’s the life I want to evoke –  the busy social and communal life of a thriving and “modern” 19th century country town. But (since this is a mystery, after all) the past has ways of coming back in the present…

I’m not telling how.

I don’t know what we were talking about, but some part of our conversation spurred a friend to lend me Elizabeth Jane Howard’s autobiography, Slipstream. That was on Sunday afternoon – I’ve just finished it. You could say I devoured it; you know when you have other things to do but you just can’t wait to get back to your book.
It was very moving and rather sad; a long life, many books, but not a lot of love and happiness. She was married three times – her first husband was Peter Scott, the son of Scott of the Antarctic, a war hero and wild-life artist; her third was the writer Kingsley Amis – but she described herself as a “bolter”, and it was usually with other people’s husbands.
She didn’t flinch from revealing her many, many mistakes – her failures to love, to communicate, to discriminate, to stand up for herself – and  the way she repeated them again and again (“A slow learner”was another self-description).What was so moving was her painful struggle to actually learn and change. She credits therapy and especially a women’s group, late in her life, with that, and she was able to reconcile with her daughter. She published her last book last year. She was 90.

When I turned to the internet – as you do – to find out a little more about her, I found out that she’s just died. There’s an obituary here: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/02/elizabeth-jane-howard-dies-90

On the last Saturday of 2013, with  head-cold (probably caught while seeing Hobbit 2 at a very air-conditioned cinema on Boxing Day), I lay and watched a DVD. I ended up even snottier than I started, and in floods of tears. The film was a documentary about the Ballets Russes.

I bought it because I have a strong connection to the Ballets Russes. Not the real ballet, of course – it had ceased to exist by the late 1950s – but ballet via two old books of my mother’s. They were called The Balletomane’s Album and The Balletomane’s Scrapbook, both by Arnold L Haskell, and when I was little I pored over them. The ballerinas were as beautiful as fairy tale princesses; in fact, some of the time they were fairy tale princesses in ballets like Sleeping Beauty. There was one photograph that I adored; it was the beautiful, dark-haired Tamara Toumanova gazing soulfully at the camera. Being dark myself, I was very sensitive to the  real lack of dark-haired fairy tale princesses, Snow White excluded.
The caption called Toumanova “Black Pearl of the Russian Ballet”; isn’t that a wondeful name? She’d been made up to within an inch of her life, with long false-eyelashes and a ton of lipstick,  and she looks lovely but artificial. On the internet I found some wonderful old film footage of her dancing at the edge of the surf, looking completely natural, wild and happy and free. It was lovely to see.)

I practised looking soulful in the mirror; I  pointed my feet and tottered around on tippy-toes; I briefly attended dance classes(but there were no tutus so it was no good at all) and often entertained(?) my family by dancing The Dying Swan dressed in a frilly white petticoat and a singlet. Since I was a plump little creature, it was probably more like The Dead Duck, but I thought I was exquisitely sad.

My mother had these two books because she was a teenager in 1938-39 when the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo toured Australia. She was a fan –  a balletomane – and in the documentary, the narrator says that though at first dismayed to be going to the end of the earth (so uncivilised!) the company was delighted and moved by the warmth of their Australian welcome. They stayed for more than six months;my mother went to see them as often as she could.

After the Russian Revolution, there was an  exodus of Russian artists to Paris. The Ballets Russes formed out of the really truly original Russian ballet (Pavlova, Nijinsky!) that emerged in the early 20th century under Serge Diaghilev.  They danced to music by Stravinsky and Debussy; costumes and sets were designed by Matisse, Picasso and Coco Chanel. This film doesn’t go back to the very beginning; it concentrates on the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo of Colonel de Basil and its rival, The Original Ballets Russes. We are shown the beautiful young dancers in their prime. And then, wonderfully, some of those same dancers grown old are interviewed in the film.
They are still beautiful. They are still dancing – teaching dancing, passing on what they know. It’s not technique that she wants them to develop, one of them tells us. It’s warmth.

The film closes to the finale from Shostakovich’s Firebird; Alicia Markova saying that her life in the ballet was so rich… and the ghosts of the Ballets Russes in grainy old movie footage dancing once again. Immensely moving. Sigh. Sob.

I also, stupidly as it turns out, decided to knit the collar of a cardigan that I didn’t quite finish over the winter. Well, I ended up with tendonitis in my wrist, didn’t I? And I couldn’t use the keyboard. Help!!!
My tech-y husband to the rescue. He installed a program called DragonDictate, so I now I can talk to the computer screen and find my spoken words magically transformed to text. It does get things wrong – varicose veins, for instance, were turned into the quite lovely ‘very cosy tale’. But it really is magic, and even when the wrist fixes itself up again I’ll use it to do messy drafts in the stream of consciousness style. Though it’s stream of self-consciousness when someone else is nearby. I really do feel incredibly silly talking  to myself; I need PRIVATE – KEEP OUT – GO AWAY on the door.

My last book of 2013 was Sheila. I quote the blurb; ‘She wedded earls and barons (only one of each, actually), bedded a future king, was feted by London and New York society for 40 years, and when she died she was a Russian princess (no, the wife of a Russian prince).’ I read it to the bitter end and wondered why I bothered. She may have bewitched the Prince of Wales but she didn’t do a lot for me. But I don’t want to begin the year on a snarky note, so I will finish up with some cheering statistics.

I tallied up my score of books for the year and found that I’d read 72. That’s – I had to get the calculator out – 1.38461538 books per week. I read the most books in December and  October. The leanest reading months were March and June. 58.3% of my total reading was fiction. Of that, two thirds was adult fiction. The remaining third was overwhelmingly junior fiction; I read only 3 YA novels (Must do better this year). Of the non-fiction, the largest category would be shelved in the bookshop where I work in the Self-Help/Religion/Spirituality section. My perpetual hypochondria (they call it health anxiety now; much nicer) plus an end-of-year Buddhist binge no doubt upped those figures.

Now for the awards. Best new novel was The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. Best classic was Anna Karenina. Best fiction discovery was Margaret Drabble. Best non-fiction discovery was Robert MacFarlane. Best kid’s book was Cicada Summer by Kate Constable. Scooping up the Karma award by a mile was Stephen Batchelor for Confession of a Buddhist Atheist. Laugh Out Loud trophy went to David Lodge for Thinks…  Book I Loved That I Didn’t Think I Would was Lola Bensky by Lily Brett. Bolstered Self-Esteem Gold Cup was won by Susan Cain for her lovely defence of introversion, Quiet. And I could go on, because almost everything I read this year gave me something – even Sheila.

Happy New Year!

I’m not morbid or sad or depressed, but I like cemeteries. I like the combination of park and sculpture and masonry and history. I find names and bits of story that inspire and interest and intrigue. I also find peace and tranquility and consolation – which is a bit odd, perhaps, when surrounded by graves and – let’s face it – a whole lot of dead bodies under the earth. It is perhaps the sense that after all the struggle and busyness of life, it all comes to this…wind in dry grass, a magpie on a gravestone, lichen growing on carving and that carving slowly crumbling away by weather and time.

When I lived in Campbell’s Creek as a kid in 1966-7, I used to play in the cemetery. My friend and I used to take little picnics to eat. I also (and I’m ashamed of this now) used to steal the white ceramic doves and hands from the smashed glass domes. It was very wild back then – in high summer you could just see the headstones and rusted railings above the long grass and thickets of roses and blackberries.  The further back you walked, the older the graves. Some of them were still standing straight but others were fallen over,  tip-tilted, sunken, or even – and this had a shivery, ghost-story quality – split in two by lightning. I loved the place. I loved the peace and the past; I loved the busy life of plants and animals going on among the  houses of the dead.

When I was 11, we moved back to the city – to Chelsea on the bay, and with a back gate opening right onto the beach – but I mourned my country life and my special place. Though at that stage I hadn’t heard of Thomas Grey and his Elegy, I have in front of me a long poem I wrote in 1970. I poured into it all my feelings of loss and longing and I’ll have to say that at the time I thought it was pretty damn good. It is much too embarrassing to reproduce in full, mainly because I hadn’t yet cottoned on to the idea of less is more and laid on bathos, cliches and especially adjectives with a shovel – but here are the first and last sections.

Among the tall yellow swaying grasses
Stand headstones, tall and gaunt,
Enclosed by rusty railings bent and contorted by age,
All the fancy carving crumbled, the letters blurred and stained by years.
A wild rose climbs a tombstone
Covering the RIP with a sweet sad scent.
A thousand sweetpeas, sown by a coffee jar of flowers
Offered by a loving hand to one so dear and dead
To that one, the tip-tilted one, or that one, split in two…

The bush is creeping closer, claiming what it lost.
Parrots sit on tombstones among rising shrubs and grasses;
A pink and grey blush of galahs swoop overhead;
A kookaburra laughs at a long-forgotten joke,
At the wallaby leaping through the  misty bush.
Dirty grey sheep in stony water-starved pastures
Bleat for the lambs that play among stumps.
By the creek willows weep into the dark water
While the wind teases dry grass and ghosts.

Sob, sob…

The retail sector is hotting up – at least my little part of it is. I work in the local bookshop and it is more than pleasing, it is utterly fantastic and delightful and heart-warming to see that scanner going zip-zip-zip on BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS!

I usually enjoy helping people choose their gifts. Picture books for younger children are usually not much of a problem, but there are lots of parents and especially grandparents all at sea about junior and YA fiction and they’re really grateful for a bit of guidance through the maze of series and genres.
The most difficult are the customers who want to buy books for people who don’t actually read. You have tortured conversations, trying to elicit a tiny bit of information that will help.
What do they usually read?
They don’t.
Well, fiction or non-fiction?
I’m not sure.
What are they interested in?
I don’t know.
Do you think they’d like this? (Cookbook for a woman, book on sport for a man.)
No.
It is then that I suggest a gift voucher. But that’s often rejected as well – people don’t like gift vouchers, I’m told. It looks like you don’t care enough to choose something.
Maybe then I go into the back office for a silent scream.

But much more often, it’s a happy experience a bit like trying on clothes; after two or three goes there will be something that hits the spot. And I always emphasise that if it’s not right, we are  happy to exchange – in fact, we’re open on Boxing Day for that very reason!

As a writer, of course, it behoves me very verily to give books as presents (I’m also giving chocolate) and I am. Last night a quartet of friends gathered at my place for dinner and I gave them each a little cookbook  – Maggie Beer, David Herbert, Karen Martini, Belinda Jeffery – wrapped in a bad-taste tea-towel from the Op Shop. I have already given my husband his book – couldn’t wait – and he’s finished it and now I’ve just (only half an hour ago) finished it too. It was The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, and it was fantastic…
…a great big juicy novel in which to immerse yourself. I don’t think I will be able to read any  fiction for a little while.

Other books neatly wrapped ready for Christmas Day are The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, The Wild Places by Robert MacFarlane, a V&A book on 1950s textile design and small book on drawing – Freehand by Helen Birch –  for my teenage niece and a fancy edition of The Lord of the Rings for my teenage son. I’m also giving The Light Between the Oceans by M L Stedman and The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk and I’m still thinking about something for my eighteen-month-old great nephew.
What does he usually read?
Fiction or non-fiction?
What is he interested in?

I think I’ll just take a punt on a Spot board book.