Susan Green

Op Shops are great for books. There must be people who are forever refreshing their shelves because you can find not just new and new-ish novels but classics that you’d think would just keep their own permanent spot like perennial plants in the garden. Recently, on the book shelf in the Vinnies Op Shop on Phillip Island, I found a few classics I didn’t have – Madame Bovary, The Trial, The Mill on the Floss. There were also some Margaret Drabble novels. I don’t think I’ve ever read a Margaret Drabble book, so at $2 a pop I took a punt and bought one. It’s called The Radiant Way, and when I got back to the holiday house and took a look at my haul (which also included some ceramic coasters with Germanic Gothic-y lettering and illustrations, a very nice skirt and a cardi) I found that the book had been signed. There it was – Margaret Drabble –  in blue biro on the now-yellowing title page. A very bold signature, with large initials and loops. What would a graphologist say? Well, I have to say this signed copy there in the Phillip Island Vinnies gave me a bit of a thrill – I don’t really know why – and I got to wondering how it had ended up where it did, twenty-five years after the publication date. And where and when it was signed. At a launch? Though this is the Penguin paperback, not the first hardcover edition. Perhaps a fan got her to autograph it at some literary event. Here in Australia? or perhaps in the UK. Or did Margaret Drabble just sit at her desk and sign a whole pile? I went back the next day and bought the other two novels in the trilogy. Unsigned.

I’ve just finished reading it. “HER POWERFUL NEW NOVEL FOR THE EIGHTIES” it says on the cover, but now reads almost as a historical novel; all the changes and losses, all the rifts in the social fabric in Mrs Thatcher’s Britain have receded into the past, and her picture of displacement and dis-ease in troubled times which would have probably seemed powerful then seem like just  background noise now.  What I enjoyed was the foreground, and apart from the three central characters – three women, Liz, Alix and Esther – and their intertwined stories, I loved the descriptions. I’ve often noticed that how-to books about writing peddle the advice that you should avoid like the plague cascades of adjectives. One word, the right one, should be sufficient. And of course eliminate the dreaded, dreadful adverb; the gold standard seems to be a kind of perfect pared-down minimalism. Perhaps it all goes back to Hemingway. Well, bugger that, I say – and obviously Margaret Drabble doesn’t go for it either.

And wonderful it was, like a fairy story, a Bohemian fairy story. The little room was illuminated by candles, by a paraffin lamp, by crackling packing-case twinges in a real fire in a real Victorian grate:its walls were painted a dark midnight blue, its floor was painted a deep red with a dark-blue and green patterned border. wooden painted chairs stood at a table covered with a white embroidered cloth and painted bowls and plates, huge cushions lay in heaps in a corner, there were two comfortable chairs covered (Alix recognised the material) with the old velveteen curtains her own other had brought down from Leeds years ago and which she’d never got around to hanging.                                             “Sit, sit,” said Nicholas, and Alix and Brian sat in the comfortable chairs, while the angels hovered, with glasses of fire-light-glinting red wine, with olives on a white plate, with nuts on a blue plate.

She gives the same lavish treatment to all sorts of settings – a cocktail party, a woman’s bedroom, a country picnic, even the disgusting decay of a squat – ...a narrow corridor, smelling of damp, ancient glue, wet plaster, chalk mice; the floorboards were soft and uneven with layers of debris and newspaper and cardboard and bits of under felt…

These wordy descriptions give me the sense of reading what I not-so-secretly think of as a “real, proper old-fashioned novel” – one that’s full and perhaps maybe too-full to the point of brimming-over with ideas and people and words and life. Generous, nothing stinted.

And speaking of generous and unstinting – though on a totally different track  – I went with friends to the Bruce Springsteen concert at Hanging Rock last weekend. He is 63 and (amazingly) played, full-bore, for more than 3 hours. I’ve never been a  devoted Bruce fan – and knew so little of his repertoire that (though only for an instant!) I mistook the lyrics “Old Tom Joad“ for “Jean Cocteau” – so I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the experience. Actually, I’ve been raving most of the week. It was such a feel-good show – at the risk of sounding like an old hippie, I’ll say that you could feel the love. Waves going from the crowd and back from the stage. He smiled nearly all the time – he appeared to be having a fine time – and must have felt a little like a god, with around 15,000 people singing his own song back to him. Well, if not like a god, at least spectacularly good. A good concert is a life-enhancing thing.

So is a good play. A few years ago, I went to a performance of Bell Shakespeare’s – it was Twelfth Night – at the Capitol in Bendigo. It was not long after the fires; they set the play amongst a group of fireys in smoke-stained overalls with a huge pile of donated clothes on the stage behind them. At the end, the cast gathered at the front of the stage and sang a song – it was a version of Katrina and the Waves Walking on Sunshine – and it was there, that feeling, a current of love, of  give and take with the audience. I thought then how wonderful it must feel for the actors, to have given so many people such pleasure. I know I floated out, arm in arm with my husband and son, misty-eyed and on a high – and I don’t think I was the only one.

First, a rant. A rant that I shouldn’t be having, actually, since in the last couple of weeks of sprained-ankle-induced sloth, I have been reading all my Buddhist books and attempting to practice mindfulness. I have managed to make one biscuit seem like a four course meal. I have taken great pleasure in hanging out the clothes and washing dishes. I have been patient in phone queues. I have agreed with Sylvia Boorstein whose little book on practical Buddhism, It’s Easier Than You Think, is still, on my umpteenth reading, a joy and an inspiration.  But it’s no good. I’ve been all steamed up about the Street Art issue, and after stewing as well as steaming, I dashed off a very cross letter to the local paper. That should be the end of it. Why am I still stewing?

Perhaps I’d better explain. As part of the Castlemaine Festival, some students from the secondary college have collaborated on a piece of street art – Text Alley – in our town. Some residents took offence at one of the pieces – a black reindeer with the words “Christmas is a lie” next to it – and the next thing you thing you know, shock! horror! it’s a local scandal. Not just the Castlemaine Mail, but the Midland Express (really one and the same, but the latter is more Kyneton-based. And it’s free) and the Bendigo Advertiser began huffing and puffing. A letter from an affronted local suggested it was libel (or slander, can’t remember which he said) and more seriously, “religious vilification”.

The school principal, the art teacher and the Festival representative all apologised for any offence, the artwork was altered, and the explanation given – the student intended it to be a comment on the commercialisation of Christmas. But this is not good enough. The local paper, scenting a lovely juicy controversy, has inflamed this issue and now we have graffiti on the street art, we have abuse and bad feeling, we have the social media going mad with suggestions that the student in the case be tarred and feathered and then burned at the stake (sorry – made that up) – or rather, expelled from school and the teachers dismissed. It’s hard to believe that adult people are so thin-skinned, so eager to take offence, so little inclined to think and discuss and disagree, while agreeing that we all have a right to our opinion.

Is it because the artist is a young person? Or because it’s street art? Or because it’s art? Or because it’s part of the Festival? Or because the town didn’t get the pokies venue some people wanted, and there’s an element of the community that wants to pay out on the arty-farties and blow-ins and lefties? A customer in the bookshop where I work today came in saying he’d been speaking to one of the locals, who told him that the Festival was done, over, finished. The town was sick of it. This offence was over the top. There would be no more sponsorship.

Over what? An image and some words you can interpret in a number of ways. In some ways Christmas – and by that I mean the credit-card-wipeout family get-together hell turkey-dinner celebration, and not I repeat, not the birth of Christ – is a lie. We don’t know when Christ was actually born. Our 25th December festivities are based on pagan rites, adapted and taken over by the church. And we lie about Christmas to our kids every time we say that Santa is coming and he’ll bring you some presents if you’re good. And then again, the reindeer suggests that perhaps that Northern European imagery isn’t appropriate for this country. Or perhaps the black reindeer is a naughty reindeer, and he’s telling Santa that Christmas is a lie so he doesn’t have to go out with the sleigh in the cold…

I’m upset on behalf of the young artist. How must he or she feel, being at the centre of this ridiculous controversy? I’m dismayed that a young person can’t have an opinion, that he or she can’t put an idea out there without being shot down in flames in the local press in this manner. I’m dismayed that there is no tolerance for differences of opinion. I’m sickened by the zest for hostility and anger that exists, in some parts of the community, in my small town. Oh dear. I am starting to huff and puff too. Another of Sylvia Boorstein’s books is called Pay Attention, for Goodness’ Sake: Practicing the Perfections of the Heart: The Buddhist Path of Kindness. Chapter 9 deals with Lovingkindness – metta in Buddhist practice – and Sylvia talks about how easy it is to think with love and kindness of the people we like. It’s much harder with those we don’t. I find I am thinking some very unkind thoughts at present. Sylvia reminds me that everything that has ever happened to us, and to our parents and their parents (let’s not even go into our past lives) leads us to be in the place where we are right now. Which may be a place of intolerance and thin-skinned anger. Or fear. Or discomfort with change. Who knows?

I’ve sent my letter. The writer John Holton http://johnholtonhereandhome.blogspot.com.au wrote a wonderful opinion piece which was published in the Bendigo Advertiser yesterday. I have done what I can. Time to stop steaming and stewing. The kerfuffle will die down. Hopefully the offended will calm and heal, and the young street artist will come out of the controversy (which would probably totally delight a mature artist!) undamaged and perhaps even stronger. And I will read more Sylvia. Perhaps we all should. http://www.sylviaboorstein.com/

I’ve just read Simmone Howell’s new Young Adult novel Girl Defective. It was an odd experience – kinda new, kinda not – because I was already acquainted with Sky and Gully and Bill in their flat above the record shop in Blessington Street, St Kilda. I knew about heart-breaker Nancy and the brickers and Eve the lady cop and the elusive track “Wishing Well” that gave the shop its name. I’d heard about all of them before; I’d heard Sky’s unforgettable voice and cracked up at her hard-boiled bon mots. And here at last was the whole story.

It seems like a long time ago, but it’s probably only a couple of years since Julie Gittus and Lee Fox, along with Simmone and I, made up a little writer’s workshop quartet. We met regularly – usually once a month – in each other’s kitchens, and read from our respective works in progress. So I’d heard quite a bit of the book, and we’d all talked writerly talk about the plot and the characters.

What can I say, apart from I loved it then, in bits and pieces and unfinished, and I love it now? I love the strong and warm sense of family, even though the family – living-in-the-past, semi-alcoholic Bill and snout-mask wearing Gully – are, as heroine Sky says, “like inverse superheroes, marked by our defects.”  I love the way Sky, a would-be-worldly innocent, fumbles her way through the darkness of adolescent confusion into some kind of light – with a little help from her friends. And the way the story of lost girl Mia weaves sad tendrils right through.

And that that old dame (or is she a broad?) St Kilda is a character in her own right.  The book is noir-ish, funny, moving, happy and sad and wise, with a mystery solved, a little romance and lots of old vinyl.

And I can’t not mention Sky’s fabulous voice. Boy, does that girl have a smart mouth! How’s this, just in the first few pages?

I’d known Nancy three months. She was nineteen and sharp as knives. I was fifteen and fumbling. We met when Dad hired her to clean the shop and the flat. I remember her walking into the room with the vacuum hose hung around her neck, sloppy and insolent like a bad boyfriend’s arm.

And at the end of that paragraph:

Kid, that was what she called me. Or little sister, or girlfriend, or doll baby, or monkey face. Sometimes she even used my name – Skylark, Sky – all in that drawl that felt like fingernails on my back lightly scratching itches I didn’t even know I had.

Reading the whole story for the first time, Girl Defective seemed inevitable and surprising at the same time, like an old acquaintance who becomes a new friend. At long last.

Simmone’s website and blog are at http://simmonehowell.com

…and I went to an International Women’s Day breakfast at the Tea Rooms in the Botanical Gardens. I had to pass on the food – muffins, frittata and the most delicious-looking berry muesli provided and served by our local Secondary College – because of nerves. I was one of the speakers, you see.

The first speaker, Amy O’Neill, does an amazing amount of volunteer stuff in the local community as well as working as a partner in a very successful building business, Vic Restorations. She’s won several awards lately, attended a huge rural women’s conference in Canberra and all I can say is, she must have an impressive load of energy.

She was followed by a local singing group, The Deborah Triangles (local in-joke, that – there is an area of gold-mining called that up the Calder in Bendigo) who did “Georgy Girl” complete with the whistling, camped it up with “I’ve Never Been to Me” and concluded triumphantly with “I Will Survive”. Then I was on. Here’s (more or less) what I said.

The theme today is “Women Inspiring Women.” I’m a writer, so I could have claimed as  inspiration many wonderful female authors going right back to Jane Austen. Especially Jane Austen, though since we’ve just had the 200th anniversary of Pride and Prejudice  she’s practically a deity – certainly an immortal. However my inspiration is human, not a writer and a lot closer to home. But before I tell you about her I’ll give you a little bit of my story.

I’ve lived in Castlemaine since 1986 – with a three-year stint here when I was a child during the middle 1960’s. I moved here at the time I committed career suicide. I’d just given up a secure, well-paid, permanent position as a primary school teacher with the Education Department of Victoria. Why? A year or so before I’d been awarded one of the Age Short Story prizes, and since then I’d been consumed with a mad desire to be a writer. I could have done the sensible thing and written in my spare time or even taken some leave without pay, but no. I thought I wouldn’t take it seriously unless I quit the Department. And so I did.

I had to work part-time of course, but nevertheless in that first year I did a lot of writing.   I won a Victorian Fellowship of Writers short story prize (and that story was later published in an anthology) and I also wrote a children’s story, The Possum Charmers. It was published in 1987 and since then I have had 9 more children’s books published. My 10th book, The Truth About Verity Sparks, was the first to have gained any real traction. It’s sold well, been appreciated by young readers, and – most thrillingly – it was awarded Honour Book in the Younger Readers section of the CBCA awards last year. I’ve got a sequel, Verity Sparks Lost and Found, due to be released in May.

Now, back to my inspiration. I said she was close to home and so she is. She’s my mother, Helen Green. She was a primary school teacher, a secondary school teacher, a senior mistress, and then in the 1970s she became vice-principal and finally principal of a large suburban high school. In those days there were few female principals and fewer still female senior bureaucrats in the Education Department. Which was why her next career step was really an enormous leap. She became Assistant Regional Director of Education for the Loddon Mallee region, based in Bendigo but taking in a huge region going down to Kyneton and up as far as Mildura and to the SA border. She held that position for 8 years, and for several of those years was Acting Director.

My mother was a very capable, intelligent and ambitious woman and she was passionate about education and community. Hers was a very public role. She was continually going to meetings and sitting on boards and committees. She did a great deal of public speaking. This was so even after she retired, when she was active in Continuing Education, Friends of the Library and University of the 3rd Age.

Now, I’m a writer. Writing is a private, solitary, even a hermit-like profession. I spend a great deal of my time sitting on my bottom alone – or with the dog – in my office in front of the computer screen. I’m not engaged in the community in the way my mother was. So how has she inspired me? Here’s how.

She gave me a belief that if you love something, if you’re committed to learn everything you can about it, to work hard and persevere – then that’s what you should be doing. No matter what your gender or whether people think you should be at home with your children or whether people think you’re crazy for giving up a steady income – that’s what you should be doing. My mother is inspiring because she was one of those women who opened up a space for the women who followed after her and it’s a great thing that most women in Australia now take it for granted that they can follow their dreams – whether it’s in the building industry, like Amy, or in the study, like me. My mother is also inspiring because she recognised that setbacks and disappointments do occur. Books are rejected, you hit the glass ceiling. Things do not always work out as you hope. But you can maintain the love of what you do. You can stay engaged and curious. You can keep learning and expanding your vision.

My mother hit the glass ceiling. When she applied for the position of Director, despite having acted for several years in the role, she was didn’t get the job. A man did. She appealed, and she lost. But my mother’s passion was for education and community and it was a real force in her life. She put her disappointment behind her and in the last fulfilling years in her job, she did a series of what my father referred to as ‘royal tours’. She didn’t drive, you see, and so she had a driver take her to visit many remote and rural schools whose communities had not seen anyone from the Department for years, sometimes decades. One of her loveliest memories was of a visit to Murrayville, near the SA border. What seemed like the whole school community turned out, there was a band and a fabulous afternoon tea, and a banner saying “We are honoured to welcome Mrs Green”.

Sadly, my mother died before The Truth About Verity Sparks was published. I dedicated it to her, and when I was presented with my CBCA award in Adelaide last year, in my heart I said as I was handed the envelope, “This one’s for you, Mum.”

Thank-you to my husband for the surprise rose-petal heart next to my keyboard.

I was going to post a photo of my black, blue and yellow swollen ankle, just so you’d know I’m not making this up in a pathetic bid for sympathy, but my husband advised against it. Too revolting, he said. It would turn people off. And in the scheme of things, a bung ankle isn’t all that bad, is it? All I have to do is rest and keep the foot elevated, as the doctor ordered.

What do you do with an elevated foot? What else but read? Polyanna-ish, I decided to make the best of it. Now’s the time, I decided, to get stuck into that pile of unread must-reads that keeps growing on my bedside table.

I started off with The Tiger in the Well, one of the Sally Lockhart mysteries by Phillip Pullman. It’s an exciting and complicated historical mystery set in 19th century London with a feisty heroine and a large cast of characters including some great street-kids, Bill and Liam. I do love an urchin in amongst the aspidistras and antimacassars of Victorian correctness. (It means you can have some swearing, too).

Then I read The Extraordinary and Unusual Adventures of Horatio Lyle by Catherine Webb. It was also an exciting and complicated mystery set in 19th century London. Unlike The Tiger in the Well, which dealt with real Victorian themes of anti-Semitism and the (lack of) women’s rights, this was sheer historical fantasy. Hero Horatio Lyle, a former Special Constable and amateur scientist, battles an otherworldly conspiracy that reaches into government and the aristocracy, spawned by a race of dangerous legendary beings with glowing green eyes and supernatural powers. He’s helped by another urchin. She’s Theresa Hatch, pickpocket and burglar by trade, and she gets nearly all the good lines.

I’m 50 or so pages into Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones by the time I realise…

Well, not only that my bottom is numb, but perhaps my brain is too. I remember reading Fire and Hemlock when I was a young teenager and loving it, but I’m not making any sense of it at all today. What else can you do with a sprained ankle?

I make a cup of tea standing on one foot and hobble outside. I hobble back in again to get the cup of tea. I sit outside in a cane chair in half-shade with my cup of tea and look at the garden. I think that it’s a bit of a mess and then remember that a kind friend has loaned me enough copies of “Gardens Illustrated” to fill two 42-litre plastic tubs. After flicking through about fifty mags, I realise that my garden is a total mess deserving only annihilation. I attempt to annihilate the leggy tangle of succulents closest to me but hurt my ankle. Falling back into the chair in well-deserved pain (after all, the doctor did say rest, keep the foot elevated, not launch into a deforestation campaign in a rockery), I ponder other ankle-less activities.

Nothing in the housework line. After all, it was housework that got me into this. I was on holiday at the beach – the sea was only a 5 minute walk away and the sun was shining – and I decided that I should go into the back yard and bring in the washing. Why oh why did I think about the washing while on holiday? The long and short of it is that I missed a step and here I am, with new bruises coming out even ten days later, and out of action for 2 to 6 weeks. No gardening. No housework. Then I had a bright idea. I thought, I’ve got it! I can sort out my filing cabinet.

Sad to say, I only got as far as dumping piles of stuff all over my study floor, looking aghast at the mess and then walking out again. I closed the door so I don’t have to look. A big bonfire, once the fire season is over, seems the simplest way of coping with these so-called ‘files’. However, I tucked a couple of scrapbooks under my arm. Perhaps – a manageable, gentle kind of job, this one –  I could paste in all the cuttings from newspapers that have been multiplying in various baskets and boxes around the place. Perhaps. Or maybe I could read…

It’s hot and horrible here in Castlemaine. We’ve had some rain, but not enough, and it’s a bit sticky and damp. (“It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity,” is the handy phrase for this kind of weather). But lucky me, I am going to the beach for a week, and I have just packed my holiday reading.

I have Roy Strong’s diaries (he was the Director of the Victoria&Albert Museum), and following that theme, a biography of Queen Victoria by Edith Sitwell.

I’m also taking a couple of books that I loved when I was a 12 or 13 and had just started High School. I’m wondering if I will still love them. But first, a bit of back-story…

My home town, Chelsea, didn’t have a library when I was growing up. Perhaps in a working-class suburb it wasn’t expected that people needed books. I went to high school in another town, Frankston, a short train ride away, and I was able to get a borrower’s card from the Frankston Library. It was housed in the middle of the shopping centre, and I used to meet my mother (who, probably unfortunately for both of us, was the Vice-Principal of my school) there once a week. We’d borrow our books and then have afternoon tea together. I realise now that this was Quality Time, and think of my mother with renewed respect and love. With her very demanding job, plus a husband and three children, she made this a special time for us, adding many calories worth of extra positive reinforcement by pairing books with toasted sandwiches, hot chocolate and the Svendborg Cafe’s amazing cheesecake. I have, to this day, a thing for toasted sandwiches, and I am never so happy as when eating with a book propped up in front of me.

The Frankston Library had a rule that if you had a Junior card, you were only allowed to borrow Junior books. This kept me in Junior Fiction (JF in big letters on the spine) until I was 14, I think. I must have been a slow developer, for I was quite happy puddling round in the kid’s section, and made a few notable discoveries. This book, A Candle in Her Room by Ruth Arthur, introduced me to the idea of the same story carried on through several generations. A common device in family sagas, but I’d never read one, and it was new to me. It was the first time, also, that I really noticed first-person narration. In this story, there are three characters, Melissa, Dilys and Nina, and they each get to tell their part of the story. It also got me hooked on the gothic. Old houses, hidden secrets, malevolent spirits, evil powers that stretch out to blight future generations…  Later, I was right into the Victoria Holts, but that was not until I had unrestricted access to Senior fiction.

In the same genre – the spooky story – was this book, Moon Eyes by Josephine Poole. I was astounded when I first read it, and I’m wondering what I will think of it now. Why astounded? Because it was so powerfully strange. Here’s the blurb: “The story of Moon Eyes, of compelling and original beauty, tells how 15-year-old Kate overcomes the influence of an aunt who comes, with her strange black dog, to stay at Hurst Camber. Kate and her little brother Thomas, who are alone in the house, and the way she saves him from Aunt Rhoda’s power reflects the conflict between good and evil in our world. Moon Eyes has a spell-binding quality not often found in books for children.”

“Not often found” is right. It was as if no-one had told the author what a children’s book should be. Everything about this seemed unconventional and odd and weird. Will it still?

I thought I was reading at a rapid rate (3 books in the last week) until I went to the SCBWI (Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators) meeting on Saturday. I even thought that writing and publishing 11 books in 25 years was good going. But I now know that both my reading and writing rate are pitiful. One of the speakers was Michelle Prawer, a judge for the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s annual awards. She’d  finished an entire book that morning and has read her way through more than 300 books in the past few months. One of the great pleasures of attending the CBCA awards in Adelaide last year was finding out how wonderfully passionate about children’s books and reading those judges are. Michelle’s energy, commitment and enthusiasm are inspiring – and she has 7 children, too!

The other part of the meeting was a panel of ‘quiet achievers’. These are writers who mayn’t be household names but whose books are literally everywhere in schools and libraries. The group included Edel Wignell, who’s published over 100 books. What an achievement. (And she told us in a funny little aside that it’s a good idea to have foreign royalty on your side – her recent Bilby Secrets apparently caught the eye of Princess Mary, and it’s been translated into Danish).

I don’t think that I’m that kind of achiever, somehow. I like to go for walks or do the housework or sit staring into space ruminating on my characters and slowly brewing up a story for a few months before I write a single word. There’s no right or wrong way to create and write, but I think you do need to know how you work best. I have written very quickly when I’ve needed to  – once, when I was a Dolly Fiction author, a writer dropped out at the last minute and I agreed to write a 30,000 word novel in 10 weeks. I was working 3 days a week as well, and the whole process was almost intolerably stressful. I revisited that situation in a minor way last year, when I had 5 months to write the next Verity book.  I now know that I do need to time to slowly build the story – or else it ends up a little undercooked. Falls flat, in other words. I chose to re-write (rather than try to fix) the second half of the novel because I just hadn’t thought about it long enough.

Back to summer reading. It’s too hot for Wolf Hall, which has been sitting on my bedside table since early January, so I’ve been dipping into children’s books from my own shelf and from the library. I read Wildwood by Colin Melot (and I must mention the stylish illustrations by Carson Ellis). I dashed though this one, carried along by the exuberant fantasy. It’s like an American The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. Melot’s Wildwood has much in common with Narnia – talking animals, battles, a powerful female character (the White Witch role is taken here by the chilling Dowager Governess) and the quest to find a missing sibling – but Prue and Curtis are fresh and engaging characters, and the geographical/political world building is complicated and convincing. Except for the dietary considerations.

Dietary – what? Yes, I know it’s a mite pedantic of me, but it’s got me worried. What do the animals eat?  Sparrows, eagles, owls, rabbits, foxes, coyotes, bears –  they all live alongside each other. Do they eat each other as well?

I call this the “Market Gardens of Rohan” problem. In the film of The Lord of the Rings, Rohan – which is the home of the horse lords – is set high on a hill, amidst plains that stretch on and on… Where, I wondered out loud, much to the annoyance of my family, were the market gardens? Where did they get their food from? Or are you supposed to just skip these practical issues and get on with enjoying the fantasy?

My other two books were A Brief History of Montmaray which I thought was entrancing. I’ve passed it on to my nearly fifteen-year-old niece. She had loved my Christmas present to her, I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, and I think this will fit beautifully with the other title.

Montmaray is a minuscule island kingdom ruled by an impoverished, eccentric English family. It’s 1937 and the larger world is poised to come crashing in. Michelle Cooper weaves the rise of fascism, the Spanish Civil War, Nazi grail hunters, post-World War I trauma, homosexuality and issues of class and gender into a riveting coming-of-age drama. With lots of funny bits, too – and you’ll be relieved to hear that Montmaray has an entirely convincing food chain, with vegetable patches, bee-hives, a goat, lots of fish and seafood and whatever supplies they can obtain from passing Portugese fishing vessels.

Finally, before I left for the SCBWI meeting, I grabbed a random thin children’s novel to read on the train. It turned out to be Leon Garfield’s Devil-in- the-Fog. What a wonderful book! I read in the blurb that Garfield originally intended to call it The Dead Little Gentleman, and critic Margery Fisher said that ‘does seem to sum up perfectly its peculiar compound of mystery, violence and Dickensian humour…It is a book to leave firmly out of categories and accept thankfully for what it is – a masterpiece.’  Nothing I need to add.

Except… I’ve been playing around with an idea for a new story, featuring a little heroine from a family of travelling actors. Devil-in-the-Fog’s hero is 14-year-old George Treet, from a family of…yes, strolling players. I take that as a serendipitous nudge that I’m going in the right direction with my thinking and ruminating and brewing.