Susan Green

As the trees on either winding bank blotted out the landing stage, Edward, who had been struck dumb by the sight of Ada left alone on the tottering platform, began to scream ‘Ada, Ada, Ada!’ and to point back up river.  Auntie May held him tight, but he screamed louder and writhed in her arms. She spoke sharply in Malay and he bit her shoulder, wriggled free and seemed about to jump overboard. A sailor caught him by the belt of the shorts that Auntie May had brought and that had astonished him. The sailor lifted him high. Water poured down the sailor’s silky arms. ‘Hai, hai, hai,’ he laughed and Edward lashed out at him, sobbing. He was a tall strong boy of four and a half but the sailor lifted him into the air like a swathe of flowers. Something of the boatman’s smell and his happy eyes reminded the child of Ada, and the sobbing lessened and he went limp.
‘Why does she stay? Why is she not here?’
‘If she came with you, you would never learn English. You and she would talk Malay, as we are doing now.’
‘I will talk Malay with you always.’
‘Not after we get to the Port. You will learn something new. Ada will follow.’
‘Follow?’
“She will follow to the Port when you have to go Home.’
Edward gave a shuddering, hopeless sob. He had just left Home. What would Ada do without him at Home? He was placed in Auntie May’s lap and looked at her with eyes nearly mad. ‘Ada! Ada!’

This is our first book group title of the year, and isn’t it a terrific one? Who (or what) is Old Filth?

It turns out Old Filth is the immaculate Sir Edward Feathers, now retired, recently widowed and living alone in Dorset. The name ‘Filth’ is an old joke, ‘Failed in London Try Hong Kong’, but he is anything but a failure. He was a high-flying lawyer, rich and respected, and later a judge. And he is also Eddie, the Raj orphan, sent back to England from Malaya (and his beloved carer Ada) as a small child.

Most of my book group had never heard of Jane Gardam; she’s not exactly a household name, but she is a multi-award winning writer. Old Filth was perhaps her most commercially successful novel. Born in 1928, her first book (for children) was A Long Way to Verona, which came out in 1971. She’s written books both for children and for adults, and it is as a short story writer that I first encountered her. I read and re-read her collections The Sidmouth Letters and Missing the Midnight when I was trying to teach myself how to write. Reading her after many years, I can see her influence, and I could do worse than study her again. Old Filth is a model of economy and style as Gardam swoops boldly back and forward in time to tell the life story of Edward Feathers from birth to death, circling around his early childhood in Malaya, his traumatic time as a foster child in Wales, his oddly happy schooldays, his professional life and relationships.  Relationships! Never Old Filth’s strong suit. There’s his wife Betty, his old rival Terry Veneering and his fellow ‘orphans’,  Claire and Babs, his schoolfriend Patrick Ingoldby, whose family more or less adopted Old Filth, and his cousin Isobel. Even chance-met acquaintances like Loss, Chinese dwarf wheeler-dealer, or fleetingly seen characters like Alice, the maid of his loathsome aunts, are vivid and real. They build the sense of a fully peopled, whole life. Each scene has beautiful, sharp, convincing detail.
It’s a piece of beautiful writing, short (around 260 pages) book, but economical and brilliant in a way that contemporary writers of brick-like tomes could study. I’ll try to limit the adjectives; it’s a cynical, compassionate, funny and intensely moving portrayal of the way childhood neglect and abuse can percolate through a whole lifetime.

There are two companion books, The Man in the Wooden Hat and Last Friends; I’ve already borrowed them from the Athenaeum.

Miserable after reading Anna Funder’s Wifedom. Out of sorts. Dispirited by how little seems to change. Thinking about my own life and choices.  My mother, who wanted to be a historian. The artist wife of an artist friend of my parents, who only re-started her painting in her 80s, after the old bastard died. I resorted to Elizabeth Goudge.

The Scent of Water. I’d read it before, obviously too fast, and dismissed it as overly sentimental, one of her lesser efforts. And yes, it has its faults. But it acted as a corrective, a stern but loving buck-up, a gentle hand and encouraging smile coupled with high expectations – ‘you can do better, and you will’. One of Elizabeth Goudge’s themes – in agreement with the Buddha! –  is simply that life is difficult. You don’t always get what you want; anything can happen, at any time, and it does. We can’t change that, but we can do our duty, we can be kind, loving and forgiving and we can be decent. We can gain sustenance from the beauty of the natural world. As a mystical, nature-loving Christian, she links the cyclical nature of the world to her faith. Plants die and disappear and hide out underground and then are reborn to sprout and grow and flourish and seed (maybe) and then die again. I’m not a Christian, but I can cope with this strand of Goudge’s work; it seems spiritual rather than narrowly C of E. I can also cope with – or ignore – the strand of martyrdom she imposes on partners in unhappy or unfulfilling marriages (another theme of Goudge’s). It’s usually the women who cop it, but not always. I link this to her deeply held, conservative belief in the sanctity of marriage vows – and perhaps the fact that she was never married herself!

Mary Linton, fifyish, urban and cosmopolitan and just retired, impulsively moves to a derelict old house in a remote country village. It was left to her by her father’s cousin, also named Mary. What a wonderfully classic Goudge beginning. The pleasures of exploring an old house, restoring and renewing it, discovering its treasures and its history never seems to pall for me. (The description of ‘the little things’, a case of tiny ornaments, rang so many bells for me because as a small child one of my delights was to sit with my mother while she took her little treasures out from the glass case to dust and admire and tell me their stories).

Mary is quickly absorbed into the village and the stories intertwine. The “squire” and his wife, the Hepplewhites, hiding their working class origins underneath a show of wealth and smothering generosity. The Andersons, elderly siblings; the no-nonsense clergyman is perpetually irritated by his timid sister, a woman almost incapacitated by anxiety. The dear old couple whose one dream is a TV, and their caddish son.  The blind war-hero poet and playwright, Paul, whose vapid wife Valerie blames him for her unhappiness and makes them both unhappy. A cast of beautifully realised children and somewhat comical faithful retainers (yes, and a modern reader just has to cope with that issue, too).

The other major character is the dead Mary #1, the one who left her house to her cousin, the “now” Mary #2. From her diaries, Mary#2 discovers that the first Mary suffered from severe mental illness; deep, debilitating depression, hallucinations, breakdowns. Her state is vividly described, with real understanding and I imagine was drawn from the author’s own experience. How Mary#1, through her faith, came to accept and live with her illness, and rejoice in what joys she could find, is the over-arching theme of the novel and this message – of acceptance and gratitude – permeates The Scent of Water. There are no deliriously happy endings or indeed any startling resolutions for any of the characters’ problems or sorrows.

When I read this book before I just took in the story of the unsatisfied wife, the blind husband, and the caddish son (her would-be lover). I read a different book this time. Goudge’s book can be an odd mix of novellettish story lines combined with deeper, more spiritual and – for me – bolstering themes.  A bit of a mish-mash but if you love it,  you love it. And I do.

As I read the biographies, I began to see that just as patriarchy allowed Orwell to benefit from his wife’s invisible work, it then allowed biographers to give the impression that he did it all, alone. The biographers are choosing the facts of this story in a world that has already sifted them in his favour. The narrative techniques of patriarchy and biography combine seamlessly so as to leave the women who taught and nurtured Orwell, influenced and helped him, like offcuts on the editing floor, buttresses to be removed once the edifice is up.
And so I write, as Orwell put it, because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention. Or, as it happens, a person.

I was so shattered by this book that I have had to have a week of gardening books and a dose of Elizabeth Goudge to recover. And that’s not because George Orwell is one of my heroes and I was having an attack of the vapours over his clay feet. I probably should be ashamed to admit that I’ve never read anything except the essay Why I Write. Yes, that’s correct, I have not read 1984 or Animal Farm or Homage to Catalonia. I do know about these books, however, and understand how important a writer and thinker Orwell is. I know that he reported on his lived experience amongst the poor in London and Paris, fought in the Spanish Civil War, and in his writing sought to expose the true horrors of communism. He championed honesty and integrity in words and actions; he was on the side of the underdog. And I knew he died young, at only 46.

But I didn’t know anything about Eileen O’Shaughnessy, Orwell’s wife.

Funder’s painstaking research, reading between the lines of Orwell’s well-documented life and a cache of letters discovered in 2005, reveals her as the wife who believed in him, encouraged him, discussed and read his work, edited and commented on it and typed it. She is the woman who also went to Spain to fight the Fascists. She was the woman who worked the double shift of paid employment and housework while they lived in London and then moved with him to a primitive country cottage without sanitation, electricity or running water, where she looked after the animals and ran the little shop and did the housework and shopping and cooking and everything else. One episode that has lodged in my mind is Eileen outside, wearing fishing waders, knee deep in shit because of the overflowing toilet and Orwell opening the window and calling out that it must be time for tea. Which does not mean she should have a rest, and he would make her a cuppa. No, it meant she should make him his tea.
She took care of the shit.

While she did that, Orwell wrote and published, though for most of their marriage not much actual money came in. Funder is good at making this life sound like a slog and a struggle for both of them.  Eileen cared deeply about her husband’s work, but Funder can’t find that in return he was appreciative of her labour and sacrifice. He didn’t cherish and care for her. Instead, he was not only consumed by his writing but also consistently unfaithful, sometimes even juggling a couple of lovers at a time and constantly pursuing young women. Back in the day these opportunistic advances were described as ‘pouncing’; today we’d probably call them out as sexual assault or attempted rape. I suppose this could be, if not excused, then at least explained as ‘other times, other mores’ except. Except – shouldn’t someone like Orwell, a man who exposed hypocrisy and injustice, be better than this? Shouldn’t he, of all people, not have ‘pounced’, or slept with teenaged Moroccan prostitutes or his wife’s friends?

Eileen had struggled for years with debilitatingly heavy bleeding, abdominal pain and anemia. Eventually, a mass of uterine tumours was revealed and in 1945 something had to be done. Orwell didn’t stay to take care of her; at the time an operation became imperative he was in France, writing and researching. Oh, and by the way, largely by his desire, they had just adopted a baby. The letters she wrote to him just before she died, after going by herself on buses and trains from London to a hospital in Newcastle-on-Tyne, are heartbreaking.

In London they said I couldn’t have any kind of operation without a preparatory month of blood transfusions, etc. Here I’m going in next Wednesday to be done next Thursday. Apart from its other advantages this will save money,  a lot of money. And that’s as well. By the way, if you could write a letter, that would be nice.
And
…what worries me is that I really don’t think I’m worth the money.

This operation on the cheap killed her. The inquest found the surgeon and the hospital blameless, though it was noted that she was severely anemic.

Funder, trying to imagine what Orwell might have gone through reading these last letters, writes:

If you don’t care for someone, will they care less for themselves? He remembers his shock when the vicar left the word ‘obey’ out of her marriage vows. ‘I couldn’t very well have asked your permission not to ‘obey’!’ she’d laughed.
What had he done?

There are 67 reserves after me for this book at the Goldfields library and I’m betting that most readers will finish it feeling pretty shattered too. And Orwell’s feet most definitely are.

I’m trying to track my reading this year – like Kate Constable does – so I can present some stats at the beginning of 2025. Maybe no pie charts, but who knows? So here’s my ‘read and reviewed, and also just read’ list for January.

Children’s Books
The Fair to Middling by Arthur Calder Marshall
The Painted Garden by Noel Streatfeild
The Rescuers by Margery Sharp
Witch Week by Diana Wynne Jones
Five Children and It by E. Nesbit

Adult Fiction
The Secret Hours by Mick Herron
Illegal Action and Secret Asset by Stella Rimington
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

Non-fiction
Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life by Brigitta Olubas
A Spy Among Friends by Ben Macintyre
Queen of Spies: Daphne Park, Britain’s Cold War Spy Master by Paddy Hayes

And my top picks were…

The Rescuers was my favourite of all the children’s books I read this month. OK, it was my favourite book. It is so witty and sophisticated, full of jokes for adults to enjoy without taking away from the ripping yarn of Bernard, Nils and Miss Bianca braving the castle, the jailer and the jailer’s terrifying cat (see picture) to rescue an imprisoned poet.
And the illustrations, by Garth Williams, are superb.
I’d never read Witch Week before, and while I did enjoy it, I found all the talk of witch burnings rather confronting. Bone-fires! Inquisitors! I actually had a Wynne-Jones inspired nightmare.

I’m not reading much literary fiction at present, but Stone Yard Devotional might get me back on track, making me remember how a novel can enlarge my world, make me think and feel deeply and illuminate areas of my own life. And as for non-fiction, A Spy Among Friends was as much a thriller as any…well, thriller.

It is my observation over many years that those who most powerfully resist convention quite peaceably accept the state of being reviled.

A woman leaves her marriage and her work for the Threatened Species Rescue Centre because she’s lost faith in them both. In the first part of the book, she returns to her home town in country NSW, in the Monaro. She’s burnt out, and wants to spend five days at a Catholic retreat house in a monastery run by nuns. It’s nothing flash. There’s basic accommodation and catering, solitude if she wants it. She was brought up as a Catholic, but she’s no longer a believer; she only has to attend the services if she chooses. Initially she’s full of discomfort and complaint; she sleeps poorly, the food is horrible, it’s cold. She starts going to the services, and she’s full of complaint about those, too. Bibllical mumbo jumbo. But gradually she changes, and at times is able to appreciate the beauty of the singing, the tranquility of the routine. She’s moved to tears by Communion; ‘It has to do with being greeted warmly by a stranger, offered peace for no reason, without question’.

She thinks a lot about her parents, in particular her mother. She was a greenie before her time, and so compassionate to others less fortunate, that a schoolmate once asked if she was a missionary.
And then she leaves, to return to the city.

On to Part II, the longest section of the book, and it seems that the woman has now been at the monastery for some (unspecified) time. There is no real plot. She takes part in the running of the place – cooking, shopping, cleaning, working in the vegie garden. A fellow student from her old high school, Richard Gittens, helps out around the place. The body of one of the order’s nuns, who was murdered in Thailand, is found, and arrangements are made to return the remains to the nuns. There’s Covid, and an infestation of mice. A ‘high profile nun’, an activist for many causes, Helen Parry, also a fellow student from the local school, comes to stay at the retreat.  She was a prickly, difficult, unlikeable teenager and she’s the same as an older woman. Helen Parry and the narrator have a complicated history; she was once complicit in her bullying. The woman sifts through memories of country town life. The mice reach plague proportions. The woman thinks a lot about her mother, and school days, and right and wrong, goodness and kindness, compassion and forgiveness.

In part III, she thinks about those things some more. Especially forgiveness. She excavates more memories from her country town; the boy who shot and killed his parents, Helen Parry’s mother hitting and yelling at her outside the supermarket and Helen’s response. Her mother’s do-gooding (my phrase); visiting a woman suffering from depression, assisting the settlement of Vietnamese refugees. She thinks about the process of dying, and death  – her mother’s, a friend’s, an anorexic teenager’s. She drives Helen Parry (always referred to by both names) around the town and realises that Helen’s mother must have been in and out of the local mental health unit.

And nobody in our town – not a teacher, a psychiatrist or doctor or nurse, not a schoolmate, another parent, not Mrs Bird nor my mother – had made a move to do anything about a schoolgirl left on her own in a housing commission flat, getting herself to school each day to be insulted and assaulted and despised, going home at the end of the day alone.

The nun’s remains are buried. Helen Parry leaves. The narrator thinks about her childhood dog’s death, and mother’s reverence for the earth. And that’s the end.

I’ve given a fairly full account of the novel, because I think it will indicate why I found Stone Yard Devotional initially so perplexing. What’s it about? Nothing’s happening? Is there a mystery, a drama, about the dead nun, or Helen Parry, or Richard Gittens? When will the plot kick in?

It doesn’t. It took around 150 pages for me to settle down, to accept that the book is what it is, and not want it to be anything else. It took that long for me to begin to read more slowly, not to race forward. To stop and think, to reflect on my own country upbringing as the unnamed narrator reflects on hers. The tragedies and hardships, accidents, illnesses and deaths. The unfairness of things. The kids who were routinely persecuted or excluded. The things I could have done, and didn’t. The way I still remember, after nearly 55 years.

The narrator dwells on grief, hers and others’. For losses endured (her parents, a friend) and the huge one – the climate crisis –  that’s coming to us all.

And it’s not depressing. I loved the beautiful, spare, precise writing, the spiralling structure of memories and thoughts and observations, the rounds of work and effort, the gently piercing insights (nothing was laboured, it was all done slantwise). The way all those finely observed moments of monastery life and thought and memory add, detail by detail, to make a book of great weight and depth. It’s a quiet book; if it had a colour, it would be grey, a beautiful, delicate and calm pale grey.

Driving across the surface of the high stony plains on my way there, I found the landscape’s desolation beautiful. My car had been seized now and then by the wind, and I had to grip the steering wheel to correct its movement across the empty road. The sweeping, broad structure of this land gently shifts from one plane int another, each sloping yet almost flat, like a shoulder blade. Although these plains bristle with a fine skin of pale grasses, they are almost as bare as bedrock, and I wonder if this is why I never came back, until now.

A moving, complex and thoughtful book, one to return to and think about.

I have a new interest – spooks. I am writing a novel (could be YA, could be adult) about a young Australian librarian, working in London, who becomes involved with an MI5 investigation run entirely by women. Her name is Helen Harris.
Which is my mother’s name. Mum loved crime novels, and I think she might like to be the one who discovered the identity of the body in the library. She was also a young librarian in London in 1951-2, working at the Brompton Road branch of the Kensington library.

Her nationality was the cause of some snobbishness – “Australia…isn’t it full of convicts?” – but the interesting thing was that a lot of people couldn’t really place her. Within the English class system, that was very important. For instance, while you could be lower, middle or upper middle class, there were a number of gradations based on your income, education and job or profession. For the middle classes, respectability and conformity were key. And you had to be on your guard. “What will the neighbours think?” A colonial was – well, not quite ‘one of us’.

Helen Harris – or Green as she was by then –  was extremely intelligent, university educated, well-read and sure of herself.  She was also versatile. Both my parents (Dad worked as a commercial artist) told us kids how it was always remarked upon that Australians had what we’d call now a broad skill set. They’d try their hand at anything. Dad could draw, paint and illustrate, design and execute beautiful lettering – which was unheard of in his advertising agency. Mum had been a primary school teacher, but along with her arts degree (with Honours) from Melbourne University, she’d also picked up a librarianship qualification. She was very observant, had the memory of an elephant, and I think she’d have made a very effective spy.

I didn’t have Helen Harris the spook in mind when I picked up Ben Macintyre’s A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal from the library book sale. I started to watch the series on TV when it first came out, but the sexism of the times annoyed me too much. So Philby wasn’t on my radar. However recently I read the riveting The Secret Hours by Mick Herron (note to self: read more Mick Herron!) It follows a couple of civil servants who have been seconded to an inquiry into misconduct in the British secret service. It is cynical, political (with one character alarmingly like a certain Boris Johnson), twisty, suspenseful and sadly quite believable.

So after I finished, I searched my bookshelves for something more on the British secret service – and hit gold.

The story of Kim Philby is well known; the consummate English gentleman, educated at Cambridge University, passionate about cricket, with the right clothes, the right accent, the right friends, the right clubs. The perfect British spy. Yet also a Soviet mole. The MI6, the CIA and the KGB files on Philby are still closed, but Macintyre was able to find plenty that was on the record to inform his slant on the story, which is through Philby’s relationships with male friends and colleagues. In particular, Nicholas Elliott of MI6 and James Angleton, the CIA inteligence chief. Both of these men would have counted themselves as close friends, an inner circle, trusted and trusting. And Philby systematically betrayed this trust for decades, with far-reaching consequences which includes hundreds of deaths, as well as more people tortured, hunted or exiled. Not cricket!

I started looking for the women in this tale. There were wives, secretaries and administrative workers. A few agents. Obviously – to the insular male establishment –  they did not fit the bill. Women did not have the old boy’s network, and they were not ‘clubbable’; so much of the important work was done in all-male environments, over drinks. I don’t think many women could tolerate the extraordinary amount of drinking that the men did, either.
But I am going to have to keep on searching for the story of female intelligence officers in MI5 and MI6. And luckily for Helen Harris, it seems that new histories are being written all the time.

A few days of sweet and nostalgic re-reading last week; The Painted Garden by Noel Streatfeild and The Rescuers by Margery Sharp. I loved them both when I was a child; reading was my ‘happy place’ and these two were re-read many times.

I’m always slightly nervous about beloved childhood books disappointing on an adult reading. I expect them to be dated, that’s not a problem. What is problematic for me is when the racism, sexism and class-based prejudice really stick in my craw. And that happens sometimes, even though I generally regard these books and these attitudes as basically artefacts from another time and another world.

(An example: last week I also tried to read an Agatha Christie novel, A Murder is Announced which was first published in 1950. I went through a Christie phase in my mid-teens, and was spellbound; this time, I wasn’t able to even get half way through. Christie may have been trying to show what horrible people her characters are, but their constant references to ‘foreigners’ as greasy, weaselly, dishonest, hysterical and prone to exaggeration led me to abandon ship even before Miss Marple came on board to solve the mystery. And the whole thing was so snobbish! Besides, if you’ve seen the TV series, you know who did it.)

The Painted Garden didn’t disappoint. Hooray! It sees an English family, the Winters, relocate to California to stay with their Aunt Cora. It isn’t a holiday. The father, John, needs somewhere in the sun to recover after a nervous breakdown caused by killing a child in a car accident. How’s that for heavy? The three children are all not keen, for different reasons. Rachel, a ballet student, is missing out on a role in a big ballet; Tim, a piano prodigy, is missing out lessons from a famous concert pianist, and Jane, who wants to be a dog-trainer, is just going to miss Chewing-gum, her dog.

But things turn out fine. John gets better. Tim, in his search for piano to practise on, makes friends with the piano-owning Antonios, who run a drug store, and gains a spot on a Hiram P. Schneltzworther’s radio show. Rachel is befriended by Posy Fossil, a famous ballerina. And Jane, the plain, grumpy, angry, untalented, unpopular one of the trio, gets to play Mary in Bee Bee studio’s film version of The Secret Garden, and in the process learns a lot about other people and herself. This is a sunny, optimistic story which whips along at a cracking pace.

It wasn’t one of those ‘children against the grown-ups’ stories; though there were struggles and disappointments and a few crabby or difficult adults, so many helpful and interested people came into the children’s lives. And another – John and Bee, the parents, listened to their children, took their concerns seriously and let them make their own decisions. Which seemed pretty unusual for a book published in 1949. Streatfeild had lots of fun with the differences between London and Los Angeles. Manners, language, food, accents, attitudes, clothes –  and from the names of characters, lots of different ethnicities. The two Black characters are Joe, a railway steward and Bella, Aunt Cora’s housekeeper. Bella is a significant character; they grow to love her, and she loves them. She becomes part of the family. The Winter family goes home happier, healthier and with lots to look forward to.
A delight.

…this theme – this transcendent theme – of fulfillment and non-fulfillment; and those who bind themselves to limitations…

Shirley Hazzard, with a small output, has a huge reputation. And this biography, by Australian academic Brigitta Olubas, is also huge – 780 grams, 467 pages plus another hundred or so comprising photographs, notes, acknowledgements and index.
That’s a lot of Shirley. For this reader, perhaps a bit too much.

Everyone seems to agree that Hazzard was a great stylist. The Great Fire was certainly full of sentences and phrases and paragraphs that are literary, precise and often beautiful or striking. Or depending on your point of view, mannered or even intrusive, with more than a touch of Henry James* (though she always denied his influence), with that way of interrogating every little detail until you want to scream. I didn’t enjoy it much, but I do plan to re-read The Transit of Venus.
I remember loving that book when I was in my early twenties. It’s spoken of as her best novel, and I think I’ll be able to appreciate it more than The Great Fire.

Maybe. After reading this biography, I’m hesitant about spending any more time with her. It’s going to be quite a task to separate the writing from the woman.

Hazzard was born in 1931 into a middle-class Sydney family. Her father Reg worked for the company that built the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and later for the Australian government as a diplomat exploring international trade possibilities. He was also an alcoholic, with a long-term mistress who followed the family to their overseas postings. Her mother Kit, an elegant and beautiful woman, was probably bipolar, and a difficult, demanding and turbulent presence in her life. Her older sister, Valerie, contracted TB when Shirley was a teenager. They were not close. It doesn’t sound like a happy childhood.

As a girl and young woman, Shirley must have been intense company, constantly reading, thinking, noticing, describing, analysing…and writing, turning her life into literature. She was mad for poetry, learning Italian so that she could read her Italian poets not in translation and memorising whole poems which she could (and did) recite at the drop of a hat. Perhaps because of all that poetry, she was also mad for love. All-consuming, passionate, romantic capital-L Love.

Which she found when her father was posted to Hong Kong in 1947. She was 16. The man’s name was Alexis (Alec) Vedeniapine, a white Russian, an officer in the British army in his early thirties. He was charming, handsome, an intellectual as well as a man of action  – and importantly, a lover of poetry. Forming the model for Aldred Leith, the hero of The Great Fire, he was “her first great love”. It was an experience she never forgot, and in many ways she carried the torch for that love her entire life. Though in 1947 they were separated (by her father’s further postings and medical treatment for Valerie), she considered herself engaged to Alec, exchanging letters when he returned to England to become a farmer – but not meeting. Olubas tells the story sympathetically but his 1950 letter asking her to break their engagement is actually quite funny. He painted a picture of himself and his farming life that is so bleak, so unappealing.

I feel and have felt for a long time that I have made a mess of things in thinking I could shape this life into something that I could ask you to share with me…I get up at half past four and work till dark. I never go out for pleasure and am too tired to live and think as a human being… There is nothing and nobody – it’s just that the life I had visualised is not coming out as planned and I see no light in the distance…

Oh God, he must have prayed, get me out of this, please! Did he feel hunted? How exhausting to be with a 19-year-old who was incapable of sharing his working life and practical interests, but who must always live at the “extremities of romance”, as Olubas describes it.  Though Hazzard kept in touch with Alec for the rest of his life, she considered him a failure. He hadn’t met her high hopes for him (or expectations), and the things that meant so much to him – his marriage, his children, his farm –  were negligible to her. She wrote, ‘He renounced his larger life.’ He had bound himself to limitations.

When her father was posted to America, Hazzard began working in secretarial roles for the UN in New York and indulged in a string of relationships with married or otherwise unavailable older men. She even went on family holidays with one lover, his wife and children. A trip to Naples to recover from one of her failed affairs changed her life; she fell under its spell, and almost until she died, she divided her time between Italy and New York. Her writing began to be published, the literary world of New York opened to her and in 1963, marriage to the much older, distinguished (and wealthy) writer and art lover Francis Steegmuller completed the picture. It was then she began to live her ideal life. She and Steegmuller went to the opera, collected art, socialised in artistic, cultured, intellectual circles, had an apartment on Capri, kept a gold Rolls-Royce – and wrote until old age and dementia took them both.

Her bibliography is sparse; four novels, three short story collections and a handful of non-fiction works, among them a couple of highly critical accounts of the UN, a memoir of her friendship with Graham Greene. Both The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire were highly acclaimed and awarded, but there was a 23 year wait between them for eager readers.

Olubas has written an admiring and almost fawning biography. I was left with the impression of a woman who was fastidious, refined, cultured, elegant, cultivated, beautiful, sophisticated, intelligent, brave (she took on the UN in her exposure of Kurt Waldheim’s Nazi past) and ambitious – but decidedly unappealing. Dominating, demanding, sensitive to coldness or criticism but often unable to understand other people’s needs and differences – or even to listen! – and almost emotionally stunted.

‘And who the devil are you?’ asked Lawrie.
Mr Scratch appeared uneasy. He even blushed.
‘That’s what they used to call me,’ he said. ‘But it’s very old-fashioned. I don’t like it. To tell you the truth, I never did like it. It seemed so crude. Though in the old days it meant something.’
Lawrie did not understand what the old gentleman was talking about…
‘It all used to be so simple when people believed,’ Mr Scratch said. ‘We used to know where we were. There was no need to explain. Faust knew what he was doing. But,’ he waved the papers in his hand, ‘today there are all these forms. If it were possible, I’d say it would be the death of me. I long for the days when they signed in their own blood on parchment.’

I never cease to be astonished at the range and quality of British children books published in the late 1950s and into the 1970s. Some of them would never get into print today, and not because of the – to us, now – unacceptable depictions of gender, race, class and identity (have I covered them all?). It’s because they are so odd. Like The Fair to Middling. What would an editor or agent say on reading it now? Very probably, “Sorry Arthur, we will pass on this one”. It seems as if an author could get away with writing whatever they wanted. Now, that’s an idea…

A visit to the Middling Fair is a treat for the children of the Winterbottome’s School for Incapacitated Orphans. It’s busy and noisy with sideshows, food stalls, rides, and games booths with silly prizes. All the usual fun. Only it is not usual at all. A series of life-changing choices and chances are on offer by the diabolic, sinister and weirdly powerful fairground operators.

Peter, a musical prodigy who is going blind, is offered the opportunity to regain his sight. But seeing drowns out hearing, and so it’s a choice between ‘seeing what everyone else can see and hearing what nobody else can hear’. His friend and teacher, Miss Oxley, can lose her disfiguring scars and have a glittering career but there’s the chance she will also lose the two loves of her life – music and Peter.
Wally, a junior thief with thyroid problems, and his friend Florence get a taste of a dystopian ‘perfect society’ whose motto is ‘We-dom or Death’ – shades of the USSR under Stalin. Albino Lawrie knows what it’s like to sell his soul and look like everyone else. Mr Enticknapp, the headmaster and the orphanage’s generous patron and fairy godmother, Lady Charity Armstrong, enter the Amazement Park and undergo a return to childhood which gives them empathy with their disabled charges.

Even Mr Carruthers, the crippled teacher who knows something strange is going on but experiences none of it, is changed forever, determining to overcome his bitterness and write the story of the Fair. The only child who takes up the offer is Emma, who is cured of her colour-blindness which – typically, for this novel – is a mixed blessing of wonder and disappointment.

This is an intensely moral story, full of compelling and serious life lessons while conveying some of the absurdity of the adult world to child readers; there are echoes of The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, some of Roald Dahl’s stories, Alice in Wonderland, Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. It’s funny, loaded with puns, wordplay, sophisticated allusions and humour but at the end I was left with an impression of something troubling, strange –  and quite unique.

And by the way, the illustrations and cover are by Raymond Briggs, one of his very first commissions.

The world out there seems so broken and divided and ugly and violent. Is it bothering me more than usual because it’s nearly Christmas? In the West, anyway, isn’t it the time of love and peace, over-eating and gifts? I’m trying to avoid the news but it’s hard to do.

I was feeling in need of comfort yesterday, and so I turned to childhood and “The Little White Horse” by Elizabeth Goudge. My old Puffin copy has been so well-loved that it’s falling apart and, when I opened it I found I’d used as a bookmark one of the deckle-edged little thank-you cards we had printed in early 2002 after my father’s funeral. Oh, dear. It was a difficult time. Apart from the obvious – my beloved Dad had just died – my husband had pneumonia, my grieving mother was in poor health (so many times in that first year I thought we would lose her) and I had a job to get to and a house to run and a child just starting school. I’m not naturally a stoic (and as I often say, ‘nobody likes a martyr’), but I scarcely cried as I carried on. No wonder I turned to The Little White Horse for comfort.

The novel starts in Gothic novel territory, with 13-year-old orphan Maria, her governess Miss Heliotrope and her Cavalier King Charles spaniel Wiggins in a dilapidated carriage bumping though a dark and cold night. They’re going to live with her uncle in his ancient manor house. They’ve never met him before. Moonacre Manor is in the depths of unknown country…
But instead of heading into the dark and dangerous, the story swerves into the joyous, delightful and magical. Maria is an enchanting heroine; fastidious, clever, loving and loyal, sensible and brave. (And somewhat vain, with a relatable love of clothes and pretty things). But she’s not passive. She’s up for action and adventure, willing to challenge the adults, fight for what is right and even, occasionally, to get dirty. There’s Maria’s dream playmate Robin who turns out to be a real boy, a quartet of protective animals who keep her safe on her adventures and two bittersweet romances from the past that end in middle-aged marriages. She goes on a quest to right old wrongs, is haunted by the vision of a little white horse and manages an earthy, joyous ending with reconciliations and forgiveness and lots of tea and cake all round.

Ah, cake! I always loved the food in this book. It’s quite a feature. Not only afternoon tea, but breakfast, lunch, dinner and various other incidental comestibles are provided by Moonacre’s astonishing cook, Marmaduke Scarlet.

…home-made crusty bread, hot onion soup, delicious rabbit stew, baked apples in a silver dish, honey, butter the colour of marigolds, a big jug of  warm mulled claret  and hot roasted chestnuts folded in a napkin.

And then there are the houses – Moonacre itself, Old Parson’s vicarage and Loveday Minette’s little cave-house. You could almost draw house-plans, they are described with such precision. Many of the rooms are lovely, but…ah, Maria’s bedroom! I imagine most little girl readers wished it was their own. I certainly did.
It’s at the top of a tower, with a door too small for all but the tiniest of adults.

The ceiling was vaulted, and delicate ribbings of stone curved over Maria’s head like the branches of a tree, meeting at the highest point of the ceiling in a  carved representation of a sickle moon surrounded by stars.
There was no carpet upon the silvery-oak floor, but a little white sheepskin lay beside the bed, so that Maria’s bare toes should meet something warm and soft when they went floorwards in the morning. The bed was a little four-poster, hung with pale-blue silk curtains embroidered with silver stars, of the same material as the window curtains, and spread with a patchwork quilt made of exquisite squares of velvet and silk of all colours of the rainbow, gay and lovely.

Plates and glasses, furniture, fabrics, pots and pans; dresses and coats and breeches and shoes; everything is gleaming and shining with cleanliness and care and described in caressing detail. Except for the nasty, gloomy Norman keep of the wicked Black Men, who live with their leader Monsieur Cocq de Noir and lead a bachelor existence in the pine forest. But even they change their ways, forsake wickedness, smarten up and do right.

Elisabeth Goudge published The Little White Horse in 1946, right after the end of WWII. The social history of immediate post-war Britain has long been an interest of mine and everything I’ve read would indicate that in 1946 the country was on its knees, in spite of victory. Bombed towns, rationing, shortages of everything – food, fuel, building materials – meant everyday life would have been challenging. Or downright miserable. Demobbed servicemen and women returned to ordinary life…but that could not erase the individual and collective trauma of the war years. Destroyed homes and communities and families. Children who were evacuated to live, often, with complete strangers, for years. And there were so many deaths to mourn.

I haven’t read much about Goudge’s life, but I do know that depression and ‘nervous breakdowns’ were an issue for her. I can easily imagine this book was written as a wonderful warming, comforting ‘God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world’ wish-fulfillment fantasy. It won the Carnegie Medal in 1946. I hope it soothed her heart, even if – with the rationing of sugar, butter, eggs and flour – she could not indulge in Marmaduke Scarlet’s full catalogue of delights:
…plum cake, saffron cake, cherry cake, iced fairy cakes, eclairs, gingerbread, meringues, syllabub, almond fingers, rock cakes, chocolate cake, parkin, cream horns, Devonshire splits, Cornish pasty, jam sandwiches, lemon-curd sandwiches, lettuce sandwiches cinnamon toast and honey toast…

(I’ve taken the pictures of Walter Hodges’ colour illustrations from a 1949 edition I picked up at an opportunity shop.)