Susan Green

I went to Melbourne last week, on the train. The purpose of the outing was ostensibly (isn’t this a great word? I had to look it up to make sure it meant what I thought it did – and it did) to take my son and his friend, both 15-year-olds, to watch the Grand Final Parade. But it was rainy and cold, the players would have been inside cars, and the boys couldn’t be bothered so they went off to look in shops. As did I. Into the Bourke Street mall, and the big department stores. If ever I actively enjoyed shopping, I don’t any more. Almost immediately, the whole exercise began to take on a nightmarish quality.  The ground floor cosmetics section was pumping. Lights, mirrors, reflections, signage; thumping music; myriad separate counters and kiosks each with their own uniformed staff spruiking; a constant stream of women moving through the vast space broken up with signage and partitions and shimmering displays of packaged magic.

Up the escalator, and here also were the female hordes moving through the various departments, on their way from here to somewhere else, and the areas set aside for the young and cool were crowded, but in amongst the middle-aged clothes, in the depths, there were only a few browsers hunting and pecking amongst the racks and tables… The clothes seemed be clumped together without logic, packed closely so you had to struggle to remove an item, and then once removed, not what I thought they were. I tried on a shirtdress, because I had some idea in my head that the shirtdress might be It, the style, a solution, a possible uniform for middle-aged me. The shop assistants, two of them, were at the counter bitching about one of their supervisors, and scarcely broke off to acknowledge me. The shirtdress had a strange asymmetric hemline (why?), and in the strange lighting of the dressing-rooms, looked not a cheerful cinnamon brown but a murky cowpat tone. Still hopeful, I thought that perhaps there might be others out there, with normal hems and in less trying shades. The shop assistants were still hot on the topic of the supervisor, so I continued the search but found only bizarre tunics stitched from an assortment of warring fabrics, shifts and sheaths, synthetics with the feel of shower curtains and a really lovely grey wool winter coat reduced by 50% to $200. I gave up. To the twee-sounding ‘Intimate Apparel’.

Who would have thought there are so many variations on the basic bra? Acres of racks and tables, amongst which I could not find what I was looking for; all the bras were the same but different and of course the style I was after had been discontinued, or had never been made. I began to feel that it was all obscurely my fault. After all, every other woman wanted push-up underwire and padded. I picked out a near-approximation. It was in ‘nude’, which is a sallow beige colour.

‘Does it come in black?’ I asked saleslady.
‘If it does, we don’t have it.’
‘Is there anything similar in black?’                                                                                                   ‘You’ll have to speak to the fitter.’

But the fitter had her back to me and was engaged in a long conversation with two old friends – or perhaps colleagues, for they were enumerating the illnesses of retired salesladies. I waited, while the saleslady briskly served three or four younger women with sports bras and moulded T-shirt bras and assertive balconettes. The fitter prattled on. I looked down at my unworthy item of apparel. It was flaccid and nude. I gazed around at the breastplates on display; hundred of paired cups hung expectantly, awaiting animation from splendid young and perky bosoms… Demoralised and defeated, I placed the bra on the counter and left the store. And I realised that I was in Barbara Pym territory.

This is from ‘Excellent Women’.

I had a feeling that I must escape and longed to be lost in a crowd of busy women shopping, which was why I followed blindly the crowd that surged in through the swinging doors of a large store. Some were hurrying, making for this or that department or counter, but others like myself seemed bewildered and aimless, pushed and buffeted as we stood not knowing which way to turn. I strolled through a grove of dress materials and found myself at a counter piled with jars of face-cream and lipsticks…There was a mirror on the counter and I caught sight of my own face, colourless and worried-looking, the eyes large and rather frightened, the lips too pale. I did not feel that I could ever acquire a smooth apricot complexion but I could at least buy a new lipstick, I thought, consulting the shade-card. The colours had such peculiar names but at last I found one that seemed right and began to turn over a pile of lipsticks in a bowl in an effort to find it. But the colour I had chosen was either very elusive or not there at all, and the girl behind the counter, who had been watching my scrabblings in a disinterested way, said at last, ‘What shade was it you wanted, dear?’

I was a little annoyed at being called ‘dear’, though it was perhaps more friendly than ‘madam’, suggesting as it did that I lacked the years and poise to merit the more dignified title.

‘It’s called Hawaiian Fire’, I mumbled, feeling rather foolish, for it had not occurred to me that I should have to say it out loud.

‘Oh, Hawaiian Fire. It’s rather an orange red, dear,’ she said doubtfully, scrutinising my face. ‘I shouldn’t have thought it was quite your colour. Still, I think I’ve got one here.’ She took a box from behind the counter and began to look in it.

‘Oh, it doesn’t matter really,’ I said quickly. ‘Perhaps another colour. What would you recommend?’

‘Well, dear, I don’t know, really.’ She looked at me blankly, as if no shade could really do anything for me. ‘Jungle Red is very popular – or Sea Coral, that’s a pretty shade, quite pale, you know.’

‘Thank you, but I think I will have Hawaiian Fire, I said obstinately, savouring the ludicrous words and the full depths of my shame.

Back in the department store, I was desperate for tea. Another Pym situation. There were in-house cafes. But they were brightly lit and exposed, where you would perch amongst the endlessly flowing traffic of shoppers. Worse, you would not be served. No-one would look after you. You’d  have to go up to the counter yourself when the wait-staff called your name. No. I was looking for somewhere quiet, a burrow, a refuge. Was there somewhere an ideal, dream-café where elderly waitresses in black with white aprons would walk on carpet to my dimly-lit corner with bolstering tea leaf in a pot, and extra hot water, and a plate of toasted tomato sandwiches…

In the Melbourne of my childhood and even young adulthood, there were such places. Though coffee culture was burgeoning, the expresso machine wasn’t ubiquitous. Melbourne was still had a tea-drinking town. When I went shopping with my mother in the early sixties, there was a choice of tea-shop bolt-holes. I remember one one downstairs, where each booth had dinky little lamps on the walls but the rest of the place was practically dark. Was it called Raine’s? The waitresses knew us; I would always order a toasted ham sandwich and an orange juice. There were several more in Collins and Little Collins, and they were all dim, quiet, restful, a respite from shopping, where ladies could ease off their stilettos under the tables and slump their corseted bodies back against the padded seat-backs. But here in 2012, eventually I stumbled across the mall, through a couple of arcades – and passing by many crowded noisy cafes – to Dymocks downstairs in Collins Street, and there at last was able to sit out of the foot traffic and have a pot of tea. Pot of tea. Words of comfort and cheer. Even though the tea was in a bag, and far too weak, and there were no toasted sandwiches but a sawdusty muffin, the idea of ‘pot of tea’ and all it stands for was there…

This obsession with tea is also of course classic Pym territory.   I shall have to go to the bookshelf and do a ‘tea’ search. Perhaps when I have  some spare time, I can Google ‘Tea in English Literature.’ But right now, the kettle is whistling and the pot is waiting.  

What a very writerly week I’ve had. On Thursday I went down to Melbourne to the opening night of the Melbourne Writer’s Festival. What forced me out into the rain, wind, hail and cold was the pleasure of meeting up with two writer friends, fellow Varuna-ites Anne Myers and Andrea Gillum. And then going off to the Town Hall to see (and hear, obviously) Simon Callow talking about ‘Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World.’

Well. Wonderful, is all I can say. He spoke about how Dickens, reading from his work, absolutely mesmerised his Victorian audiences. People would laugh, cry, and even faint, such was the drama and intensity of Dicken’s performance…and I can see how ably Callow would reproduce those readings, for he was pretty spell-binding, too. No notes, and even his answers to questions after the talk were polished and witty. Apparently Dickens was addicted to the ‘fix’ of that emotional and almost spiritual bond that forms between audience and actor. I’ve been lucky enough to experience that a few times, and it is a deep, real, moving and absolutely real feeling.

I think I felt it first when the Royal Shakespeare Company came out to Australia in the 1970’s and my parents took me to see Judi Dench in ‘A Winter’s Tale’ and ‘Twelfth Night’. And another Shakespeare occasion was only a couple of years ago, with the Bell Shakespeare ‘Twelfth Night’. At the end of the play we were all (or it felt like ‘all’) clapping and smiling and some of us – it couldn’t have just been me – were teary as well. It was the wisdom and beauty and encircling joy of the whole thing; the creaky story, Shakespeare’s characters and wonderful words, the actors themselves. I thought as I applauded, how wonderful it must feel to have those waves of emotion flowing towards you on the stage from the invisible people in their seats in the dark. You could feel the love.

But enough of that; Simon Callow certainly communicated his passion for Dickens, and his warmth and humour and wit filled the big hall.

The other writerly-ness was the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s Book of the Year awards ceremony in Adelaide. My The Truth About Verity Sparks was awarded (along with Jackie French’s Nanbery) Honour Book in the Younger Readers category. It was like winning silver. Since being shortlisted felt like winning gold to me, this was the cup running (almost) over. Wonderful. It was especially lovely to talk to some of the CBC members and judges, to hear their kind and enthusiastic comments about my book, and to realise the passion they feel for children’s literature. Since the judges had to read around 300 books, it was truly a labour of love. The awards were presented by the Federal Member for Adelaide, Kate Ellis. She is the tall, model-esque one with the long hair. She is also Minister for Childcare and Early Childhood. She spoke about the importance of books and reading not just for those measurable outcomes such as language acquisition and literacy. She recalled her young self under the sheets with a torch, reading after the lights were out, and talked about how books can transport you to other places, indentities, experiences; how they enrich and expand your world, nourish your imagination and your sympathies; help you to grow. Hear, hear! Congratulations to the other award and Honour Book winners (my pick for the Younger Readers was Kate Constable’s Crow Country and I was right) and to those on the shortlist and list of notable books.

I also had lunch with my wonderful editor Mary Verney and the other Walker Books prize-winner, Bob Graham. His ‘A Bus Called Heaven’ was the Picture Book of the Year. I told Bob that in Castlemaine a month or so ago, I had seen a mini-bus with ‘Heaven’ painted on the front; how funny, I said, they must have got the idea from your book.

“No, that was the bus,” Bob said. It was a real bus. Bob saw it in Melbourne while walking his grand-daughter to school and his lovely story with those warm and funny illustrations was born.

Small world, eh?

It’s winter and so of course it should come as no surprise that it’s cold – but it’s really cold. Last night, with the gas heater chugging away as hard as it could, we were still rugged up and feeling draughts of frigid air from the ill-fitting casement and louvre windows and glass doors in our charming old house. I’m sick of charm.  At the moment, I feel that a warm brick bunker would do me. But the days have been sunny and the big freeze doesn’t start till near dark; besides, I’ve just had an email from my brother in New York where it’s breathlessly hot and steamy. So much for complaining about the weather.

Except to say that, cold weather and knitting going together as they do, I’m on the front of my first cable experiment.

I read somewhere that, when deep in the rhythm of plain and purl, the knitter’s brain- waves resemble those of a meditator. Perhaps that’s why I love knitting so. And probably why what I love most is knitting scarves. You don’t have to think. The long straight parts of a jumper or cardigan are fine, too, but all those decreases to make arm-holes and shoulders are troublesome.  This cable pattern looks lovely, but what you don’t see is that I’ve pulled it out and re-knitted about half a dozen times. This is not what I knit for! However – as I know from the bin at my closest Op Shop, where unwanted hand-knitted scarves multiply like multi-coloured rabbits – there are only so many scarves a person needs.

When this cardigan is done, I will look forward to my nightly collapse on the couch with some nice plain knitting. And for a special treat, on Sunday afternoons, as the evening draws in, there can be (this is me in Barbara Pym mode) knitting, a book, a cup of tea and some McVities Digestive biscuits.  Not all at once, of course.

Knitting and reading aren’t really similar, but re-reading is a little like plain knitting. Soothing, with no real surprises, but with much enjoyment. I have just re-read a  children’s novel called Mistress Masham’s Repose by TH White. I haven’t read it since I was twelve or thirteen, but it was hugely influential in making me into the writer I am. I was hesitant, at first, to re-read in case I didn’t like it – in case it wasn’t all I’d cracked it up to be – in case it’d lost its charm. But – amazingly – no.

Mistress Masham’s Repose was given to me as an 8th birthday present by a friend of my eldest brother’s. He was a teenager, and he worked at the local bookshop – Stonemans Bookroom – where I work now. How he came to choose this one for me, I don’t know, but re-reading it, I’m surprised that he chose it and that I loved it.

Because, on the face of it, it’s quite a difficult book. Briefly – Maria lives in an almost-ruined great house called Malplaquet in the wilds of Northhamptonshire. She discovers the descendants of a band of escaped Lilliputians on an island; makes friends with them; battles her malicious governess Miss Brown and the unscrupulous Vicar, Mr Hater, in order to prevent them from kidnapping the People (they plan to sell them to circuses); and with the help of the cook, Mrs Noakes, an ancient Professor and the dotty Lord Lieutenant, she foils the plans of the evil pair and comes into her inheritance.

What’s difficult – and wonderful  – is the language. All through the book, TH White plays with words.  Here, on the very first page, he has fun with 18^th century military history, poetry, architecture, and vocabulary;

It had been built by one of her ducal ancestors who had been a friend of the poet Pope, and it was surrounded by Vistas, Obelisks, Pyramids, Columns, Temples, Rotundas and Palladian Bridges, which had been built in honour of General Wolfe, Admiral Byng, the Princess Amelia and others of the same kidney.

I don’t need to pick apart how and why that is difficult for an 8-year-old reader. I can’t imagine that I truly understood much of that. But I kept in reading, and there was more history, more pastiche, lots of humour along with some sadness, lessons in love and respect for Maria who had taken to treating the tiny people as pets (Her apology reads; I am young but tall. You are old but short. I am sorry and will be better), some jokes around Latin and antiquarian book lore, a gallery of English stock types of the 19^th and early 20^th century – Vicar, governess, faithful retainer, dotty Professor, loopy aristocrat, doughty but dopey policeman – and a lot of swooningly beautiful nature writing. Like this;

Under her nose, she watched the mare’s-tail and other flora of the ocean floor, as the prow edged its way between the water lilies. Dragonflies, like blue needles, and damsel-flies, like ruby ones – the husband keeping his wife in order by gripping her tightly round the neck with a special pair of pincers on the end of his tail – hovered over the surface. By going gently, she could sometimes pass over a flight of perch without disturbing them. Or rather, they would raise their spiky fins, blush out the dark anger of their bars and make mouths at her. Once or twice, she passed a pike, only six inches long, basking under the flat green leaves, and once she came close to the meeting place of the tench – who made themselves scarce with a loud plop. They had been lazily scratching their backs on the lilies, like a school of elephants.

 The whole thing ends happily after an extended comic set-piece of the Professor trying to convince the hunt-mad Lord Lieutenant that Maria has been imprisoned in the dungeons. It’s almost all dialogue – a script –

‘Here, have a cigar. We keep them in this filly here, for parties. Look, you just press her tail down, like this, and the cigar comes out of her mouth, like that, oh, I’m sorry, and at the same moment her nostrils burst into flame, so you can light it. Neat, isn’t it?’

The poor Professor is waylaid with an array of ingenious musical devices shaped like horses which spout cigars, chocolates, coffee and cigarettes – and I was on the train laughing helplessly and out loud.

How I made any sense of it at 8, I don’t know. Was I just the most amazingly precocious reader or what? Well, I was stopped in my child-genius tracks when I looked on-line to see that other readers had made of it – and found legions of devoted American fans. They would, I thought, be even less likely than me to get the so-English jokes and references.

Re-reading, I was surprised to find of the source of my writing. Some of it, at any rate. My sense of humour, my love of pastiche, my tendency towards (hopefully) nail-biting pile-ups of suspense and action; red herrings, historical oddities, Capitals, made-up book titles; a semi-delirious swoon of words… I only have to look glancingly at The Truth About Verity Sparks to see a bit, here and there, of Mistress Masham’s Repose.

One last odd thing about re-reading Mistress Masham’s Repose. I found that I had remembered, since I was a young girl, a particular phrase from the book. Maria, pretending to be a pirate, has paddled her boat out to an island in the middle of an ornamental lake. ‘She boarded the tree bole, brandishing her cutlass, and swarmed ashore with the battle cry of a Maria, her spectacles twinkling fiercely in the sun.’

How I love that. How I loved re-reading that. It’s a kind of key-stone – spectacles, twinkling, fiercely – there’s laughter and affection, imagination and reality, a building-up and cutting back down to size. Why, of all the words in the book – many of them wonderful, long and obscure – those are the ones that encapsulate for me it’s delight, I don’t know. Perhaps it’s because, in its own way, ‘spectacles twinkling fiercely’ is simply perfect.

Recently I was invited to give a short talk at the Castlemaine Word Mine (have a look at castlemainewordmine.wordpress.com/ to see what it’s all about). I got the title of my talk from a book (of course). The Child That Books Built by Francis Spufford is a hybrid of, amongst other things, memoir, literary history and criticism and biography, and a record of the children’s books that ‘grew’ the author.*

I began my talk with the key books of my early childhood. When I was four I began school and encountered  John and Betty (the Victorian Schools 1st reader). In grade 2, I started to read Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Yes, I did. No, I was not a child genius. I’ll explain.

All sorts of things grow a person. There are the real experiences and events, the rock-like solid structure of your life – your family; where you live; how you live.  Rock-like? Solid? I only have to talk to my siblings to find out that there are many subtle and some gross differences in the way we experienced those. And then there are the unreal experiences – the dreams and nightmares, the fears and fantasies. I can probably point the finger of blame at my father for the fact that I’m still scared of the dark. It wasn’t the Hobyahs for  me – it was the Swarbies. The Hobyahs came out of the bush but we lived by the sea-side and the Swarbies, according to Dad, lived in the nearby Carrum Swamp. I vaguely remember that they had pointy heads and were bluish-greenish and rustled in the reeds and rushes. The moral of the tale was and has always been  – little child, don’t wander off and get lost or drowned or stolen.

The pointy-headed Swarbies, Rat and Mole and Mr Badger, Snow White, Orlando the Marmalade Cat, Max and the Wild Things, Little Red Riding Hood…before I could read, I was already enmeshed in the world of story. Not only was I was read to, but I was  allowed to free-range on the bookshelf.  I spent hours with art books, looking at reproductions. Before I was five, I had a favourite dying saint – Saint Sebastian; my adult self sees him as  kinkily homo-erotic, bound to his post not very well-covered with gauzy cloth, six-pack and multiple piercings –  but more to the point, I had images of heroes and heroines galore from secular portraits of the great and glorious; from paintings of history and myth and legend; from the many juicy Old Testament tableaux (head on a platter, anyone?) plus of course the pietas and annunciations and nativities… My imagination seethed with details – jewel-encrusted sleeves, a ferret bright eyed in a woman’s arms, billows and folds of silken cloth, men with pointed ears and goat’s legs, winged babies with fat pink bottoms…so it’s perhaps no wonder that, after all the wonder and magic and splendour and excitement of that world, to be thrown into the cold water of ‘learning to read’ John and Betty at Bonbeach State School with Miss Benson came as a bit of a shock.

 John and Betty. It was a kind of torture. I didn’t get it. Perhaps I didn’t want to get it. John can jump and Betty can jump went on and on and on, miserably, bewilderingly, like the school day itself with its Cuisenaire blocks and folk dancing to scratchy records and finger painting and those powerful, unknowable runes on the blackboard.  Just looking at it, with its orange cover and illustrations of disturbingly bland fifties suburban conformity, gives me the chills to this day. I started school at four, and was far too immature and dreamy for the whole project. I wasn’t a bright child bored. I was a dopey child mystified.

But…when finally I could read, I could read ANYTHING. This time I free-ranged the novels in my parents’ bookshelf, trying Ulysses and Oblomov, understanding some of the words but not penetrating much beyond a page or two. Then I picked up Orlando. I think I must have read twenty pages. Again, without understanding much but – and I remember this clearly – finding words that skimmed, hummed, glittered and shone.  I discovered delight in words. I fell in love with language.

But, not being a child genius, I couldn’t go on. And thank goodness, not long after that, my mother gave me The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett to read. And followed it with Seven Little Australians and the Edith Nesbits and the Laura Ingalls Wilders and The Phantom Tollbooth and Alice in Wonderland. School libraries gave me the Billabong books and the Secret Seven mysteries. I was immersed in Children’s literature from classics to crap. None of what I read  had quite the brilliant humming-bird language of Orlando ( I had to wait till Form 6 Literature and The Leopard for that) but some of it approached it… and by the way,  bless you, Saint Enid, for the bliss and balm of Popular Fiction.

I was launched and running, back on track, reading as if my life depended on it. John and Betty and Orlando were the starting points, and and I have never looked back.

*One of the Castlemaine Word Miners has loaned me a great little UK publication called Slightly Foxed which deals with people and their Significant Books. It’s great fun.

I did promise myself that I’d be a more frequent blogger this year, but now into the third month of the year, and with only one post to my credit, it seems that I was misleading myself. I have, however, finished the novel I have been writing for the past three years.

It’s called Anything Worth Keeping. What’s it about? The short answer is; Oh, the usual thing, a dysfunctional family. A slightly longer answer is a little story. Four or five years ago, a friend told me about her stepmother. Not long after he was widowed, her father met an Englishwoman on board a ship. They married. The stepmother was a difficult person; the children, still grieving for their mother, resented her; it was not Happy Families when they settled back in Melbourne. My friend’s father died first, and when the stepmother died, she was intestate, which meant that her father’s money went to the stepmother’s nephew. The family contested this settlement, and won. There was a small detail that fascinated me. The family knew practically nothing about the stepmother except this one thing – she had been the mistress of a high-ranking British diplomat or politician.

So. I hatched a story. It was about the children and how their lives had been all but ruined by this Evil Stepmother. But something happened as I began to write this story – the stepmother took over and I fell in love with her. Her name was Bliss. She hijacked the story and at times I felt she was almost it. Her story – and why she never told it – form the centre of the novel.

So, for three and a bit years I’ve been living for a lot of the time with Bliss. And with the children Paula, Anne, Tom and the ghost of Caroline, with Alec, her last husband and a few husbands and lovers in between, and with Rob and Judith, her  good friends who…but that would be giving the whole thing away. I have been living in London in the early 1950’s – it was still Austerity Britain then, with the city slowly being re-built after the ravages of the Blitz, and some items of food still on the ration, but nevertheless London was a magnet for young Australian artists and writers eager to expand their horizons, to explore art and culture and history, and of course to take off into Europe, to France and Italy and beyond. I’ve been mentally dressing in New Look suits and frocks with their wide skirts, tiny waists and strenuous corsetry; I’ve been eating reconstituted eggs and drooling over Elizabeth David’s inspirational cookery books; I’ve been dreaming on the top of double-decker buses and stuck in the smelly Tube. I’ve been living in 1950’s Australian suburbia, too, and incidentally re-living some of my own personal history, my growing-up days in one of Melbourne’s beach-side suburbs. But that’s all over now Time to call it a day because I can’t go on revising forever. Time to call it quits, write The End. Time to say goodbye.

Ah. (That’s a big sigh) A relieved sigh, a sad sigh, a somewhat exhausted sigh… Yesterday afternoon I went into my workroom and tidied my desk. I put all the books about 1950’s art, fashion, politics, social history and literature up onto a high shelf. Printouts of the various drafts I stacked up neatly to recycle. The sheaves of handwritten notes to myself went into the bin, and a few photocopied references about odd subjects (the Melbourne Metropolitan Board of Works being one) I filed away just in case I need to verify some date or fact… The decks are cleared, ready to start the next book, which is a sequel to The Truth About Verity Sparks. I’m keen to get going on it, I’ve got lots ideas and Verity is a feisty girl who just about writes her own lines. And she may need to, since my deadline is 1st August.

But still. And yet. Not really ready to let go. One door closes and another – Yes, I know all of that. If I didn’t have Verity to get on with, I’d probably spend a lot of time moping and moving commas around, so it’s probably just as well. It feels a lot like moving house. You know – emptying it of furniture, cleaning up, closing the windows and doors on the echoing and empty rooms for one last time, and finally, knowing you can never really go back again, saying goodbye.

My New Year’s Resolution is to be a More Frequent Blogger. Which will probably mean short and pretty much off-the-cuff posts. My weekly pile of library books is always a good start. But also, this week, my swanning about with authors. Last night, I had dinner with a quartet of teriffic YA, junior fiction and picture story-book writers. They were Simmone Howell, Kirsty Murray, Martine Murray (the question was asked, and no, not related) and Lee Fox. We ate Thai food al fresco and pretty cold it was too, out on Barker Street. An Age photographer was out and about snapping for yet another story on Castlemaine, and he snapped us. ‘We’re all writers!’ we called merrily, and you know what he said? ‘Who do you write for?’ and pricked up his ears. Which went back to normal when we revealed that we weren’t journos, we were only novelists.

And a sweet little story. Kirsty Murray visited my son’s school last year to give an author talk about her latest, India Dark. He was so galvanised by this that he asked me to order it for him. Waiting was impossible, so he borrowed the book from the library and read half of it before the order came in.  Yesterday, when I told him who I was dining with, he asked if I could get her to sign his book. I told her this, and she was impressed (he’s a sporty fifteen-year-old boy, after all!), touched, signed it beautifully and said how lovely it was to have that kind of response. AND IT IS! Speaking for myself now, it is abolutely heart-warming and wonderful to find that you have done what you hoped to do when you wrote the book – connected with someone.

Which takes me neatly to a well-known quote from E.M.Forster – ‘Only connect‘ (and I will admit right now that I haven’t read any Forster even though I have seen the movies of Room with a View and Howard’s End) –  to my pile from the library this week.

My pile from the library this week included a book of essays by Zadie Smith. She is a great admirer of Forster and her most recent novel, On Beauty, was written (mind you, I only know this from the reviews) around themes from Howard’s End. The book I borrowed is called Changing my Mind: Occasional Essays and the puffs below the title say ‘Stimulating, original, vibrant and witty’ and ‘Reading for Smith is a mind-changing, life-saving, soul-saving affair‘. The first of these rather put me off, because for many years now, ‘vibrant’ has been one of my least favourite words, with repulsive New Age and alternative health connotations of being endlessly energetic, glowing, fulfilled…but enough of my prejudices. However the second sounded really, really good.

But I had a problem. Reviews. Now, Zadie Smith is the famous author of White Teeth, The Autograph Man and On Beauty  – none of which I have read. There are reasons, and probably not good ones – they all seem quite long and I am a bit faint-hearted about the investment of time required by a long book; the adjectives used by reviewers are things like ‘dazzling’, ‘dizzying’ and ‘complex’; also ‘ambitious and hugely impressive’, which though a resounding thumbs up also sound a bit demanding, like cross between a fireworks display and an IQ test.

But these essays are wonderful! It’s like sitting with a very wise, witty, informed, intelligent friend – emphasis on friend, for they are accessible essays, no fireworks or tests – telling you about writers, books, films, places she’s been, her family. She’s made me think about things I haven’t thought about before, like what it’s like being a black girl reading English literature and what it means when I (usually unconsciously but sometimes not) calibrate my accent or my vocabulary depending on my company. She’s encouraged me to read authors I’ve never got around to like E.M. Forster and Kafka; avoided, like Nabokov; and never heard of, like Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. I will re-read Middlemarch, and I might even try to like Katharine Hepburn a little better.

But most of all, I will stop being afraid of Zadie Smith, nip down to the library and borrow whatever there is of hers on the shelf!

I’ve borrowed a library book called The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books edited by J.Peder Zane. The editor asked 125 writers to list their favorite books, and then made more lists of the lists. The Top Top Ten were;

1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

6. Hamlet by William Shakespeare

7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

8. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

9. The stories of Anton Chekhov

10. Middlemarch by George Eliot.

I’ve heard of all of those authors and titles, and have actually read six of them, which I suppose isn’t too bad, but (since we are listing here) when I looked at the writers who actually made the lists, I found I recognised only 46 names. Worse, I’d only read books by 19 of those authors. I excused myself a little by saying that the ones I didn’t recognise were mostly American authors and since there are just so many whose books published in the US that don’t make it here… Perhaps the truth is, I don’t read widely enough.

I thought I would have read a lot of the books on the 125 lists, but actually, when I was really really honest, and didn’t count books I’d skimmed or started and not finished (or even just seen the film) it was only a miserable 69 out of the 546 books.

Then I found myself almost agreeing with Annie Proulx, who said ‘I find this list of ten books project to be difficult, pointless, and wrong-headed… One could of course quickly go on to put together list after list after list. Moreover the lists would change from week to week as ones tastes change and one reads more widely.’ If I was asked to list my 10 favourite books, it would really depend on why I was reading. And also when I was reading. So here are some of my categories. By the way, they’re all fiction, and no poetry or plays.

I Thought These Were Great, by Somehow I Don’t Want to Re-read Them

1. Austerlitz by W.G.Sebald

2. Madness of the Seduced Woman by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer

3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

4. The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields

5. Lady Oracle by Margaret Attwood

6. The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead

7. Possession by A S Byatt

8. Memento Mori by Muriel Spark

9. The Dispossessed by Ursula le Guin

10 The Women’s Room by Marilyn French

I Thought These Were Great, I Re-read Them and I Still Think They’re Great 

1. The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa

2. Middlemarch by George Eliot

3. Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro

4. Cat’s Eye by Margaret Attwood

5. the Claudine books by Colette

6. Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

7. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

8. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

9. Persuasion by Jane Austen

10. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

Authors I Re-Read When in Need of Comfort

1. Jane Austen

2. Barbara Pym

3. L.M. Boston

4. Colette

5. Michael Innes

6.Elizabeth Goudge

7.Kathleen Norris

8. Raymond Chandler

9. Mary Roberts Rinehart

10. Georgette Heyer

Books I Loved in Childhood

1.The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge

2. The Midnight Folk by John Masefield

3. Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder

4. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

5. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine l’Engle

6. Mistress Masham’s Repose by T H White

7. Seven Little Australians by Ethel Turner

8. Little Women by Louisa May Allcott

9. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken

10. Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery

In October, Sisters in Crime are celebrating their 20th anniversary with a HUGE convention called SheKilda. It’s on from 7-9th October at Rydge’s Hotel in Melbourne, and there will be heaps of women crime writers from Australia and overseas, plus – hopefully – heaps of readers as well.  The link is www.SheKilda.com.au – check it out and you’ll see that there’s an amazing line-up of crime-writing talent. And one delighted but slightly puzzled participant – me.

I’ve been invited because of my new children’s novel, The Truth About Verity Sparks. Well, there’s crime in it all right (murder, arson, kidnapping, assault – rather a lot of crime, really, for a kid’s book!) and detection, so I guess I sort of squeak in. It’s funny, in a way – I’m not a crime fiction buff by any stretch of the imagination, but my late mother was, and often when I was looking for something to read I’d wander up to look at her shelves and take something from her collection back with me. She didn’t just collect the latest, or the most well-known, either. She was interested in the Victorian prototypes like Wilkie Collins ‘The Woman in White’ and Fergus Hume’s Melbourne-set ‘The Mystery of a Hansom Cab’, as well as many early 20th century examples. The famous ones like Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers as well as the not-so-famous – a genre I categorize to myself (and it’s rather twee, I know) as “forgotten best-sellers of yesteryear”. That’s because though on the covers or inside the title page there’ll be the boast “20th thousand” or ’16th printing’ or whatever, the books and authors will often be almost completely forgotten.

Take the case of  Mary Roberts Rinehart. I’m having a bit of an MRR binge at the present, thanks to Mum’s collection. (When Mum died, more than thirty boxes of crime fiction  were sold to a second-hand dealer, but I saved a few favourites.) MRR was an American writer – sometimes called ‘The American Agatha Christie’ – who lived from 1876 to 1957, and in the course of her long career published what Rinehart afficionado Michael E. Grost calls ‘a mountain’ of short detective fiction in magazines plus over forty novels, plays and collections. Her first big success, ‘The Circular Staircase’ published in 1907, sold 1,250.000 which was an astonishing best-seller for those days. She’s credited with inventing the ‘If-I-Had-Known’ school of mystery writing (you know – ‘Had I but known the significance of the button in the garden bed, perhaps…etc etc) and the one I’ve just finished, ‘Haunted Lady’, does have a fair bit of that. It’s also got a delightful heroine, Hilda Adams, a nurse who her policeman friend (and just at the end, love interest) calls ‘Miss Pinkerton’ after the famous private detective agency. She’s neat and a bit prim, middle-aged and grey-haired but cherubic when she’s all pink after after her bath, very observant and very very sensible. Rinehart was a trained nurse herself, and married a doctor, so the medical aspects to her plots ring quite true. ‘Haunted Lady’ features a rich family with lots of dirty secrets and there’s much creeping and spying and being knocked out and found stabbed and so on – the usual happy family stuff – in a creepy old urban mansion. Loads of fun.

Before I read ‘Haunted Lady’, I sat up the night before till late with ‘The Wall’ – murders among the idle rich by the sea. Before that, it was ‘The Swimming Pool’ – ditto, but among country estates of New England – and ‘The Yellow Room’ – same again, during WWII. That they’re dated goes without saying, but there’s plenty of intrigue, suspense, deception and insanely complicated family machinations around money and inheritance, not to mention adulterous dalliances and of course, murder. 

 

I’ve only got one more of Mum’s MRR’s to go now – it’s called ‘The Great Mistake’…and then I’ll need to get onto the second-hand book sites on the internet to see if I can find any more.

Today’s ‘Sisters in Crime’ are part of a long tradition of female crime writers, some of whom – like MRR – are almost forgotten today but still really worth a read. And I think my mother would be tickled pink to know that with my children’s novel, I’ve been admitted to the sisterhood.

A couple of weeks ago I went to see ‘From Time to Time’, a movie based on a children’s novel by L.M. Boston. I was eager to see it, and I suppose it’s always a danger, seeing the film of a beloved book…and yes, I was disappointed and left wondering, how could they get it so wrong? But then the film is not the book, and will be soon forgotten while the spell of those Green Knowe novels is still strong for me. In fact, I immediately re-read the first couple of them – ‘The Children of Green Knowe’ and ‘The Chimneys of Green Knowe’. Green Knowe is a strange old house, part Norman, part Elizabethan, part Georgian, where the past is alive in the objects and pictures and furnishings of the house, the trees and plants in the garden, the stones and beams of the place. Ghosts are part of everyday life, but so are meals and gardening and the weather. It is both real and un-real, enchanted, magical and also down to earth. I still enjoyed the stories, but I found even more than that, I was gob-smacked by the writing. As a teenager, first reading these books, I never realised just how beautifully written they are, how ‘literary’, and I suppose that the beauty of the writing must always have been part of the spell. Here’s the section of ‘The Children of Green Knowe’ where little Toseland – later called just Tolly – first enters his great-grandmother’s house.

The entrance hall was a strange place. As they stepped in, a similar door opened at the far end of the house and another man and boy entered there. Then Toseland saw that it was only themselves in a big mirror. The walls round him were partly rough stone and partly plaster, but hung all over with mirrors and pictures and china. There were three big old mirrors all reflecting each other so that at first Toseland was puzzled to find out what was real, and which door one could go through straight, the way one wanted to, not sideways to somewhere else. He almost wondered which was really himself.

There were vases everywhere filled with queer flowers- branches of dry winter twigs out of which little tassels and rosettes of flower petals were bursting, some yellow, somw white, some purple. They had an exciting smell, almost lieks oemthing to eat, and they looked as if they had been produced by magic, as if someone had said ‘Abracadabra! Let these sticks burst into flower.’

“What if my great-grandmother is a witch!” he thought. Above the vases, wherever there was a beam or an odd corner or a doorpost out of which they could, as it were, grow, there were children carved in dark oak leaning out over the flowers. Most of them had wings, one had a real bird’s nest on its head and all of them had such round polished cheeks they seemed to be laughing and welcoming him.

(The illustration that goes along with this – of the carved angel with a nest in its arms –  is also very beautiful. All the illustrations for the books were done by Lucy Boston’s son, Peter.)

I think ‘entranced’ is the right word, back then when I first read the book, and now, re-reading after many years. I had remembered the story – stories, really, for layered along with the story of Tolly discovering the house are the stories that Mrs Oldknowe tells about the 17th century family of  Linnet, Alexander and Toby – and the atmosphere. Books do form part of your understanding and experience of the world, and I realise that whenever I visit old houses I am primed to seek that sense of past lives she created at Green Knowe.

I also read L. M. Boston’s memoir about the model for Green Knowe (the Manor at Hemingford Grey) called ‘Memory in a House’ and started another memoir ‘Perverse and Foolish’ but oddly found that I didn’t like Lucy Boston very much. Or rather, found her prickly and a bit cranky and thought if I had met her, I probably would have been a bit afraid of her. And last, but most interesting in this Lucy Boston jag, I read her novel for  adults, ‘Yew Hall’, which is, frankly, weird – but I read it all in one go. Again, I was astonished – or enchanted, or amazed; taken right out of myself is what I am trying to say – by the beauty of the writing. Really really good ‘nature’ writers, like Annie Dillard , do this to me too. Here’s a description of roses.

One was a single rose of an open splendour like an assembly of planets. The other was the Painted Damask, which opens as a cup packed with cream petals in concave whorls, every one edged with crimson; then with the engaging habit of many roses it turns itself inside out and takes the shape of a bubbling spring, one curled dome above another, pearl in the centre and arabesques of crimson lines around the circumference… I imagined the raiser who first found or hybridized it, perhaps in the seventeenth century, and the gardens in which it grew, the novelty of the day. It went well with the looped and ribboned clothes of the time. It was obviously once a sophisticated rose, but now encased in the density of time like moss in amber. The single rose was one that I wished had never grown in any garden but this, it seemed to have sprung from the necessity to be here, the mark of the house. These were too precious for picking. I left them on their trees and browsed round the better established treasures, trying to see each one for the first time, and amazed at the stupidity and blindness of my habit-dulled eyes.

After reading that, when I went out into my garden, I was so  – sorry, but there’s another extravagant word coming – intoxicated that I was quite crazy with seeing. And was rewarded with a plum tree full of white blossom and birds. A flock of greyish-green silver-eyes was chirping and hopping from branch to branch among the flowers and petals were falling all around them. I wish I had Lucy Boston’s pen to describe it.