![\"\"](\"http:\/\/fourpole.net\/susan\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/07\/knitting.jpg\" "\\"knitting\\"")
<\/a>It\u2019s winter and so of course it should come as no surprise that it\u2019s cold \u2013 but it\u2019s 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\u2019m sick of charm.\u00a0 At the moment, I feel that a warm brick bunker would do me. But the days have been sunny and the big freeze doesn\u2019t start till near dark; besides, I\u2019ve just had an email from my brother in New York where it\u2019s breathlessly hot and steamy. So much for complaining about the weather.<\/p>\nExcept to say that, cold weather and knitting going together as they do, I\u2019m on the front of my first cable experiment.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s why I love knitting so. And probably why what I love most is knitting scarves. You don\u2019t 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.\u00a0 This cable pattern looks lovely, but what you don\u2019t see is that I\u2019ve pulled it out and re-knitted about half a dozen times. This is not what I knit for! However \u2013 as I know from the bin at my closest Op Shop, where unwanted hand-knitted scarves multiply like multi-coloured rabbits \u2013 there are only so many scarves a person needs.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 Not all at once, of course.<\/p>\n
Knitting and reading aren\u2019t 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 \u00a0children\u2019s novel called Mistress Masham\u2019s Repose<\/em> by TH White. I haven\u2019t 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\u2019t like it \u2013 in case it wasn\u2019t all I’d cracked it up to be \u2013 in case it\u2019d lost its charm. But \u2013 amazingly \u2013 no.<\/p>\n Mistress Masham\u2019s Repose<\/em> was given to me as an 8th birthday present by a friend of my eldest brother\u2019s. He was a teenager, and he worked at the local bookshop \u2013 Stonemans Bookroom \u2013 where I work now. How he came to choose this one for me, I don\u2019t know, but re-reading it, I\u2019m surprised that he chose it and that I loved it.<\/p>\n Because, on the face of it, it\u2019s quite a difficult book. Briefly \u2013 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.<\/p>\n What\u2019s difficult \u2013 and wonderful\u00a0 – is the language. All through the book, TH White plays with words.\u00a0 Here, on the very first page, he has fun with 18th<\/sup> century military history, poetry, architecture, and vocabulary;<\/p>\n 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.<\/em><\/p>\n I don\u2019t need to pick apart how and why that is difficult for an 8-year-old reader. I can\u2019t 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<\/em>), some jokes around Latin and antiquarian book lore, a gallery of English stock types of the 19th<\/sup> and early 20th<\/sup> century \u2013 Vicar, governess, faithful retainer, dotty Professor, loopy aristocrat, doughty but dopey policeman \u2013 and a lot of swooningly beautiful nature writing. Like this;<\/p>\n Under her nose, she watched the mare\u2019s-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 \u2013 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 \u2013 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 \u2013 who made themselves scarce with a loud plop. They had been lazily scratching their backs on the lilies, like a school of elephants.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em>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\u2019s almost all dialogue \u2013 a script \u2013<\/p>\n \u2018Here, 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\u2019m sorry, and at the same moment her nostrils burst into flame, so you can light it. Neat, isn\u2019t it?\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n The poor Professor is waylaid with an array of ingenious musical devices shaped like horses which spout cigars, chocolates, coffee and cigarettes \u2013 and I was on the train laughing helplessly and out loud.<\/p>\n How I made any sense of it at 8, I don\u2019t 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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2026 I only have to look glancingly at The Truth About Verity Sparks<\/em> to see a bit, here and there, of Mistress Masham\u2019s Repose.<\/em><\/p>\n One last odd thing about re-reading Mistress Masham\u2019s Repose<\/em>. I found that I had remembered, since I was a young girl, a particular phrase from the book. <\/em>Maria, pretending to be a pirate, has paddled her boat out to an island in the middle of an ornamental lake. \u2018She boarded the tree bole, brandishing her cutlass, and swarmed ashore with the battle cry of a Maria<\/em>, her spectacles twinkling fiercely in the sun<\/em><\/strong>.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n How I love that. How I loved re-reading that. It\u2019s a kind of key-stone – spectacles, twinkling, fiercely – there\u2019s 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\u2019s delight, I don\u2019t know. Perhaps it\u2019s because, in its own way, \u2018spectacles twinkling fiercely\u2019 <\/em>is simply perfect.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s winter and so of course it should come as no surprise that it\u2019s cold \u2013 but it\u2019s really cold. Last night, with the gas heater chugging away as hard as it could, we were still rugged up and … Continue reading <\/a><\/p>\n