A Chelsea Concerto - Frances Faviell

In 1939, Frances Faviell was living in Cheyne Place, Chelsea. She was an artist in her mid 30s & had just met Richard Parker, the man who would become her second husband. She had a facility for languages & trained as a Red Cross volunteer in preparation for the bombing that became more & more inevitable as Germany invaded & occupied Holland, Belgium & France. The Blitz devastated many parts of Britain but Chelsea, close to the main bridges over the Thames, was one of the most heavily bombed areas of London. A Chelsea Concerto tells the story of the Blitz through the eyes of a compassionate, sensitive woman whose common sense, patriotism & sense of humour were tested but never entirely broken by the onslaught.

Faviell's memoir begins with the process of training as a Red Cross volunteer during the early months of the war. This period of Phoney War allowed London to prepare but also added to the sense of unreality as volunteers were bandaged up after imaginary bombing raids & practiced putting out incendiary bombs with sand & stirrup pumps. Practice shifts in hospitals were interspersed with lectures, including one by a doctor who had served in Spain during the Civil War. His words, "Casualties don't choose their place of annihilation - the bombs choose them - anywhere - anytime. You must be prepared for anything.", came back to Frances many times during the years that followed as the sometimes comical practice sessions gave way to the first bombing raids.

Frances Faviell was part of an artistic community in Chelsea that included Rex Whistler, with whom she'd studied at the Slade, & Edith Walker. She lived with her dachshund, Vicki (later nicknamed Miss Hitler because of her German origins), in a flat in a house on Cheyne Place that became a haven for her many friends. Her most prized possession was a green cat made of celadon that she had acquired as she left Peking in 1937. The cat was the Guardian of the Home & the man who gave it to Frances in exchange for her camera, told her that her home would be safe as long as the cat was treated with respect. Mrs Freeth, Frances' housekeeper, was a remarkable manager who kept the household running no matter what else was happening. Frances acknowledged that she couldn't have got through those years without Mrs Freeth's support. On the top floor lived Kathleen Marshman & her daughters, Anne & Penty. Penty was intellectually disabled & was sent to live in the country when the Blitz began. Kathleen ran a dress shop & was a close friend of Frances even though she was older. Other friends included Larry, an American who had joined the Canadian Army & Cecil, a Canadian soldier who fell in love with Anne Marshman. Frances & Mrs Freeth also kept open house for the Civil Defence workers in the area who could rely on a cup of tea or bowl of soup after a long shift.

As the first refugees from Belgium began arriving, her language skills proved useful & she became an interpreter for a group of refugees living in Chelsea.This was a challenging task as the refugees were naturally shocked & traumatised by their experiences. The men were mainly fishermen who wanted to get back to their boats but the authorities had to screen them before allowing them into the community. Frances began teaching them English & tried to find them some employment to keep them busy as idleness & worry led to disputes over cooking & cleanliness. Vegetable plots were successful until the most difficult of the refugees, called by Frances the Giant, accused two others of stealing some of his plot &, once again, the police asked Frances to sort it out.

Other friends needed more support. Ruth, a German Jewish refugee, became suspicious of authority, convinced that she was being followed, her phone was tapped & that They would take her away. Her paranoia led to a breakdown & she attempted suicide. Ruth's daughter, Clara, became Frances's responsibility & she paid her school fees while Ruth was in hospital. Another young woman, Catherine, who had fled Belgium ahead of the invading German Army, narrowly escaped death as the refugees were bombed & shot at. She arrived in London alone & pregnant. She had been unable to marry her boyfriend in the rush of war & was obsessed with the shame of her predicament & with the perceived hostility of the other refugees to her plight. Frances supported her throughout her pregnancy & cared for the baby, Francesca, when Catherine failed to bond with her.

The Blitz was unrelenting during 1940. Sirens went nearly every night & sometimes during the day as well. Frances was working at a First Aid Post (FAP) as well as helping the Belgian refugees & also relieving telephonists at the Control Room in the Town Hall, taking messages for the Civil Defence staff. The bombs fell night after night, unexploded bombs (UXBs) were a hazard as well & negotiating the streets in the blackout during a raid had dangers of its own as Frances discovered when she almost fell into a crater that had once been a house. Running into a half-dressed woman who had been thrown clear when the bomb hit, Frances witnesses the efforts of the rescue crew to remove debris & rubble to get to the people who had been sleeping in the basement.

And almost at once there was sudden violent activity in the dead, ravaged street; the wails were drowned in the jarring of brakes, the screeching of engines, and sudden short sharp commands. In the thick evil-smelling blackness it was an eerie and ghastly sight to see all the preparations being made, the paraphernalia unloaded. did any of us realise how terribly dangerous and treacherous it was to have to excavate, shore up, and tunnel in such complete blackness for buried bodies - living or dead? Did we appreciate it until we saw it? I know that I had not until I watched the tunneling for Mildred Castillo and that had been mostly in day-light.

On another journey she was called on to be lowered head first into a shaft to sedate a badly wounded man. The description of this is horrific yet forensic in its detail, even down to the way she held the torch in her teeth & looked back on her acrobatics training with gratitude as she fought nausea & dizziness to stay conscious & help the man.

The sound coming from the hole was unnerving me - it was like an animal in a trap. I had once heard a long screaming like rabbits in traps from children with meningitis in India, but this was worse - almost inhuman in its agony. The torch showed me that the debris lay over both arms and that the chest of the man trapped there was crushed into a bloody mess - great beams lay across the lower part of his body - and his face was so injured that it was difficult to distinguish the mouth from the rest of it - it all seemed one great gaping red mess.

One of the worst jobs Frances was required to do was to reconstruct bodies blown apart by bombs, putting the limbs back together so that the families could be shown a body to identify. Sometimes there weren't enough limbs & body parts to make the right number of bodies. The macabre nature of the task was mitigated by the knowledge that it just had to be done. There was no time to show fear or to be ill or disgusted; time enough for that when the work was finished. It was only when she had to visit a sick child on the top floor of a house (where no one willingly slept during a raid) that Frances felt afraid.

I think it was during some of those many visits to Raymond ... that I first began to know real fear. Up to that time I had not really minded the Blitz at all. I had just married, and we were very happy, although the occasions when we were both together were increasingly rare. Richard was frequently away on tour for the Ministry, and I was often on night duty, but the bombs seemed a macabre background to our personal life, and the fear that either of us would be a victim of the Blitz was a remote thought - but it was one which now began recurringly to enter my head.

Life wasn't unremittingly awful, even during the worst of the Blitz. Frances & Richard managed to get away from London & go walking on the Downs in Surrey where they watched dogfights overhead & marveled at the beauty & peace in the midst of destruction & death. There were parties in Cheyne Place & amusing incidents to relieve the horror as Frances tried to keep the peace among the refugees & planned her wedding. Little Vicki was unperturbed by the bombs & the knowledge that the Green Cat was serenely sitting on the windowsill guarding the house & its occupants was comforting. Frances was pregnant & had reduced her workload. Then, in December 1940, during the biggest raid Chelsea had experienced, Frances' home suffered a direct hit & was completely destroyed. Frances, Richard & Vicki survived & were miraculously able to get out of the house with minor injuries. The description of the blast & the dazed aftermath is horrifying. Frances & Richard went to the FAP, not really knowing what else to do & returned to the house to discover that they had been presumed dead. This was the end of their life in Chelsea & the Parkers left London & moved to Esher.

Standing there by the great heap which had been our home without possessing even a pocket handkerchief gave me an extraordinary feeling of freedom mingled with awe. Yesterday it had been a lovely home filled with choice and beautiful objects. Like all the others round it, it had vanished in a few seconds, truly 'gone with the wind'. I understood a little then of how some of the bombed-out and refugees must have felt, but strangely enough I didn't mind at all,. I had already learned that home is to be with the person you love, and hadn't I been wonderfully blessed in having Richard, the expected baby, and even Vicki all saved? As I turned over some of the rubble looking for even a chip of the Green Cat I thought of the Second Commandment, for, like the huge carpets, the heavy furniture and easels, he had simply disintegrated into dust.

This is a devastating book. I've never read a better memoir of the Blitz or one that affected me so much. The final chapters are heartbreaking to read & I read the last half of the book in one sitting, compelled & horrified in equal measure. I cannot believe that this book has been out of print for so long & I'm just so pleased that Scott from the Furrowed Middlebrow blog & Dean Street Press have brought A Chelsea Concerto back into print as the first title in their new imprint, Furrowed Middlebrow Books. Virginia Nicholson, author of Millions Like Us, has written the Foreword for this new edition. She describes her search for the author of this remarkable memoir & Faviell's life after the war as she continued to paint & wrote fiction as well as A Chelsea Concerto & another memoir about life in post-war Berlin, The Dancing Bear (all reprinted by Dean Street Press), which exorcised the memories of the war at last.

Dean Street Press kindly sent me a review copy of A Chelsea Concerto.

Hand-Grenade Practice in Peking - Frances Wood

I had mixed feelings about this book. It's the story of an English student studying Chinese language & history in Peking in the 1970s, during the final days of Mao's Cultural Revolution. What disconcerted me at first was the tome of humorous incomprehension. I was tempted to pick this up because I'd been reading articles about the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Everything I read emphasized the horror & the tragedy of this period of Chinese history, when the Communist leadership, led by a resurgent Mao Zedong, incited students to form the Red Guard. The Red Guard violently suppressed intellectuals, exalted the role of the peasants & forced so-called class enemies to work in the fields. In the process this new policy ruined the economy & led to millions of deaths from famine as well as the many people imprisoned by the regime. China was almost an unknown land to most people in the West at that time & Frances Wood didn't know about the atrocities until her return from Peking. The book was based on her letters home & emphasize the absurdities of a regime that she compares to Sellers & Yeatman's 1066 and All That rather than Orwell's 1984.

I can't imagine how Wood kept her sense of humour in the circumstances of her life in Peking. She was one of a group of foreign students studying at a Language Institute & then, she was permitted to study history at Peking University. Living conditions were primitive, no heating in the winter, very little hot water (& that was usually monopolised by the aggressive North Korean students). Washing sheets in the winter & trying to keep the sleeves of a thick padded coat free from soy sauce are only two of the challenges Frances faces. Her Chinese tutors & fellow students lived in a state of fear that their words would be misinterpreted & so real friendships were impossible. Some of the foreign students deliberately tried to question the official version, which changed depending on who was in or out of favour with the leadership of the Party. Teaching materials were bland & uninteresting because so much history was being rewritten & so many books stamped Negative Teaching Material & only available from the library with written permission from a tutor.

Then, there were the compulsory games & the periods spent working in the country, trying to plant rice or bind enormous cabbages with inferior rice straw that broke. Every aspect of life was dictated by the Party & foreigners were restricted in their movements, forced to get permits to travel &, like other Chinese, having to take all their food with them for the journey. There are some beautiful moments, seeing the dawn at the Great Wall, for instance, but most journeys, whether by train or bicycle, were frustrating. The British Embassy staff provided respite for the British students, providing transport for them to get into Peking & inviting them to social events & outings. Wood always feels an outsider & the horrified reaction of most Chinese to Westerners gives her insight into racism at a very basic level,

An immensely tall and lanky Swedish student with a great clump of fair hair got tired of walking along city streets and having the entire population call out Waiguo ren (Foreigner) as if he didn't know. ... The same thing happened to the rest of us, all the time, although we weren't quite so visible from a distance. Wherever we went, whatever we did, there was always the insistent whisper, Waiguo ren. If you just slipped out of the Institute gates to post a letter, people staggered back, arms flailing, or flattened themselves against walls and stared. I remember one little old lady in her thick black cotton padded suit, hobbling along on bound feet, who had to clutch at a tree when I passed as she muttered Waiguo ren to herself.

After a year in Peking, Frances returns home after a long journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway & through Eastern Europe. She regrets her failure to really become a part of China, unrealistic though such an aim might have been. On her return home, she was paralysed by the choice of cereals at breakfast (even though she'd dreamed of such choice in Peking) & felt paranoid when she was ignored by her fellow travellers on the bus. Frances Wood & her fellow students were witnesses to the essential absurdity of all totalitarian regimes. She was fortunate in being an outsider, able to observe & be amused by the ridiculousness without becoming a victim of the arbitrary whims of the leadership. I enjoyed Hand-Grenade Practice in Peking with reservations. Having just read Christabel Bielenberg's memoir, The Past is Myself, I had similar questions about writing & reading memoirs. Although written many years after the event, both authors take us back to the people they were at the time with the knowledge they had then. I can only respect their honesty & their ability to strip away the knowledge they gained after the fact & take their stories at face value, for the fascinating slices of life they are.

The Past is Myself - Christabel Bielenberg

Christabel & Peter Bielenberg were married in 1934. She was English but she gave up her British citizenship to live in Hamburg with Peter, a would-be lawyer from a liberal family. The Bielenbergs & their friends thought that Hitler was a joke; they couldn't believe that his crude appeal to xenophobia & nationalism could really succeed. However, as time went on, they became more & more distressed by the direction Germany was taking. Peter qualified as a lawyer & joined his father's firm but, when a client who had been acquitted was immediately picked up by the Gestapo & rearrested, he could no longer see any point in practising law.

By the time war broke out in 1939, Peter was working for the Ministry of Economics, eventually spending most of the war managing an aircraft factory in Graudenz. Christabel & their three sons were living in Berlin until the bombing became too intense. They spent most of the war in a village in the Black Forest. Peter's friends including Adam von Trott, one of the group who planned the July 20, 1944 assassination of Hitler. When the plot failed, Peter was caught up in the aftermath, arrested & eventually imprisoned in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. Chris was able to get an interview with the Gestapo officer in charge of Peter's case & convinced him of Peter's innocence. He was released & went into hiding for the rest of the war to avoid being called back to his Army unit. The book ends with the arrival of Allied troops at the end of the war.

This is a fascinating memoir that shows a different side to the war. I've read many books about the Home Front in England but very few from the German side, let alone by an Englishwoman in Germany. The threat of the Nazis becomes more evident as the years pass. Soon, the Bielenbergs are wary with new people, sounding them out before they can speak freely. Even a joke about Hitler or an unguarded comment can lead to prison. Living under such constant strain must have been wearing. Peter was involved on some level with the German Resistance who opposed Hitler & must have been under surveillance. I found it astonishing that Chris didn't suffer from discrimination because she was English, even as the Allied bombing raids intensified. I can't imagine that a German woman would have avoided internment in England during the war. It may have been due to class. The Bielenbergs were a comfortable middle-class family & when they move to Rohrbach, the villagers do all they can to make Chris & the children feel at home.

Life in Rohrbach goes on much as it always has, apart from the problems of rationing. There's only one Nazi in the village but no-one pays any attention to him. When an American airman is shot down & finds his way to the village, the Mayor rings the nearest town for instructions. When told to lock him up, the only police cell is cleaned, the bed made with fresh linen & an enormous meal offered to the exhausted American. I couldn't help but think of the scene in the movie Mrs Miniver when a German pilot is shot down & spouts Nazi propaganda to the last.

Once Peter is arrested, the pace of the narrative quickens & it reads almost like a thriller. Chris gets permission to see Peter in Ravensbrück & her journey by train (in a compartment with the wife & daughters of the Camp Commandant) & then the long walk around the perimeter of the camp is incredibly tense. Her journey to Berlin to see Lange, the Gestapo officer, & her interrogation, is also full of tension but the anger she feels drives away her nerves. She describes the ruins of the city, meets an old friend who now lives among those ruins, & realises how safe she has been in the country. She is saved from almost certain death when a stranger advises that she leave her train & take the Underground. Later she hears that the train was bombed & many people killed.

On her journey back to Rohrbach, she finds herself alone in a carriage with an SS officer. He tells her of his life in Riga in Latvia &, as his family was persecuted by the Russians, they thought the Germans had come to liberate them. He had Aryan looks so was recruited for the SS & participated in the massacre of Jews in Poland. Once he knows that Chris is not German (she tells him she's Irish) he pours out his story. When Peter is released from prison, he tells Chris what happened to him through one long night. He never speaks of it again. He was extraordinarily lucky to be prevented by his work from being with the conspirators on July 20 & so was able, with Chris's help, to be released. Until the war ends, Peter hides near Rohrbach & the whole village must be aware of what is happening.

Chris wrote The Past is Myself in the 1960s & she was criticized for what some critics felt she left out. She does mention the persecution of the Jews & she shelters a Jewish couple for a couple of nights. However, there's no mention of the Holocaust at all. She acknowledges that she & her family were fortunate. Their life in Rohrbach was comparatively safe, away from the devastating raids of the major cities. The villagers seemed to be sensible, pragmatic people who turned a cynical eye on their government even though they weren't free to express their feelings too openly. Even Peter's involvement with the assassination plot was peripheral & he was lucky to be released. Luck seemed to be with the Bielenbergs at every turn. When faced with these criticisms, Chris said that she wrote the book with the knowledge she had at the time. Like many Germans she found it difficult to believe in the enormity of the camps. The newspapers were censored & she just didn't know, even though she should have been in a position to know as Peter was part of the opposition to the regime. She wrote the book to show another side of Germany to counteract the stereotype of all Germans being Nazis. I think it's valuable to hear stories from all sides & Chris's perspective as an Englishwoman is very revealing. The book is a gripping read & I found it fascinating.

Christabel Bielenberg was on Desert Island Discs in November 1992 & I found it very interesting to listen to this after reading the book. I also have the sequel to The Past is Myself, The Road Ahead, on the tbr shelves which describes life after the war when the Bielenbergs lived in Ireland.

My Kitchen Year - Ruth Reichl

I'm not a foodie & I don't read foodie books. I enjoy cooking, especially baking, but I don't long to live in a Tuscan farmhouse, growing my own kale & keeping heritage chickens. I'd heard of Ruth Reichl & read admiring reviews of her earlier books but hadn't been tempted to pick them up. This book is a little different. The subtitle is 136 recipes that saved my life, & My Kitchen Year is a beautiful blend of memoir, recovery story & cookbook.

Ruth Reichl was the editor of Gourmet magazine, probably the most prestigious magazine about food & cooking. In 2009, Reichl had been editor for 10 years when the owners, Condé Nast, abruptly decided to close the magazine down. It was October, the December issue of the magazine was at the printers, Reichl was completing work on a TV series & promoting the latest in a line of Gourmet cookbooks when the axe fell. At first, she just kept working, there was nothing else she could do. She had a book tour organised & although the last thing she wanted to do was go out & talk about Gourmet magazine, she couldn't let down the bookstores & the readers who wanted to meet her. In between commitments, Reichl retreated to her kitchens, in New York & the country house in upstate New York where she & her husband spent weekends & holidays. After clearing her desk & completing the book tour, the reality of losing her job hits.

On the first day of my new life I woke, alone, to frosted windows in New York City. Michael was out of town, and for a moment I thought gratefully that I had no responsibilities, nowhere to go. Then the empty day rose before me, and I realised that that was literally true. I had nowhere to go. What would I do with myself? I went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door.

Reichl's husband suggests that they might try living year round in the country. If Reichl doesn't get another job, they'll have to sell one of their homes. She realises how much she has missed cooking meals that aren't just thrown together after a long day in the office. She rediscovers New York through walking, visiting different districts & trying out new ingredients. She visits the farmers markets near their country home & finds herself creating a meal in her head as she looks at what's on offer.

This book almost convinced me that Twitter could be a worthwhile activity. Reichl discovers a whole new community of friends on Twitter (some of her tweets are reproduced in the book). The power is cut off at Reichl's country house for several days during the winter, just as she had made some bread dough.

The storm raged but I didn't mind; I was feeling more optimistic. What I did mind was that the electricity had deserted us while my dough was rising, and I didn't know what to do. It might be days until I had a working oven. Should I throw the dough out?
I tossed the question into the Twitterverse and the responses came back. 'Don't throw it out!' at least a dozen people tweeted. 'Just keep punching the dough down'.
Convinced that it was a lost cause, I did it anyway. What did I have to lose? The electricity was out for three days, and by day two I was noticing a change. The dough was capturing wild yeasts with great abandon, and before long it began to smell like fine champagne. I could hardly wait for the power to be restored.

One of her former colleagues on Gourmet had suggested she write a cookbook & the idea appeals to her new self. She realises she would rather be at home in her kitchen than eating out at fancy restaurants on an expense account.

For the past six months, cooking had been my lifeline, and I was grateful for everything I had learned in the kitchen. Most cookbooks, I thought as I reached for an orange and began to squeeze it for juice, are in search of perfection, an attempt to constantly re-create the same good dishes. But you're not a chef in your own kitchen, trying to please paying guests. You're a traveller, following your own path, seeking adventure. I wanted to write about the fun of cooking, encourage people to take risks. Alone in the kitchen you are simply a cook, free to do anything you want. If it doesn't work out - well, there's always another meal.

When Reichl breaks her foot after stumbling in a restaurant in LA, she has a lot of time to think.
She consoles herself for not being able to cook for weeks by thinking about recipes & encouraging her husband to cook. I also love that she has two cats who take advantage of her immobility to make themselves comfortable. I think all cat owners have experience of this! She is writing an Introduction to a new edition of Elizabeth David's recipes & compares David's influence on English food to American writers like Julia Child & James Beard. As the year turns to autumn once more, Reichl considers a new project.

Summer over, cookbook done, I was back in a state of anxiety. I lay fretfully in bed at night. knowing what I should be doing and yet reluctant to commit.
I have always wanted to write a novel. I'm an avid reader, and fiction is my first love; the ability to inhabit someone else's space, even for a little while, makes life so much richer. I've dreamt of writing a novel since I was very small, but I'd always put it off, finding all the reasons why I couldn't do it. I had a job, a child, no time. Now my child was grown, my job was over and my days belonged to me. The time had finally come. Surely it couldn't be that difficult?
But the middle of the night is no time to look for answers. I got out of bed and went into the kitchen. I wanted some hot dark fudge poured over cold white ice-cream, and I knew that just stirring up the sauce would improve my mood.

Apart from anything, the book itself is beautiful. The book follows Reichl through the year after Gourmet closed down. The photography by Mikkel Vang is just gorgeous. The evocation of the seasons through food & scenery is luscious. Following the seasons from the first misery of unemployment in autumn to a place of acceptance & recovery at the end of the following summer is a very effective way of structuring the story. As expected from a writer as renowned as Reichl, the text is intimate & honest, at times it's very moving. This is a memoir about what it's like to lose a much-loved job, a job that defined who you are. It's about the fear of not finding another job at all (Reichl is in her 60s), & what that would mean financially as well as personally. We don't all have the high profile career of Reichl or her privileges but we can all imagine what it would be like to be suddenly unemployed & trying to work out what comes next. It's also a book about food, our relationship to food & the joy of slowing down & really looking at what we eat, where it comes from & the way we cook. The recipes are classics, new variations on old favourites & ideas prompted by new discoveries. My Kitchen Year is a book about food & cooking for non-foodies, a memoir of the grief of unemployment & a gorgeously produced coffee table book of photographs & recipes. I enjoyed it very much.

Into the Whirlwind - Eugenia Ginzberg

This is one of those books that I find more horrifying than the scariest fiction. The word Kafkaesque describes Into the Whirlwind perfectly. It's the story of a woman's physical & mental endurance in circumstances that would & did crush many people.

Eugenia Ginzburg (known as Jenny) lived a comfortable life in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. She was a member of the Communist Party, married to the Mayor of Kazan. She had two children & was a teacher & writer, working on the journal, Red Tartary. When she is arrested, she assumes it's a mistake. Her belief in the Party is absolute & she can't believe that she can be arrested for something she hasn't done. She's accused of not reporting the seditious actions of a colleague & her interrogators refuse to believe that she didn't know of his activities or recognize that they were seditious. This is the beginning of her personal nightmare & the beginning of the purge of intellectuals that was undertaken by Stalin in the 1930s. She was interrogated, imprisoned, thrown out of the Party, & spent the next seventeen years in jail or in prison camps in Siberia, separated from her family & reliant on her own strength to survive.

Her interrogations are almost surreal as she refuses to admit anything & refuses to sign the fabricated confessions she is offered. She has no idea what has become of her family &, as time goes on, she can only be grateful for the fact that her arrest came before the order allowing the torture of suspects was passed. Even so, at one stage she is sentenced to five days in complete darkness in a filthy cell far underground where she can hear rats.Her initial stint of solitary confinement is eased when overcrowding means that she shares her cell with Julia, a woman she knew from the outside. This companionship & the tapping code that enables the women to communicate with the prisoners in nearby cells alleviates the mental torment but the physical privations - lack of exercise, poor food & the heat or cold in inadequate clothing -  are difficult to bear.

Almost worse than all these is the lack of books. Eventually they're allowed to borrow books from the prison library but then have to contrive to stay awake all night to read them. There's not enough light in the cell to read during the day but the guards leave the lights on all night as an additional torture. Jenny & Julia manage to sleep during the day by pretending to be reading & read at night by hiding the books under their blankets. All these contrivances are fascinating to read about & the triumph for the prisoners of outwitting the guards keeps their spirits up.

Nothing is simpler to explain the profound effect of books on a prisoner's mind by the absence of outward stimulants. But this is not quite all there is to it. Isolation from everyday life and from its rat-race favours a kind of spiritual lucidity. Sitting in a cell, you don't chase after the phantom of worldly success, you don't play the diplomat or the hypocrite, you don't compromise with your conscience. You can be wholly concerned with the highest problems of existence, and you approach them with a mind purified by suffering.

From Yaroslavl, Jenny is transferred to Kolyma & from there to the prison camps of the far east in Siberia where she is sent on to the camp at Kolyma where she almost died felling trees on a work gang. Each stage of the journey is worse than the one before & Jenny looks back to the previous stage almost with nostalgia as the conditions get worse with every change. As a political prisoner, charged with failing to disclose terrorist activities, she is very low in the hierarchy, looked down upon by other prisoners & derided for her bourgeois attitudes. Many times I wondered how Jenny kept going. The interminable train journey east to the camp in an overcrowded truck; the many times she almost died from exhaustion or disease but survived due to luck or the kindness of a stranger; the sheer inhumanity of the system that had imprisoned her in the first place which is outside the comprehension of any sane person. It's a humbling experience to read a testimony like this & amazing to think that Jenny had the almost total recall she displays in setting down her experiences.

The Afterword to the Persephone edition is interesting in the perspective it brings to the book. Rodric Braithwaite is a former British ambassador to Moscow & he saw a play based on the book while he was in Russia. There have been those who disputed some of the details of Jenny's account but I think it would be unbelievable if she didn't get details wrong. A memoir like this is naturally subjective & others have thought that she had just too much good luck in the people she knew & the comparatively easy time she had. If Jenny's imprisonment was easy, I would hate to read about a harsh imprisonment. Her incredible mental strength & her inner resources kept her going through the worst mental agony of not knowing the fate of her family. She was at least able to write to her mother some of the time & they worked out a code that would get past the censors so she did know a little about her children but her imprisonment & exile lasted for seventeen years & she never saw her eldest son, Alyosha, after her arrest. He died in the siege of Leningrad in 1941. Even after her initial sentence was over, she had to stay in Siberian exile for a further five years & wasn't finally rehabilitated until 1955, after Stalin's death. Into the Whirlwind is about the first few years of her sentence. Ginzburg wrote a sequel, Within the Whirlwind, which continues the story of her exile & was published after her death.

While I was reading Into the Whirlwind I was reminded of an extract from a book I read in a Reader's Digest anthology over 30 years ago. My Dad collected the Reader's Digest condensed books but this was slightly different, an anthology of short extracts from many books. It was bound in white with gold lettering & I only remember one piece, just a few pages long, which I must have read hundreds of times. It was the story of a woman (Edith?), imprisoned in Eastern Europe. She was in solitary confinement & passed the time by reciting all the poetry she could remember & by walking through Europe in her mind while pacing her cell to keep herself fit. She had worked out how many circuits of her cell added up to a mile & she recreated the journeys she had made when she was free. I would love to know what this book was if anyone can tell me.

Memoirs of a Professional Cad - George Sanders

The extra edition of Shiny New Books (which used to be called the Inbetweeny) is now available & I've reviewed George Sanders' Memoirs of a Professional Cad. I enjoyed reading it very much, especially after reading one of the mystery novels Sanders co-wrote, Crime on My Hands. Both books (as well as another thriller, Stranger At Home, which I've yet to read) have been reprinted by Dean Street Press.

Memoirs of a Professional Cad is a witty recollection of the life of one of the great Hollywood stars. Sanders comes across as a melancholy man with his pose of cynicism and his sardonic turn of phrase. His musings on everything from why actors want to win an Oscar to the advantages of fame (good tables and excellent service in restaurants seems to be the highlight) are told with panache but there’s an underlying sadness in the writer that left me feeling rather melancholy myself.

Other highlights of the extra edition of SNB include reviews of The Youngest Lady In Waiting by Mara Kay (one of my favourite childhood reads, now reprinted at last), The Ghost Fields by Elly Griffiths (just read this, one of my favourite crime series), Great Shakespearean Actors : Burbage to Branagh by Stanley Wells, & a tribute to Ruth Rendell.

My Life in Houses - Margaret Forster

I love books about houses. Novels about someone buying a house in the country, renovating it, finding the right furniture, creating a home, creating a garden, I love reading about that. I can't stand reality TV shows about renovation though but maybe that's just because I'd rather read than watch TV. I'm also a fan of Margaret Forster's books so I was looking forward to reading her new memoir, My Life in Houses.

The book is structured in a series of chapters about the houses Forster has lived in. She was born in 1938, in Carlisle, in a house on the Raffles Council estate. This house represented a step up for her parents & they were proud of the hard work they'd done to get the house & then to maintain it. Margaret, however, was always looking at other houses, always slightly ashamed of living on a Council estate, especially as the Raffles estate had quite a bad reputation by the early 1950s. She spent as much time as possible in other people's houses, looking longingly at the Edwardian villas on Norfolk Road, wanting what she didn't have - a room of her own, mainly. She was a clever student & felt she deserved a proper study or at least a desk in her bedroom. The only time she ever really felt at home as a teenager was when she was alone in the house.

Margaret passed the entrance exam & went up to Somerville College, Oxford. She thought that living in college would be the culmination of her ambitions but she hated it. The noise, the other people so close by. Her furniture & belongings looked ridiculous in the spacious corner room. She soon moved into lodgings with a friend. The landlady, Mrs Brown & her sister, Fanny, who did all the work, were an odd pair but Margaret loved the house, imagining the many other women who had lived in her room over the years.

After Oxford, Margaret married the writer & journalist Hunter Davies. They lived in Hampstead, in a beautiful house owned by Mr Elton, an eccentric man who hated noise. Eventually, reluctantly, they had to move because they wanted to start a family. The house they finally bought, in Boscastle Road N W 5, was to be home for over 40 years. There were interludes in Portugal, when the children were small, & weekend cottages in the Lake District but it was Boscastle Road & eventually another house in the Lakes, in Caldbeck, that became the homes Margaret had always wanted.

The stories of the renovations at Boscastle Road show how much work is needed when your home is a Victorian wreck that Margaret hadn't wanted to live in anyway. Gradually the house grew on them. The plan to move back to Hampstead as soon as they could afford it faded away & the Boscastle Road house became home. Even the trial of having a sitting tenant, Mrs Hall, wasn't enough to deter the Davies' from loving the house. They just had to come up with a way of moving Mrs Hall.

This book isn't just a series of stories about house hunting & the benefits of one district of London over another. It's really about what makes a house a home & the way that ideas about home have changed. One of the most moving themes is about the home as a haven. Margaret Forster had breast cancer twice in the 1970s & she describes so beautifully how she felt when she finally went home from hospital after the first lot of treatment.

Arriving home was in itself a healing process. Once I was inside my house the relief washed over me like a tide going out - I was on dry land again, secure within its familiar walls. And that's how the house changed its significance for me. It took on a magical quality. If I stayed in my house, I'd be safe. I knew perfectly well that this was fanciful nonsense, but it was how I felt. Sometimes, in the weeks that followed, I'd be out on the Heath enjoying a walk when I'd be overwhelmed with an urgent need to be inside my house. I'd start walking more quickly, then almost run, and when I reached our front door my hand would fumble with the key in my haste to get into the house. Once inside, I'd stand for a moment with my back against the door, and the ordinary sight of the staircase ahead of me, a toy dropped halfway up, a basket of clean clothes lying on the bottom stair waiting to be taken up - all this would calm me. I was fine again, cocooned by the familiarity of the house.

One of my favourite Forster novels, Is There Anything You Want?, follows the lives of the women who attend a cancer clinic. I listened to it on audio, read by Susan Jameson, & found it very moving. I had no idea, then, that Forster had suffered from cancer. Only a few years later, the cancer returned, necessitating another mastectomy & this time, chemotherapy.The cottage in Caldbeck near Windermere was the healing place this time, a place where Margaret & her family would spend half the year rather than just the odd weekend.

This cottage had been built to withstand the full force of the wild winds coming from the west and so it was dug low into the ground. There were only two small windows - one in the living room one in the bedroom. Not much could be seen from them but views were not the point: keeping the wind and cold out was more important. That first night, there was a tremendous wind, howling and roaring all around, but the cottage stood firm, not a rattle to be heard. It hunkered down, just as it had done for two hundred years, and being inside it felt secure and safe.

I read a review of this book that complained about the detached way that Forster writes about her life. I didn't find her writing to be detached at all. She seems very clear-eyed about herself, even brutally honest about her snobbery as a child & the way she looked down on her childhood home, taking for granted her good fortune. I was very moved by the later sections of the book where she writes about her cancer treatment & the effect that it has had on her. Her writing is restrained, matter of fact, unsentimental. She's more sentimental about houses than about her health. Several times she describes her anguish at leaving a loved home but other setbacks that might seem more personal are described dispassionately. I also enjoyed her thoughts on the importance of houses to the women she has written biographies of - Casa Guidi to Elizabeth Barrett Browning & Menabilly to Daphne Du Maurier. Margaret Forster has used the idea of home to structure this story about her life & the houses she's lived in & I found it an enjoyable, moving book.

Where Stands A Wingéd Sentry - Margaret Kennedy

In the Foreword of this book, written in May, 1941, novelist Margaret Kennedy looks back over the last year.

A year ago today the French line was broken near Mézières. From that day until the end of the first phase of the Battle of Britain, in October, we in this country were living through a supreme experience: supreme in the collective life which is our history and supreme in our individual lives. Many of us were more frightened than we had ever expected to be. Many, before the year was out, found themselves being braver than they had ever expected to be.. We discovered unsuspected passions and loyalties. We realised which things we valued most.

Where Stands A Wingéd Sentry is Kennedy's account of life in England from May to September 1940. The book was written up from her diaries of the time, for an American audience. She changed the names of people & places & acknowledges that much has changed even in the short period between the summer of 1940 & 1941 when the book was published. I found it to be an incredibly honest account of the emotions & fears of one woman & her family in a period when a German invasion seemed imminent & inevitable. It reminded me of the comforts of hindsight & of what I really value in the fiction & memoirs I've read of this period. The knowledge that we have, that Germany would not invade & that although there would be hardship, destruction & death, Britain would survive, was not available to Margaret Kennedy. No matter how much research a modern novelist does into the period, they can never create the atmosphere & the immediacy of a first-hand account like this one.

In 1940, Margaret Kennedy was living in Surrey with her three children, a friend's daughter, her mother-in-law & her children's Nanny. Her husband, David, was a barrister in London, coming down for evenings & weekends. The invasion of France seems unbelievable at first, even after the German invasions of  Norway, Holland, Denmark & Belgium. However, the reality soon hits home with air raid drills & road blocks being placed along the coast roads in preparation for Hitler's inevitable invasion of England.

Cotter says they are hastily putting up log barricades on all the roads and taking down the signposts, and the farmers have orders to put obstructions in large fields where troop-carrying planes might be landed. The British Legion has been told to guard the local telephone exchange. There are notices in the village telling us what to do if we see parachute troops coming down. We are to lock up all cars and bicycles at night and if we leave a car unattended it must pretty well be disembowelled. Apparently it won't do to just take out the ignition key because the Germans know about hairpins.

Kennedy & her husband decide that she & the children should move to Porthmerryn, a Welsh coastal village where Kennedy lived as a child. David will stay in London to work & also because he's an air raid warden & his mother will return with him. Nanny & the children go on ahead while Margaret closes up the Surrey house. As the children set off for Porthmerryn, they see trainloads of soldiers returning from the evacuation at Dunkirk. Friends come down to say goodbye & Margaret is reminded of the Munich crisis. The same feelings of unreality & the same conversations with friends canvassing all the many possibilities.

Porthmerryn is a village of three communities. Downalong, where the fisherman & local people live; Upalong, full of retired middle class professionals who've bought houses there to take advantage of the fishing & the golf; & the Artists, who live between the two communities. The Artists arrived in the 1890s to paint the coast & the seagulls & more artists come every year to live cheaply & soak up the atmosphere. Kennedy is surprised that Porthmerryn has not changed at all since she was last there. The war doesn't seem to have touched it at all except that all the fishing boats went off to Dunkirk & haven't yet returned. even that didn't matter much because it's not the fishing season so they weren't needed. There's still plenty to eat, the blackout is very sketchily enforced & the weekenders come down for their holidays as usual. People who went to the East coast for their holiday last year have come to Wales this year.

The Kennedys consider sending the children overseas but worry about the dangers of the voyage. They're also uncomfortable about the inequality of the schemes on offer. Middle class children will have advantages that working class children would never be offered & eventually they decide that the children will not go. In July, the first air raid warning causes considerable panic but, apart from the harbour, there seem to be no obvious targets in the area. Nevertheless everyone goes through their drills & the children take it all in their stride, incorporating air raids into their games & dropping to the ground just as they've been taught when a loud bang goes off unexpectedly. Margaret's reaction to the raids is not so much fear as anger with a rueful realisation that she's essentially helpless to change her circumstances.

After luncheon I climbed along the cliffs to Spaniard's Point and sat on the end of it and contemplated the sea. Suddenly a huge plane shot down out of the sky. I don't know where it cam from, but as it roared over Spaniard's Point I could see the black crosses on it.
I wasn't frightened, I was in such a rage. My skin crawled on my bones and I jumped up and shouted:
"You ...!" (A word no lady would use.)
And I picked up a small stone and flung it at the plane. At least I meant to fling it at the plane, but it went in the opposite direction, as things always do when I throw them.

There is humour in the book as well as the constant worry & uncertainty about the future. I loved her description, half serious, half embarrassed, about the village's reaction to the young R.A.F. pilots,

Everybody loves the R.A.F. Today i saw a young pilot walking down Fore Street - one of those pink, stodgy-looking boys who are working these miracles ... People turned to look after him, as they passed, with a kind of worship in their eyes. The shop people came to their doors, and all the way up the hill people turned round to stare. We did not cheer. There was a feeling in the air which went far beyond cheering.

Then there's her description of the influx of those she calls the Gluebottoms, people who have left the cities for the safety of the country but expect all the facilities they had at home. She's most annoyed at the number of able-bodied young women who seem to have no thought of joining the services.

I look at the Gluebottoms, sitting on the sands until it is safe for them to go back to their comfortable lives. It's well for them that the shelterers (those who have been left homeless from raids) are not all Communists and that there is such a strong feeling in this country for tolerance and common sense. England after the war is going to belong to the shelterers. And it won't be the England Bob (a Communist friend) wants, or the Gluebottoms' England either. It will be a land fir for human beings.

Meanwhile, Margaret worries about David, living in London & spending his nights as an air raid warden. His experiences give a different perspective to the family's life on the coast.

One of the wardens, bombed out of his sleeping place, pulled himself from the wreckage and walked along the street to get to a friend's house to ask if he could sleep there the rest of the night. In the blackout he walked into a rope stretched between two houses to stop people going up that street because the houses were unsafe. He fell over the rope and both the houses fell down. In the warden's log the entry just says, "At 3.30 A.M. Mr Gamble collided with two houses and demolished them."

Margaret is often worried about the morality or otherwise of the decisions she & David make - about the children, about where they live & the contribution they can make to the war effort. She knows how lucky she is & spends a lot of time praying for the country as well as for her family's safety, while also realising that Germans & Italians are praying the same prayers to the same God & wondering how to reconcile that. Early in the book, she attends a service for the National Day of Prayer & remembers singing the same hymn, O God our help in ages past, at the memorial service for her brother, killed in Palestine in 1918, then again, only a few months later, at the Armistice. At the end of the summer of 1940, the invasion scare seems to have died away and, although the bombing raids continue, the weather will deter any plans of invasion until the following year.

The leaves are beginning to turn and today I have rinsed through and dried our bathing dresses and put them away till next year. The summer is over.
What a summer!
I was just going to write that I wouldn't have missed it for anything. But when I think how lucky we have been so far, and what others have had to suffer, I feel I have no right to say that. Some great sorrow may come to this family still. I may then earn my right to say it.
But we have certainly taken life to pieces and found out what it is made of. We have come a long, long way since we all went to church on the National Day of Prayer.

I read about Where Stands A Wingéd Sentry from the extensive list of books on WWII by women on Scott's blog, Furrowed Middlebrow, & I was able to borrow a PDF copy of the book from Open Library. The title is a quotation from a poem by Henry Vaughan which I posted in Sunday Poetry last weekend.

A Fig at the Gate - Kate Llewellyn

Kate Llewellyn is a poet and diarist who is best-known for her poetry & her memoirs of creating gardens in various parts of Australia. The Waterlily is probably her most famous book, about living in the Blue Mountains. I realised when A Fig at the Gate was published that I still had her previous book, Playing with Water, on the tbr shelves. I've pulled it off now though & look forward to reading it soon.

Llewellyn is now in her seventies & has moved back to Adelaide, South Australia, where she grew up. Her siblings are near by as well as friends she's known from her nursing days. She knows this climate well, & prepares to create a new garden in her house by the sea. The book is a diary, written from 2009-2012, moving through the seasons. Adelaide has experienced even hotter, dryer weather than Melbourne over the last few years so I could relate to her struggles with the climate & the failure of plants to thrive in the hot summers. I love this description of the beginning of autumn,

The first cold day and welcome, too, a feeling of zest and a sting in the air with rain in the night. The tank is half full. I knock, knock with my knuckles on the corrugated iron rings of the tank to hear where the water level makes a dull sound. ... A flock of starlings flies up from the newly mown lawn. A willie wagtail hops around in its cheerful way and a Murray magpie flutters down and then up. when pruning the apricot tree a while ago, I found a small bird's nest high up in the tree. I left the branch in case the bird uses the nest again. A sparrow flew into a dense olive tree in the front garden and, thinking it may be nesting there, I have been out to search but, apart from a small crop of green olives, the tree is empty. A flash of green and a lorikeet flew out. Tuesday, 24 April 2012

Apart from the planning & enthusiastic planting of the garden, Llewellyn visits friends & family, tries to make friends with neighbours, starts a garden on the roadside opposite her house, lies on her bed watching the trees through her window. She is very frugal & always on the lookout for some free seedlings or a way to reuse an object that would otherwise be thrown out. She rescues some old pink bricks from a demolished house (carrying them in a green wheelie bin) to create borders around the garden beds &, walking past a house with a load of soil on offer for free, soon has a friend there to help carry away as much as possible in buckets & wheelbarrows.

The garden causes just as much pain & frustration as pleasure. Seeds are sown & fail to come up. A crop of tomatoes at the side of the house, where nothing has probably ever been planted, give so much fruit that it can't all be eaten. Nothing ever grows there so well again so was it just that it was virgin soil? I loved the story of the blood orange tree. Nurtured, fed, mulched, watered, the tree gave no fruit at all. Listening to a gardening show on the radio, Llewellyn hears that blood oranges should be left alone & if neglected, will thrive. Which hers does as soon as she pulls away the mulch & ignores it.

The other major saga is that of the chickens & later, ducks. Llewellyn grew up with chooks & her brother rears them for a living so she is keen to have her own small flock. She begins with six white pullets & all is well until she introduces six red chickens. She calls the result the War of the Roses. She learns from her mistakes about feeding them & caring for them when ill. She even sets up an intensive care unit in her shower for the hens when they're sick, bathing them & anointing their bare red skin with calamine lotion. The story of the chickens becomes as suspenseful as a soap opera. I find I'm racing on to the next entry to see what has happened to the latest patient. Rearing ducks is more successful as the pair she buys soon have nine ducklings, most of which have to be sold as pets as there's not enough room for them.

There are many beautiful quiet moments in this book where Kate Llewellyn meditates on the pleasures & pains of getting older. The aches & pains of her body & a bout of depression are the downside but the advantages, from being able to lie in bed late watching the trees to being eligible for Council help with maintenance around the house, are also celebrated. I enjoyed reading about Kate Llewellyn's garden, her chooks, her clever contrivances, her successes & failures, everything that goes to make up this one woman's life.

A Lifelong Passion : Nicholas & Alexandra : their own story - ed Andrei Maylunas and Sergei Mironenko

This book has been on my shelves for many years. I've dipped into it before but never read it all through. After reading Helen Rappaport's wonderful Four Sisters earlier this year, I wanted to read more about the Romanovs & this book was perfect. It's a selection of the letters, diaries & memoirs of Nicholas, Alexandra, other family members, servants & other observers to the events of Nicholas's reign.

The tragic story of the last Tsar & his family is well-known. As I was reading A Lifelong Passion, I was struck by just how early on in Nicholas's reign the portents of disaster began. The personalities of Nicholas & Alexandra & the way they reacted to circumstances determined the course of their lives. The book begins with an account of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Known as the Tsar-Liberator because he liberated the serfs, Alexander was succeeded by his son, Alexander III, who became one of the most reactionary & autocratic of Tsars in reaction to what he saw as the failure of his father's liberal ideals. Alexander III dominated his son, Nicholas, who led an idle life in the Army & society.

At a family wedding, Nicholas met Alix of Hesse, a princess of a minor German royal house & a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Alix's mother had died when she was young & Victoria had virtually brought up Alix & her sisters. Alix had been a happy child but the deaths of her mother & two of her siblings changed her personality & she grew up a serious, melancholy girl. She was also very religious & the great stumbling block to her love for Nicholas was religion. Alix was unwilling to convert to Russian Orthodoxy & it took years to overcome this resistance. Alix's sister Ella had married one of Nicholas's uncles, Serge, & her influence was crucial in the engagement eventually taking place. Alix became a passionate convert to Orthodoxy &, as tragedy consumed her personal life, she became more & more religious which led to an estrangement from Russian society & her dependence on mystics such as Rasputin.

Alexander III died suddenly in 1894 at the age of only 49. Nicholas had no training for his destined role & his personality was not suited to playing a dominant role. Nicholas also had several very domineering uncles who saw him as a weak personality who needed bolstering. He reacted with polite attention which gave the impression that he agreed with the last person he spoke to but which often left people feeling that he had deceived them. Alix, on the other hand, was stubborn & strong-willed, always pushing Nicky to impose his will on his Ministers & be a strong Tsar for the Russian people. This was a disastrous combination. The saving grace from a personal point of view was their great love for each other. This never wavered from their earliest days together until the end & is expressed in passionate terms in their letters & diaries in this book.

Their marriage began in the tragic circumstances of Alexander III's death. Alix was summoned to Livadia to be present at the Tsar's deathbed & she & Nicky were married just weeks later & the superstitious Russians said that their new Tsarina had come to them behind a coffin. From that moment, nothing seemed to go right. The coronation was marred by the tragedy of the stampede at Khodinka Meadow, when hundreds were killed as they tried to get hold of souvenirs. The new Tsar went to a reception that night which gave a bad impression. Alix was shy & uncertain in society, in contrast to her mother-in-law, Maria Feodorovna, & the mistakes she made in the early days were never forgotten or forgiven. Alix's religious fervor was also wondered & laughed at by sophisticated Russian society.

Four daughters were born over the next six years, each one loved by their parents but the rest of the family despaired over the lack of a male heir. Alix's desire for a son led her to consult quacks & religious mystics. When the longed for son, Alexei, was born in 1904, he suffered from haemophilia. Alexei's illness dominated Alix's life from that moment & led to her reliance on Rasputin, who seemed to be able to calm the boy when he was ill. The family also isolated themselves at Tsarskoe Selo, preserving their happy family life but distancing themselves from the rest of the family, society & the people.

Politically Russia was also in revolutionary mood. The Bloody Sunday massacre in 1905 & the Russo-Japanese War led to demands for democracy but Nicholas was reluctant to grant any power to the people. Bolstered by Alix, he stubbornly vowed to uphold the autocracy of his ancestors. Russia's lack of preparedness for WWI led to enormous losses on the battlefield & Nicholas's decision to take over as Commander in Chief of the Army was a fatal mistake. Revolution in 1917 led to Nicholas's abdication, imprisonment with his family at Tsarskoe Selo, then Siberia & death in Ekaterinburg in 1918. Whether Nicholas could have done anything to avert the disasters of his reign if he had been a different man or if he had married a different woman, is a question that is impossible to answer. There are so many What Ifs in the story of the last Romanovs which is why it's so interesting to read these firsthand accounts.

It's so interesting to read how concerned Nicky's family were about the isolation of the Royal Family. Right from the very beginning of his reign, there was concern that Alix was avoiding her duties to society, but as the family grew & especially after Alexei was born, the desire to be completely private & especially not to allow anyone outside the immediate family to know of Alexei's illness, became more obvious. Nicky's sisters, Olga & Xenia, write in their letters & memoirs of their concern at the Tsar's isolation. The wider Romanov family were bewildered & concerned. Many of them grew to resent Alix & blame her for the increasing discontent in Russia, including her own sister, Ella, from whom she was increasingly estranged.

The most interesting sections of the book are the Diaries of Konstantin Konstantinovich, known as KR. KR was a cousin of Nicky's, the grandson of Tsar Nicholas I. He was a writer, poet & translator; he translated Hamlet into Russian. He was a devoted husband & father of nine children but he was also bisexual which caused him great anguish. It also left him open to blackmail & he struggled with this although there was no open scandal. KR was one of the few Romanovs who were close to Nicky & Alix right up until his death in 1915. By then, it was too late to save the dynasty. Alix was virtually running the country when Nicky was at the Front & her letters to him are full of exhortations to be strong & save the throne for Alexei. Her letters become more & more unbalanced & it's hard to imagine how Nicky must have felt when receiving yet another letter full of advice about ministerial appointments from his wife with total reference to Rasputin. The eyewitness accounts of Rasputin's murder, & the murders of members of the Imperial family are also fascinating.The most poignant diary entries are from Alexei in captivity in Tobolsk as he writes day after day, "Everything the same." "The same as yesterday".

A Lifelong Passion is a fascinating book. There's virtually no commentary from the editors, apart from chapter headings & footnotes, so the eyewitness accounts speak for themselves. With the mass of material available to them (the first draft was 2,500 pages long. The published book is 650 pages) the editors had to leave a lot out but they have done an excellent job of making a complex story coherent & allowing as many diverse voices as possible to be heard. The Memoirs may have the benefit of hindsight & self-justification (especially in the case of Felix Yusupov, one of Rasputin's murderers), but the letters & diaries are so immediate that the well-known story becomes new once more.

The Road to Middlemarch - Rebecca Mead

The subtitle of this book is My Life with George Eliot. Rebecca Mead has read Middlemarch every five years since she was 17 & has been profoundly influenced by the novel. She is also fascinated with the author & this book is a combination of personal memoir, biography of Eliot & exploration of Middlemarch, the characters & their origins.

I enjoyed this book so much. I think Middlemarch is a remarkable book. I've read it twice, most recently last year for dovegreyreader's group read, Team Middlemarch (all the posts are still there if you want to start your own group read) & it's completely absorbing. I was a little apprehensive about the idea for The Road to Middlemarch as there's a great temptation for the author to gush & for the personal story to overwhelm the criticism. I think Rebecca Mead has balanced the different aspects of the book very well. The genesis of the book was an article Mead wrote for the New Yorker (almost exactly three years ago, on February 14th, 2011) about Eliot but her interest in Eliot was already deep. The book is structured as the novel is, in eight Books with the chapters of The Road to Middlemarch bearing the same titles as the original.

Born in the UK but living in the US for most of her adult life, Mead tells her own personal story alongside Eliot's. She also visits many of the places associated with Eliot & I loved these sections. Mead handles the manuscript of Middlemarch, visits the place where Eliot was born, travels to libraries in the UK & US to see & touch objects Eliot owned. She describes Eliot's life, from her provincial childhood to her renunciation of religion, decision to live in London, her work as an editor, meeting with George Henry Lewes, the man she would live with for 20 years & her work as a writer. She quotes from Eliot's notebooks & letters & the recollections of those who met her. Following in her footsteps gives Mead a chance to meditate on the changes time has wrought on the places Eliot once knew as well as sparking memories of her own life.

The most interesting part of the book for me was the deep exploration & discussion of the plot & characters of Middlemarch. Mead explores the beginnings of the book. Eliot wrote the first Book, Miss Brooke, first & only then decided to introduce Tertius Lydgate & his story which made the novel more ambitious & expansive. As the subtitle of the novel puts it, A Study of Provincial Life. She discusses the possible models for Dorothea & Casaubon; the authorial voice; the humour in the book & the things that Eliot leaves out. For instance, we learn a lot about Lydgate's childhood & origins but virtually nothing about Dorothea's. Eliot writes that Dorothea's parents died when she & her sister, Celia, were "about twelve years old." This imprecise statement puzzles Mead every time she reads the novel but she concludes, "George Eliot doesn't need to provide Dorothea with a fleshed-out childhood, or a detailed history. She comes into the world of the novel fully developed, like a second Minerva." I also enjoyed the discussion about Mary Garth, one of my favourite characters. I was glad to see how seriously Mead considers Mary & her relationship with Fred Vincy. Their relationship is one of the love stories in the book, just as important as Dorothea & Will Ladislaw or Lydgate & Rosamond.

Middlemarch has not given me George Eliot's experience, not on my first reading of it, or my latest. But in reading her works and her letters, and learning about her life and the lives of those near to her, it becomes clear to me that she could not have written this novel without her individual contact with sorrow. And as I continue to read and think and reflect, I also realize that she has given me something else: a profound experience with a book, over time, that amounts to one of the frictions of my life.

The friction of life, mentioned in the quote above, is a reference to something Eliot said, "There must be the actual friction of life, the individual contact with sorrow, to discipline the character." Mead's exploration of the writing of Middlemarch, the life of the author & her own life as it has been affected by the author & the novel is a wonderful exploration of the effect reading can have on one's life. I've always loved reading around my favourite books. Knowing about the circumstances of composition, the reception of the work & where it fits in the life of the author & the period enriches my experience of reading. It may not be necessary to "know" who Casaubon was based on (& there's more than one candidate, anyway) but it's fascinating to look at the parallels between life & fiction. The Road to Middlemarch is a book that has enriched my understanding of the novel & made me want to reread it all over again.

Ammonites and Leaping Fish : a life in time - Penelope Lively

Penelope Lively is one of my favourite writers. The first audio book I ever listened to was her According to Mark, read beautifully by Michael Williams. According to Mark has remained my favourite of her books as it combines her twin preoccupations of time & memory. Mark is a literary biographer working on the life of an early twentieth century writer. This was the era of the great biographies - Holroyd's lives of Lytton Strachey & G B Shaw, Ellmann's life of Oscar Wilde - & Mark's subject, Gilbert Strong, is one of those grand old men of Edwardian letters. It's the story of his research & the surprises he discovers. It's also the story of Mark himself, of his marriage & of his attraction to Strong's granddaughter, Carrie. It's a wonderful novel, funny but full of interesting things to say about the nature of biography & reputation.

This new book, Ammonites and Leaping Fish, is not fiction but a memoir about old age & memory. Lively looks back on her life from old age. She remembers her wartime childhood in Egypt (written about in more detail in Oleander, Jacaranda), the disorientation of returning to England after the war, her years at university, meeting her husband, Jack, her writing & the traveling that she once relished (including a farcical visit to the Soviet Union in the 1980s). She misses gardening now that arthritis prevents her from doing much more than tend a few pots & she observes that conversations with friends of a similar age (Lively is now 80) now consist of stories about visits to the doctor & heartfelt inquiries about each other's health or lack of it.

However, my favourite parts of the book are the chapters on reading & books & the final chapter about six objects that bring back memories of different periods of her life.

I can measure out my life in books. They stand along the way like signposts: the moments of absorption and empathy and direction and sheer pleasure. Back in the mists of very early reading there is Beatrix Potter, who does not just tell an enthralling story but challenges the ear. Her cadences, her linguistic flights that i repeated to myself over and over. 'the dignity and repose of the tea party', 'too much lettuce is soporific', 'roasted grasshopper with ladybird sauce', 'The dinner was of eight courses, not much of anything, but truly elegant.'

Many of the books mentioned inspired her love of history & archaeology, major themes of the novels & stories.

For me, interest in the past segued into an interest in the operation of memory, which turned into subject matter for fiction. I wanted to write novels that would explore the ways in which memory works and what it can do for people, to see if it is the crutch on which we lean or the albatross around the neck. It is both, of course, depending on the person concerned.

In the final chapter of the book, Lively talks about six items that recall her life. The kind of objects that mean very little to anyone except their owner. A pair of kettle-holders from Maine with ducks on them; a Bible given to Lively by her nanny when they were evacuated to Palestine during the war; a sherd of 12th century pottery with two leaping fish on it; a fossil with two tiny ammonites in it, millions of years old; a copy of a statue of an Egyptian cat, the original of which is in the British Museum; and a sampler stitched by Elizabeth Barker in 1788. All these objects lead to memories of bird watching, her childhood, visits to America, digging in her own gardens & finding sherds of pottery from previous households. the beauty of the King James Bible over any other version & her never-ending interest in time.

I wish the whole book had consisted of memories like these. In an earlier memoir, A House Unlocked, about her Somerset grandmother's house, Lively used a similar technique, taking objects & telling the history of the house & of her family. I found this final chapter & the chapter on reading much more engaging that the view from old age, I'm afraid. Still, Lively is always an interesting writer & I would recommend Ammonites and Leaping Fish to anyone who has enjoyed her fiction. It's sent me back to dip into her novels & maybe I'll read According to Mark again & enjoy Lively's meditations on time & the past once more.

The Morville Hours - Katherine Swift

So it was that the Hours came to mirror my life in the garden - not only the calendar illustrations with their regular round of tasks, but also the feasts and the fasts, the highs and the lows, the red-letter days and the dies mali: from the crunch of grass underfoot at midnight on a frosty New Year's Eve, to the drip of trees in a melancholy March dawn; from a perfumed May Day morning when the whole world seems sixteen again; to the enervating heat of a midsummer noon; from the bloom of blue-black damsons picked on a golden September afternoon, to the smell of holly and ivy cut in the dusk of a rainy Christmas Eve. Senses seemed keener in relation to the Hours, with their lesson of attentiveness. Theirs was a world where time was accounted for, each second precious: instead of hearing, one listened; instead of seeing, one looked; instead of tasting, one savoured; instead of touching, one felt. 'Listen,' said St Benedict, 'listen with the ear of your heart.'

This is the story of a garden & of the woman who created it. Katherine Swift was a librarian in Dublin when her husband tempted her back to England with the opportunity of leasing the Dower House near Morville Hall in Shropshire & creating a garden from nothing. The Morville Hours is the story of how the garden was created. It's structured like a medieval Book of Hours, with the liturgical hours of Vigils, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers & Compline acting as a guide, not to one day in the life of the garden but to the gardening year. This is a lovely conceit because it allows Swift to use the many beautiful Books of Hours created for royalty & noble families in the Middle Ages as a guide to the garden. Each month would have its tasks from Keeping Warm and Chopping Wood in February to Picking Flowers and Greenery in April & Mowing in June through to Slaughtering Beasts, Roasting Meat and Baking Pies in November & December.

I especially enjoyed the history in this book. Swift takes us back to the glaciers that first formed the soil & mountains of Shropshire & gradually moves forward to the first garden on the site in the time of the Priory through to the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s & the last Prior, Richard. The Priory & its contents were stripped & sold off. The land was sold to Roger Smyth of Bridgnorth, the first in a long line of secular owners down to the present day when the Hall & Dower House are now owned by the National Trust.

I'm not much of a gardener but I could certainly enjoy & identify with Swift's struggle to create the garden. The madly ambitious plans that had to be passed by the National Trust, the urge to buy too many bulbs & then the rush to get them planted in time. The delight in researching & discovering plants that have a connection with the house. Swift decided to create several gardens at the Dower House, each one reflecting a period of its history. So, there's the Cloister Garden as the monks would have known it; the Knot Garden of the 16th & 17th centuries, the Fruit & Vegetable Garden with its Apple Tunnel & Victorian Rose Border.

The Morville Hours is also about living in a community. Swift tells the stories of her neighbours & friends as they help her with advice, labour & plants. It's also a very personal story which tells of the lives of her parents & her own childhood. I felt a real sadness in these sections. She doesn't seem to have been a particularly happy child & her parents seem to have been disappointed people in some way. The family moved house many times but Katherine's father always planted trees, created a garden. When he is old & ill, she creates a garden for him in his last home, partly because she wants to do it for him but partly because she is good at it. He accuses her of pride & she says she does it out of love but she knows that they're both right. Swift's relationship with her parents & brother seems to have been quite distant for much of her adult life but at the end of her parents' lives, they reconnected.

There's a real sense of melancholy in this book. Swift's favourite season is winter when the garden is dormant, sleeping, quiet. The stories she tells of the history of the Priory & the sometimes tragic lives of the subsequent owners are fascinating but full of the melancholy nostalgia for a past that is long gone. Maybe it's her sensibility but that's how it seemed to me. I enjoyed reading The Morville Hours, I like wintry melancholy, but I found myself turning from it to something lighter & more frivolous every now and then. The weight of sadness & melancholy was too much. Katherine Swift's creation of a garden that would honour & remember all those who had gone before her is a tribute to Morville's past & her determination to create a beautiful garden as a living memorial.

The Time by the Sea - Ronald Blythe

Ronald Blythe describes himself in his new memoir as a listener & a watcher. He has always been a distinguished writer about rural life, through his columns for the Church Times, collected in several volumes, including Word from Wormingford. In the columns, Blythe writes about the Church year & about the changing seasons. He also writes about one of his greatest loves, poetry. He is especially fond of the poetry of Crabbe & Clare. The Time by the Sea is about his first years living near the Suffolk coast, the people he met & his tentative beginnings as a writer.

Blythe had met Christine Nash, wife of the artist John Nash, during his time as a librarian. Christine was to become his muse, the person who had a vital influence on the course of his life. It was his visits to the Nash's home at Wormingford (where Blythe now lives) that first introduced him to the Suffolk landscape & it was Christine who helped him find the house at Aldeburgh where he lived for several years in the 1950s while he tried to write a novel. He would write in the mornings & then take long walks in the afternoon, exploring the coast & the countryside. He met E M Forster & Imogen Holst but most importantly, Benjamin Britten. Britten & his partner, Peter Pears, were living in Aldeburgh & were planning the Festival of arts & music which continues today. Blythe became involved in the running of the Festival, writing programs, negotiating with unwilling parsons to be allowed to hold concerts in their churches & assisting the Director.

The Time by the Sea is a series of reminiscences about the people & places that were important to Blythe during this period when he discovered his landscape & the country where he would live for the rest of his life. Blythe describes himself as a watcher & listener &, indeed, he's a shadowy figure in this book. He tells wonderful, intimate stories about Forster, Britten, Mervyn Peake, photographer Kurt Hutton & Nash but rarely intrudes himself. He describes the lives of George Crabbe & rationalist author, Edward Clodd. Amazingly he met the widow of Clodd, who had been born in 1840. In 1914, Clodd had married for the second time & his widow, Phyllis, was still living. One of the most memorable chapters in the book is the account of Blythe's visit to Phyllis Clodd & her companion, Miss Grant-Duff, for tea.

'Oh, you are young!'
She was a bag of bones in a pretty summer dress. She hung to one side. Miss Grant-Duff filled the teapot. I sat between them and felt unable to get out my notebook and pencil. Mrs Clodd said,
'You are sitting in Thomas Hardy's chair - from Strafford House.'
and from then on, Clodd's widow and myself were engulfed in a torrent of literary reminiscences.

Ronald Blythe has become one of the best known writers about rural Britain. His classic account of rural life, Akenfield, was published in the late 1960s & captures the very end of the old traditions of rural living. He has edited Austen & Hardy & has championed the work of John Clare, the quintessential rural poet. He is always at his best writing about landscape, about the solitary walks he took,

One April morning in 1956 I made one of my planless walks from Slaughden towards Orford and with the usual elated feeling. there would be a wonder midway although I knew nothing of its existence. All I experienced at this moment was a tossing about of freedom. the sea was glorious and near at hand, the gulls screamed and the air was intoxicating... Somebody had told me that Chillesford Church tower was pink because it contained lots of coraline crag. But what drew me would be the stunted oaks and the limited nature of things.

The Time by the Sea is a look back at a time of possibilities & new beginnings. Blythe was able to take the time to work out his future direction & find the one place where he could bring his plans to fruition. He also pays tribute to the people he met who influenced him & helped him on his life's journey.

I read The Time by the Sea courtesy of NetGalley.

Pigs in Clover - Simon Dawson

Simon Dawson was working as a real estate agent in London when his wife, Debbie, suddenly proposed that they move to Exmoor & run a smallholding. Simon has never lived in the country & hates the outdoors. However, as he had promised to make the move (albeit in a noisy pub when he was half-drunk), he feels obliged to give it a go. The Dawsons sell up in London but Simon has to keep working to make the project financially possible so he lives in a room at his mother's house & continues working during the week, making the trip to Exmoor every weekend.

Simon's initial reluctance to make a complete lifestyle change is understandable & the fact that he commutes from London to Exmoor every week means that he finds it harder to become part of the local community. Initially they rent a house with no land but eventually they buy land close to their house & the smallholding begins to take shape. Debbie immediately finds her feet, getting a job as a cook. She convinces a reluctant Simon to keep chickens which they house on a friend's property in return for looking after her poultry as well. Eventually they have pigs, horses, sheep as well as chickens, ducks, geese & a dog called Dex.

Simon  finds it difficult to reconcile killing & eating animals that he's grown to love - however reluctant he might have been to have any animals in the first place. From his first horrible attempt at killing a chicken & the day when he has to send his first pigs, Black Bum & Spotty Bum, off to the abattoir, Simon soon decides that rearing animals with kindness so they have a happy life is the only way he can bring himself to eat meat at all. He has to learn to contain his rage at the unfairness of Nature when a hand reared pig dies or a fox kills all the chickens. The Dawsons experience a lot of setbacks, especially financially but, after more than ten years on the land, they know they made the right decision to keep trying to fulfill their dream, even when it would have been easier to give up.

I enjoyed Pigs in Clover with a few reservations. Simon's relationship with his family seems odd, to say the least. It's not until halfway through the book that we learn that the estate agency he works in is owned by his mother & brother, neither of whom are ever named. Of course, it could have been their choice to be anonymous but they're distant, slightly hostile figures all the same. His mother tells him of a reduction in his working hours from full-time to part-time over the phone & finally lets him go altogether in the same way without really having any idea just how finely balanced their finances are or what a devastating effect this will have on their lives. Their one visit to Dorset is a disaster as they just can't understand what the Dawsons are trying to achieve.

I would also have loved to have heard more of Debbie's experiences. Alternate chapters about Debbie's life on her own in Dorset while Simon was in London would have been fascinating. We learnt a lot about Simon's many near-death experiences with quad bikes, electric fences & rogue sheep & his philosophical tortures over eating the animals he's grown to love. he even becomes a miserable vegetarian in London because he can't bear to eat animals that haven't had a happy life. I wanted to know more about the work Debbie put in to learning butchery & all the ways she made ends meet. They eventually made a modest living through selling their organic produce at farmers markets & online & Simon became a writer with a weekly newspaper column & wrote The Self Sufficiency Bible which led to running courses on what they'd learnt to others wanting to have a go at self sufficiency. They also made a decision to streamline their tasks so they could become self-sufficient without dying of exhaustion. This became even more important once Simon was living full time in Dorset & their relationship began to suffer because they did nothing but work without ever feeling they were getting ahead.

I read Pigs in Clover courtesy of NetGalley.