First published in 1941, Country Moods and Tenses is an interesting non-fiction account of grammar and the English language, and how both relate to life within the countryside – that of Olivier’s native Wiltshire, to be exact. Olivier has begun her account by setting out her ‘grammarless education’, which she feels has debarred her ‘from the familiar use of a good many attractive and expressive words’.
Throughout, it is clear that Olivier is passionate about the subject of which she is writing; she speaks of her delight of perusing the dictionary in her introduction, and discusses such grammatical elements as the infinitive and the imperative, all the while relating them to the experiences of her family and neighbours in their small English village. Olivier uses the examples of other writers and experts in certain fields to further reinforce the points which she makes.
In Country Moods and Tenses, Olivier continually demonstrates the differences between town and country living – for example, ‘the store cupboard, so easily filled in London by the benificence of Messrs. Fortnum and Mason. To them it is merely a matter of indifferently turning to another shelf and with equal facility they will hand over the counter Guaya Jelly, Hymettus Honey or Sloe Gin. But in the country, a May frost may put an end to all hopes of strawberry jam for the year, and a wet September can ruin the blackberry harvest’. Of the utmost importance, she believes, is never to take anything for granted. One gets the impression that she would like city folk to adopt the mentality of the countryside, where the communities which she describes are grateful for everything which Mother Nature offers them.
Country Moods and Tenses is both quaint and charming. Olivier presents an interesting and quite original mixture of travelogue and linguistics. The subjects which she writes about range from public work to literary pilgrimages, and are diverse enough to hold something for every reader.
John Steinbeck’s The Moon is Down was first published in 1942. Its title comes from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and on reflection, it suits the piece marvellously. Unlike much of Steinbeck’s other work, no concrete setting has been decided upon within The Moon is Down. Even the country in which the action happens is ambiguous, with many believing that it is set somewhere in Scandinavia.
The informative afterword to the novella, which has been written by Donald V. Coers, tells the reader that in The Moon is Down, Steinbeck ‘had decided to write a work of fiction using what he had learned about the psychological effects of enemy occupation upon the populace of conquered nations’. In doing so, Coers goes on to say that Steinbeck ‘refused to adopt the contemporary Teutonic stereotype’ for either his setting or his protagonists. He also believes that The Moon is Down ‘demonstrates the power of ideas’, and one can only concur with this.
The first sentence is striking, and leads on wonderfully to the main thread of the story: ‘By ten forty-five it was all over. The town was occupied, the defenders defeated, and the war finished’. At the beginning of the novella, six of the soldiers who have been involved in a brutal spur-of-the-moment shootout ‘became dead riddled bundles’, and three others are deemed ‘half-dead riddled bundles’. This repetition of violence makes it all the more chilling.
Steinbeck goes on to write about the way in which, in the occupied town, ‘The days and the weeks dragged on, and the months dragged on… The people of the conquered country setled in a slow, silent, waiting revenge’. Steinbeck exemplifies the solidarity of the community throughout, particularly with regard to the attitudes rallied against the outsiders. The community in question is centered around mining, and the colonel who infiltrates the town tells the Mayor that his people ‘will be in danger if they are rebellious. We must get the coal, you see. Our leaders do not tell us how; they order us to get it… You must make them do the work and thus keep them safe’. The Mayor responds that the ‘authority is the town… [and] when a direction is set, we all act together’. The point of view of both sides has been considered throughout, a technique which works marvellously in a novella, and which makes the whole an incredibly rich read despite its deceptively short length.
As with Steinbeck’s other work, I was struck immediately by the quality of his writing and his deft skill, both at building characters and rousing compassion for them. The scenes which he crafts are unfailingly vivid, and everything which he turns his hand to describing comes to life before the very eyes: ‘Beside the fireplace old Doctor Winter sat, beared and simple and benign, historian and physician to the town… Doctor Winter was a man so simple that only a profound man would know him as profound’. Joseph, the serving-man belonging to the Mayor, on the other hand, had a life ‘so complicated that only a profound man would know him to be simple’. The divisions, like this one, which he creates between his characters have all been so marvellously realised: ‘Joseph had tried carrying Doctor Winter’s remarks below-stairs before and it had always ended the same: Annie always discovered them to be nonsense’. Such juxtapositions, which can be found at various points throughout the novella, allow Steinbeck to make his work and his characters so distinct. His perceptions in such matters are always intelligent.
The Moon is Down is a sage novella, written by a man who is a master at creating believable dialogue and conversational patterns between his characters. He captures their thoughts and feelings in the most sublime of manners; it feels, in consequence, as though he knows them inside out. The way in which he captures the foreboding which hovers above the town is stunning, and the entire novella is eminently human and thought-provoking.
‘Nijinsky,’ writes Moore: ‘his name alone conjures up romance, exoticism, scandal and tragedy’. Acclaimed historian Lucy Moore, who has written the first full-length biography of Nijinsky for decades, believes that he ‘transformed the world of ballet… as the first male star of the modern era, with critics and audiences hailing him the God of the Dance’. She writes that he ‘had the same dramatic impact on ballet as the work of Picasso had on painting’.
Vaslav Nijinsky, born in 1889, is said by many to be the greatest dancer of the twentieth century, and was the shining star of the famous Ballets Russes. For the first time in the scope of Nijinsky’s biographers, Moore has been able to take into account his personal diaries to further enforce her information. She spans the course of his fascinating and incredibly sad life, until his death in 1950, and even touches upon the legacy which Nijinsky the dancer left behind. She is conscious of his tough climb to the top, and those problems which beset him with every step forward. When he began to train at the prestigious Tsar-owned ballet school at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, for example, he had trouble fitting in, despite his obvious talents. As a Polish boy ‘with a strong accent, and notably poorer than the others, he was despised by his peers, ignored in all the school games and made to feel inferior at every turn’.
Nijinsky, who excelled at his craft and found fame in the Ballets Russes at an early age, was born into the ballet; his parents were both ‘gifted professional dancers’, and his younger sister Bronia joined the same company as him. In his own diary, Nijinsky wrote that his parents ‘considered it as natural to teach me to dance as to walk and talk’. At the start of the book, Moore sets out the family history of the Nijinskys, which is fascinating in itself.
From the very beginning, Moore’s writing is beautiful. Her prologue is centered around the premiere of Nijinsky’s ballet ‘Le Sacre du printemps’, which was choreographed with two poets, and was first staged in Paris in 1913. ‘Le Sacre du printemps’, and other ballets choreographed at around the same time, writes Moore, created ‘a revolutionary, entirely modern form of ballet, stripped of the tinselled artifice of previous generations’. Amongst other elements – becoming the husband of a rather formidable woman named Romola, and the father to two doting daughters, for example – Moore wonderfully exemplifies the friction between Nijinsky and ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who schooled him in homosexual relationships. Throughout, Moore is conscious of the social constraints which Nijinsky and his family would have struggled against, and uses them as a backdrop to the biography at every turn. It is clear that she is so in control of her subject and in the information which she presents, and has used each one of her sources with clarity and consideration.
Photographs of Nijinsky and those who were close to him have been printed in glossy sections, and these are a lovely touch. Moore has also included a comprehensive notes section and far-reaching bibliography, which those who enjoy ballet, or even just non-fiction in general, are sure to find invaluable. Moore’s account of Nijinsky’s life has been called ‘mesmerising’, ‘captivating’, ‘timely’ and ‘hugely enjoyable’. It is all of these things, and more. Moore’s respect and admiration for Nijinsky shines through on each and every page, and one cannot help but think that she was perfect candidate to write such an enlightening biography of him.
Despite being relatively popular in her day, Winifred Holtby shot to the limelight in the United Kingdom last year. This is due in part to Virago’s beautiful reprinted editions of several of her novels, and also because of the delightful BBC adaptation of her most famous book, South Riding. The Yorkshire-born author always writes with such astonishing clarity which allows the thoughts and feelings of her characters to rise to prominence as her stories progress. She writes about those situations which she has experience of, and the characters which feature in her novels seem all the more real because of it.
Anderby Wold takes place in the small village of Anderby in the East Riding of Yorkshire. The novel opens with the formidable character of Sarah Bannister who seems intent upon bossing her husband Tom around. Sarah has ‘too much respect for her own judgment to acknowledge an error’ in her character. Details like this which feature heavily throughout Holtby’s narrative set her writing apart from other novels. She is not too blatant or obvious with the details which she mentions, and her writing certainly benefits as a result.
The inhabitants of Anderby Wold, John and Mary Robson, are soon introduced. They are cousins who are currently trapped in a loveless marriage with one another. Sarah, John’s sister, and Tom are travelling to their farm for a celebratory ‘tea party’. The plot revolves around the Robson family, all of whom are used to rural life and are intent upon preserving the familial intermarrying which has occurred for generations. Mary is discontent with her lot in life until she chances upon the young, rebellious author David Rossiter, sixteen years her junior. The relationship between Mary and David is crafted wonderfully. They mock each other and bring a real sense of joviality and comradeship to the novel. A wonderful example of this is when David tells Mary: ‘as it is, every time you are nice to me, I have to recite little pieces of Marx to myself to convince me what an abomination you really are’.
The novel sparkles from the outset. The reader is in the company of a wonderful author who crafts such believable stories and peoples them with rich and wonderful characters. Despite using the third person perspective, Holtby is able to capture the most in-depth thoughts and intricacies of feelings of each of her characters. Her descriptions are sublime. She builds up marvellous pasts for her characters and uses these to build friction and tension between them. The characters in Anderby Wold are all diverse and range from self-important Sarah and clumsy maid Violet to quiet John and keen-to-please Mary. Mary is intent upon being her own person in the village and not becoming like the women around her who fill their lives with empty chatter about ‘maids, their sisters… [and] the price of wool for socks’. Sarah is obstinate and disapproving and is unable to see the positive side in any given situation, but she is a vivid character from the outset. Even without Holtby’s character descriptions, one can imagine each of the people she has created as realistically as if they had just passed them by in the street.
The dialects used throughout are written well. They are not over-exaggerated and do not detract from what is actually being said. The conversations between characters are often amusing and, by the same token, incredibly heartfelt. Holtby’s choice of vocabulary and the order in which she puts them are often surprising. Among the best examples of this are a character who ‘bowed severely’ and ‘Mrs Toby’s four unattractive little daughters possessed the sole talent of acquiring infectious diseases’.
As in South Riding, many characters feature in the novel, some of them briefly and some throughout. Similarly, the sense of community is incredibly strong, and clashes exist between the people and the County Council as well as those of differing classes and social standings. Like South Riding’s Sarah Burton, Anderby Wold’s main protagonist Mary is a teacher. Both novels are stylistically and thematically similar.
Many themes gain prominence throughout Anderby Wold. These include ageing, family, presuppositions, the building of relationships, life and death, community, the notion of outsiders, altering perceptions, class and social change. Social nuances, many of them rather silly, are included throughout to build up a realistic feel of the period in which the novel is set. Anderby Wold is a many-layered book which intrigues and informs in equal measure.
Anderby Wold was Holtby’s first novel and was published in 1923. There is nothing old-fashioned about it, however. The issues which she addresses are still of interest to the majority and the characters which she has fashioned so lovingly are fresh and continually intriguing. The novel is a must read.
The plot of Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea so intrigued me that I could not wait to start reading. Mishima is an author whom I have been meaning to get to for years, and I am pleased that I have finally had the chance to read some of his work, despite not really enjoying it.
The novella takes place in Yokohama, Japan. I found the storyline rather odd, and very creepy indeed. A young boy, Noboru, has been schooled in sexual practices by ‘the Chief’, the head of his group of privileged schoolfriends. He sees nothing wrong or shameful in secretively watching his mother sleep with a man, a sailor, whom she has only just met, through a hollow space in the wall between their bedrooms. He then delights in telling his friends all about what he has witnessed – behaviour which I personally find incredibly weird. The novel was also a little too erotic at times for my personal taste. One of the scenes in The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea, which details the murder of a cat, made me feel sick to my stomach. I had to skip the rest of the section with dealt with the murder, and then force myself to read on.
I did not personally warm to any of the characters, and I really came to dislike young Noboru for all of his horrid and odd actions. He was cold and calculating, and uttered one untruth after another. The emotions of the protagonists particularly jolt around a little too much at times, rendering their actions and reactions rather unbelievable. The way in which the relationship between Noboru’s mother, Fusako, and the sailor, Ryuji, develops appears to be rather rushed on the whole. Some of the technical details – about sailing, or the stock which Fusako’s mother keeps within her shop – are a little wearing after a while, and do not add anything whatsoever to the story.
In The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea, Mishima makes use of all five senses beautifully. In so doing, he is able to build up incredibly vivid scenes in the mind, and creates a marvellously sensuous novella in consequence. I loved his descriptions at times, but this, when coupled with my dislike of the story, renders me unable to give the novella anything more than two stars. I will be reading more of Mishima’s work in future, as he is an author who has very much intrigued me, but I am hoping that he has penned some books which are not quite so graphic in their scenes.
On the whole, this novella was far darker than I imagined it would be. Whilst I did not enjoy it overall, Mishima has still crafted a tale which I will be unable to forget for a long time to come.
To celebrate Persephone Books’ one hundredth publication, the publishing house have issued a new volume of short stories, all of which have been written by female authors between 1909 and 1986.
Of the included stories, ten are taken from volumes already published by Persephone, ten have been previously featured in their Biannually Magazine, and ten have been ‘selected especially for this collection’. Each tale is ‘presented in the order they are known, or assumed, to have been written’, and the year has been printed after the title and author of every story, which is a rather useful touch. In fact, the entire volume has been very well laid out, with an accessible author biographies section and a well-spaced contents page.
The collection is a wonderfully varied one and features authors from all walks of life. There are many British and American authors, as well as others from further afield – New Zealand-born Katherine Mansfield, Pauline Smith, who spent her childhood in South Africa, Irene Nemirovsky who grew up in Kiev and spent many years in Paris, and Frances Towers, who was born in Calcutta. The Persephone Book of Short Stories begins with Susan Glaspell’s 1909 story ‘From A to Z’ and finishes with Georgina Hammick’s 1986 offering, entitled ‘A Few Problems in the Day Case Unit’.
The stories woven into the collection are as varied as the authors who wrote them. They encompass every aspect of life in their perfectly crafted portraits. There are first jobs, first loves, marriages, affairs, illnesses and death, and these are merely the more obvious themes which float upon the surface.
The protagonist in the beautifully written vignette ‘From A to Z’ by Susan Glaspell is a young girl named Edna Willard, who spent her senior university year ‘hugging to her mind that idea of getting a position in a publishing house’, and is then discontent when this dream is realised. In Pauline Smith’s tale ‘The Pain’, we meet a South African couple who have been married for fifty years, brave in the face of the wife Deltje’s illness. Smith describes the way in which Deltje has ‘a quiet, never-failing cheerfulness of spirit in spite of her pain’, and the story is beautifully and sensitively realised. In E.M. Delafield’s ‘Holiday Group’, we meet a kindly and rather patient reverend, who struggles to take his young and rather demanding family – his wife Julia ‘had gone on being blissfully irresponsible until she was quite grown up’ and has a particularly selfish streak – to the seaside.
Some of the authors in The Persephone Book of Short Stories are more well-known than others, but all share common ground in the way in which they all deserve to be read on a wider scale than they currently are. The balance of longer and shorter stories works incredibly well, as do the differing narrative styles, which range from the third person omniscient perspective to interesting streams of consciousness. Hopefully, this lovely volume of short stories will inspire readers to seek out other novels and short story collections by the authors which they enjoy in this collection. Each story in The Persephone Book of Short Stories is like a small but perfectly formed work of art, and the book is sure to delight a wealth of readers.
Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000), says the blurb of Hermione Lee’s new biography, ‘was a great English writer, who would never have described herself in such grand terms’. Lee adds to this, stating that ‘her novels were short, spare masterpieces, self-concealing, oblique and subtle’. Fitzgerald won the Booker Prize for her novella Offshore in 1979, and I am certain that great swathes of her fans have looked forward to the publication of a book which focuses solely upon her life. The author named Lee as a biographer whom she admired, and so it seems fitting that she was tasked by Fitzgerald’s own family to immortalise their beloved Penelope in such a way.
Fitzgerald first became a published writer at the age of sixty, and did not reach the dizzy heights of fame until she was an octogenarian. She became the author of ‘nine short novels, three biographies, some remarkable stories, many fine essays and reviews, and many letters’. Lee states that throughout her writing, Fitzgerald: ‘wrote about her own life, but kept herself carefully concealed’. Lee has split the biography into eighteen different chapters, which range from ‘Learning to Read’ to ‘Last Words’. The writing style which is used throughout has been stylistically rendered as though to fit a novel, in that it is ultimately pretty, and has clearly been well thought out. In this sense, the wealth of information which has been presented throughout does not seem at all dry, and is not difficult to absorb.
Fitzgerald had rather a sad beginning. She was born in the middle of the First World War, in which her father was ‘shot in the back by a sniper at the Battle of Passchendaele, [and was] then found in a shell-hole in a pool of blood’, and her maternal grandfather passed away when she was just two years old. At the start of the book – as with most biographies which set out the lives of the ancestors of their subjects – there are rather a lot of people introduced, and it is necessary to flip back and forth between the text and the extensive family tree which has been included at the beginning of the volume. Fitzgerald hails from, says Lee, an ‘exceptional and eccentric clan’, who ‘left a strong mark upon her life and her writing’. In the Knox family, ‘everyone was publishing, or about to publish, something’. Indeed, there are some famous names in her extended family – the author Winifred Peck is an aunt, her father Eddie wrote for Punch, and her stepmother was the daughter of E.H. Shepard, most famous for illustrating the Winnie-the-Pooh tales. Her mother, too, contributed to the English Literature Series, which published ‘editions of annotated, abridged, classic texts’.
Quotes have been included throughout, both from Fitzgerald’s books, and the letters of her family and friends. Lee also paraphrases a lot of Fitzgerald’s work, which gives a real feel for the inspiration she took from her own life and interests, and subsequently fed into her fiction. The entirety is sprinkled with Fitzgerald’s memories – The Poetry Bookshop in Bloomsbury, where she distinctly remembers an afternoon reading of Walter de la Mare’s poetry (‘he was the man who had written Peacock Pie. That was enough’); of being sent to prep school in Eastbourne, an experience which she hated; being taught at Somerville College, Oxford, where she was given lectures by both J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis; her first job at Punch, writing film reviews; her move to the BBC during the Second World War; becoming married: ‘To Hampstead neighbours, to friends and colleague, they seemed an enviable, talented couple with the world at their feet’; hardships, and her teaching career.
Penelope Fitzgerald is an admirable biography, and one which has evidently been thoroughly researched down to the last detail. Lee excels at her craft, and it is no wonder that the subject of this biography so admired her. Whilst reviewing Lee’s earlier book, Virginia Woolf, Fitzgerald wrote: ‘Lee’s book is not only very good, but very necessary’. The same can surely be said here.
I read this again recently, and was charmed by it all over again.
Rumer Godden’s The Lady and TheUnicorn, which was first published in 1937, is the 630th entry upon the Virago Modern Classics list. As with The River and The Villa Fiorita, both republished by Virago at the same time, The Lady and The Unicorn includes a well-crafted and rather fascinating introduction penned by Anita Desai.
After setting out the author’s childhood, lived largely in India, Desai goes on to write about the influences which drove Godden to write over sixty acclaimed works of fiction, for both children and adults. Desai states that Godden ‘cannot be said to have been ignorant, or unmindful, of her society and its role in India. In no other book is this made as clear’ as it is in this one, a novel written ‘in the early, unhappy days of her first marriage’. Desai then goes on to write that ‘the contact with her students [at the dance school which Godden opened in Calcutta], their families and her staff taught her a great deal about the unhappy situation of a community looked down upon both by the English and by Indians as “half-castes”‘. The Lady and The Unicorn faced controversy upon its publication, with many English believing her ‘unfairly critical of English society’, and others viewing ‘her depiction of Eurasians’ as cruel. Her publisher, Peter Davies, however, deemed the novel ‘a little masterpiece’.
The Lemarchant family are Godden’s focus here; ‘neither Indian nor English, they are accepted by no-one’. They live in the small annex of a fading ‘memory-haunted’ mansion in Calcutta. The widowed father of the family is helped only by ‘auntie’ and a servant of sorts named Boy, an arrangement which causes misery for all: ‘There were so many ways that father did not care to earn money that the girls had to be taken at school for charity and the rent was always owing… No matter how badly he [father] behaved they [auntie and Boy] treated him as the honourable head of the house, and auntie complained that the children did not respect him as they ought’. The way in which the family unit is perceived within the community is negative, and often veers upon the harsh: ‘The Lemarchants are not a nice family at all, they cannot even pay their rent’ is the idea which prevails.
The three daughters of the Lemarchant family could not be more different; twins Belle and Rosa are often at odds with one another, and the youngest, Blanche, is treated no better than an outcast. Blanche is described as ‘the family shame, for she was dark. Suddenly, after Belle and Rosa, had come this other baby like a little crow after twin doves. Auntie said she was like their mother, and they hated to think of their mother who was dead and had been dark like Blanche. Belle could not bear her, and even Rosa was ashamed to be her sister’. Of the twins, Godden writes that Rosa, constantly overshadowed by her twin sister, ‘could never be quite truthful, she had always to distort, to embroider, to exaggerate, and if she were frightened, she lied’. The family in its entirety ‘were sure that Belle was not good, and yet at home she gave hardly any trouble; it was just that she was quite implacable, quite determined and almost fearless… Belle did exactly as she chose. When she was crossed she was more than unkind, she was shocking’. The divisions within the family therefore echo those which prevail in society.
The sense of place is deftly built, particularly with regard to the house in which the Lemarchants live: ‘There was not a corner of the house that Blanche did not know and cherish, all of them loved it as if it were their own; that was peculiar to the Lemarchants, for the house did not like its tenants, it seemed to have some strange resentment’. Of their surroundings, of which the girls know no different, Belle sneers the following, exemplifying her discontent: ‘We know a handful of people in Calcutta and most of them are nobodies too. What is Calcutta? It is not the world’. There is not much by way of plot here, really, but the whole has been beautifully written, and the non-newsworthy aspects of the girls’ lives have been set out with such feeling and emotion.
The Lady and The Unicorn is a captivating novel, which captures adolescence, and the many problems which it throws up, beautifully. Part love story and part coming-of-age novel, Godden is shrewd throughout at showing how powerful society can be, and how those within it often rally together to shun those ‘outsiders’ who have made it their home.
The Vet’s Daughter, which has been turned into both a play and a musical, has just been reissued by Virago, along with two of Comyns’ other novels, Sisters by a River and Our Spoons Came From Woolworths. The novel was first published in 1959, and as well as featuring an introduction written by Comyns herself, this new edition contains an introduction by Jane Gardam, who sets the scene of both the author and her work very nicely indeed. Gardam calls this, Comyns’ fourth work, her ‘most startling novel… the first in which she shows mastery of the structures of a fast-moving narrative… [It] is not about “enchantment”, it is about evil, the evil that can exist in the most humdrum people’.
The opening line alone is intriguing: ‘A man with small eyes and a ginger moustache came and spoke to me when I was thinking of something else’. Our narrator, Alice Rowlands, lives in ‘a vet’s house with a lamp outside… It was my home and it smelt of animals’. Her father’s tyrannical cruelty is present from the first page. When describing her mother, Alice says, ‘She looked at me with her sad eyes… Her bones were small and her shoulders sloped; her teeth were not straight either; so if she had been a dog, my father would have destroyed her’. In fact, many of the similes throughout are related to animals – for example, ‘holding up her little hands like kitten’s paws’, and ‘her lifeless hair… was more like a donkey’s tail’. An unsettling sense of foreboding is built up almost immediately, and much of this too has some relation to the animals which fill the house and surgery: ‘Before the fireplace was a rug made from a skinned Great Dane dog, and on the curved mantelpiece there was a monkey’s skull with a double set of teeth’, and ‘The door was propped open by a horse’s hoof without a horse joined to it’.
Alice is seventeen years old, and her present life in ‘the hot, ugly streets of red and yellow houses’ in London is interspersed with memories of her mother’s upbringing on a secluded farm in Wales. Alice’s dreams, which far surpass her sad reality, consist of the following: ‘Some day I’ll have a baby with frilly pillows and men much grander than my father will open shop doors to me – both doors at once, perhaps’. Alice and her mother are both terrified of her father – her mother tells her daughter that ‘He was a great and clever young man, but I was always afraid of him’ – and his presence fills the novel even when he is away from home: ‘We heard Father leave the house and it became a peaceful evening, except that we had a mongoose in the kitchen’. The fact that her father is even mentioned in the book’s title demonstrates the level of control he has over her. To add to their troubles, Alice’s mother becomes ill. Desperate Alice laments somewhat over her fading life, telling us that, ‘I felt a great sorrow for her and knew that she would soon die’, and ‘Autumn came and Mother was still dying in her room’. Her father, as is to be expected, exhibits his usual cruelty when faced with the news; he sends a man in to measure his wife for her coffin whilst she is still alive.
Throughout, Alice is an incredibly honest narrator. One gets the sense that we as readers see her world exactly as she does, and that nothing has been altered before it reaches the page. All of the characters throughout feel so real, and Comyns has built them up steadily and believably. Their actions do not feel forced, which demonstrates Comyns’ deftness of touch. Whilst The Vet’s Daughter is a sad novel – well, a novella, really – what sadness there is is interspersed with humour and wit. The balance between the two has been met beautifully. For example, just after Alice’s mother’s death, Comyns describes the way in which ‘Already the parrot had been banished to the downstairs lavatory, and in its boredom had eaten huge holes in the floor’.
Tumultuous relationships between characters are portrayed with such clarity of the human condition throughout the book, and the story is both powerful and memorable in its tale and its telling. Alice faces more challenges than the average teenager, but her strength of mind and the way in which she always tries to make the best out of a bad situation endear her to the reader. Her honesty shines through, particularly as her story progresses: ‘I wrote a letter to Blinkers. Although it wasn’t very long, it took me two weeks to write because it was the first one I’d ever written – there had been no one to write to before’. The Vet’s Daughter is a beautifully and sympathetically written book, which takes many unexpected twists and turns, and presents the reader with a story which is likely to stay with them for an awfully long time.
I thought that it would be a good idea to create a blog post about all of the books which I adored as a child, and naturally, there are many of them. I have used my Library spreadsheet (a big list of all of the books which I’ve read during my lifetime) as inspiration.
The Big Surprise (Topsy and Tim #2) by Jean Adamson – I used to read the Topsy and Tim books religiously when I was in infant school, and they were the first books I got to when I moved myself up a reading group, much to my parents’ amusement. In my infant school library, we had a series of wooden boxes on legs, and each of them was painted in a different colour. The books within each had a corresponding coloured sticker upon their spine. When I had made my way through the colour which I had been assigned, I would move myself up so that I had more books at my disposal. I think, in this way, that I reached the books for the most advanced readers when I was still in the middle of Year One. I also learnt recently that Jean Adamson is a relatively local author to me, and I would have found such a fact terribly exciting when I was younger. Topsy and Tim is a lovely series of books, and this was my particular favourite.
Funnybones by Allan Ahlberg – This book had an accompanying cartoon, which I am sure that many people of my age still remember the opening rhyme to. The concept was quite simple: in a dark, dark town, in a dark, dark street, in a dark, dark house, in a dark, dark cellar, lived three skeletons – Big Skeleton, Little Skeleton, and their dog. Each story featuring the trio was so fun, and I loved the illustrations. Even though the very idea of living skeletons who enjoy playing tricks on people seems a little odd to me as an adult, something about it really worked, and for this reason, Funnybones and the rest of the books in the series will definitely be read (and the cartoon shown) to my future children, who will hopefully find it as amusing and memorable as I still do.
The Bear Nobody Wanted by Janet and Allan Ahlberg – Janet and Allan Ahlberg were my literary heroes when I was small, and I loved reading all of their books. The Bear Nobody Wanted is one which remains vivid in my mind. The story begins as a sad one, but it has a delightful ending, and it certainly made me treasure my soft toys all the more.
The Jolly Postman, or Other People’s Letters, The Jolly Pocket Postmanand The Jolly Christmas Postman by Janet and Allan Ahlberg – I still remember these books with such fondness. Each had a plethora of small envelopes inside, in which there were tiny letters which the Jolly Postman was delivering all around town. I am certain that the stories would still absolutely delight me as an adult, and I am very excited about the possible prospect of re-reading them far into the future.
Each Peach Pear Plumby Janet and Allan Ahlberg – Definitely one of the most adorable simple picture books that there is. I vividly remember reading it over and over again before I could even read its words.
Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen – I still absolutely adore these tales, and was lucky enough to drag my boyfriend around the Hans Christian Andersen Museum in Copenhagen last year. I cannot pick a favourite story as I did love so many of them, but as it is still essentially wintertime, I shall say that ‘The Snow Queen’, and its beautiful television adaptations, is at the very pinnacle of my treasures list.
The Lighthouse Keeper’s Lunch by Ronda and David Armitage – Such an absolutely charming book, which I remember adoring. I found out last year that there is an entire series of these books, and am hoping that my library has them all in stock so that I can joyfully discover the Lighthouse Keeper all over again.
The Flower Fairies by Cicely Mary Barker – It goes without saying that I absolutely adored these books. Which little girl didn’t? I would happily gaze at the illustrations for hours, and read the lovely accompanying rhymes.
The Complete Brambly Hedge by Jill Barklem – Surely the most adorable series of books, Brambly Hedge centered around a group of woodland creatures who wore the most adorable clothing, and were real characters in themselves. I am longing to rediscover these lovely tales once more.
Peter Panby J.M. Barrie – Quite honestly, I could gush about this charming book for hours. If you haven’t read it before, please, go and do so. It is beautiful, magical and filled with adventure – for me, the very cornerstones of marvellous children’s literature.
Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans – Everyone who knows me tends to know how much I absolutely adore the Madeline books, and Madeline herself as a character. These tales are all told in rhyme, and centre upon a children’s orphanage in Paris, in which Madeline lives with eleven other little girls and their guardian, Miss Clavel. Bemelmans’ illustrations are utterly charming, and he effortlessly captures the excitement and adventure which his little heroine encounters along the way.
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