Posted in My World, tagged My World on October 8, 2012| Leave a Comment »
My daughter’s roving band of feathered foolish ones.
“Turkeys on the grass, alas!”
This is a farm, so I needn’t go into their ultimate fate for those of you with sensitive sensibilities. These handsome creatures lived a short but on the whole happy avian life, as evidenced by their presence very much out of the barnyard, foraging for fallen crab apples, and slugs and other delectables in the garden.
Carpe diem, all.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Posted in 1920s, Read in 2012, Stevenson, D.E., tagged Stevenson, D.E., Vintage Fiction on October 6, 2012| 3 Comments »
Peter West by D.E. Stevenson ~ 1923. This edition: Isis Publishing, 2007. Hardcover. Large Print. ISBN: 978-0-7531-7824-9. 213 pages.
My rating: 6.5/10. Very much reads like a first novel, which it is. The author tries hard, and ultimately succeeds, in telling her soberly romantic little story. I had been warned not to expect much from this obscure first work, but I was pleasantly surprised by its readability once I learned to navigate the flowery language and the bits of Scots dialogue from the local lassies, crones and crofters.
A point off for the constant references to the heroine’s figurative gossamer wings. Urgh!
Also lost a point for excessive use of the convenient plot device of the random hand of death. Deus ex machina, dear author? Please don’t make that a habit!
This was now-esteemed and very collectible romantic fiction writer Dorothy Emily Stevenson’s first published novel. According to the BOOKRIDE rare book guide website, it was first released in magazine serial form.
Bookride, 12 February, 2007:
‘Peter West’ is the first of over 40 novels by the popular writer. Her sister married into the Chambers publishing family, and Ms Stevenson got this novel serialized in ‘The Chambers Journal’, and published by them in book form in 1923, but it wasn’t a success. Dorothy Emily Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1892, she was related to Robert Louis Stevenson, who was her father’s first cousin. She was 24 when she married Captain James Reid Peploe of the 6th Gurkha Rifles in 1916. Created the immortal characters Mrs Tim and Miss Buncle published by Herbert Jenkins. Can find nothing on ‘Peter West’ except that it is much wanted and highly elusive.
Almost ten years were to pass before D.E.Stevenson’s second novel was published. Mrs. Tim of the Regiment, 1932, inspired by Stevenson’s personal diary as an army wife, proved much more successful and is one of the very few of her forty-odd books currently in print.
But we want to talk about Peter West. Apparently it is quite obscure, though the copy before me, obtained from my local library, is a very recent (2007) large print edition from Isis Publishing, so there must be a few of these in circulation. The following review contains spoilers, so if you want to search out Peter West for yourself and be surprised, stop reading now.
*****
Dedication by the author:
Dedicated to all who love Scotland, her tears and smiles, her dark woods and sunlit moors, and the plain and homely folk in the lonely villages of the north.
And the first few paragraphs of the Prologue, to give you a taste of the author’s descriptive style:
Mr. Maclaren loved Kintoul. Ever since he had come there, nigh on twenty years ago, the place had “grown on him,” as the saying goes. It had seemed a paradise of rest and quiet to the town-weary minister – a place where a man might regain health and strength of mind and body; where a man might forget the ugly striving and pushing of the city, and steep his very soul in the peace of God.
It was, on the whole, an easy thing to fall in love with Kintoul. There was something alluring about it, something mysteriously feminine. Even in the depths of winter, when the pure white snow covered all the hill-side, hanging on the pine-trees like fleecy blankets, and the river (the only non-white thing in the whole valley) ran like a narrow snake between jagged ice – even then there was something soft about Kintoul. The hills were friendly sentinels for all their rugged crests; the long dark nights were lighted by misted stars; the very snowflakes seemed to caress one’s cheek as they fell.
When spring came, soft, blustery winds blew primroses and cowslips into the sheltered hollows, still moist and green from the late melting of the snows. Soft white clouds drifted across the blue, blue sky, throwing patches of moving shadows on the newly awakening hills.
Summer brought long. drowsy days – days which seemed to have forgotten how to fade into night; when the emerald turf paled to a soft dun colour, and heather bloomed like a purple mist under the golden sun.
Autumn came as a king in the full panoply of state, and, in a single night of frost the hill-side glowed with colour like the dream of a demented artist. Here rowan and beech, with their clashing tones, mingled harmoniously, and the dark unchanging pines stood like quiet tokens of immortality among the gay but transitory foliage of their neighbours. And over all was the mist, the cool, soft white mist, lying sometimes in the valley hollows, sometimes capping only the hills, eddying hither and thither, and enhancing the beauties of the landscape by revealing them afresh and unexpectedly through rents in its clinging folds.
The stage is set, and in this idyllic scene Mr. Maclaren muses and reminisces about a certain local romance which he has taken a great interest in. Romantic Mary Simpson, lovely young daughter of Mr. Maclaren’s predecessor as Kintoul’s church minister, fell in love with the rough and ruggedly handsome John Kerr, ferryman at the river crossing. Against her parents’ wishes Mary married John, and found all of their dire predictions coming true. Sheltered Mary was unprepared for John’s practical and brusque ways. Mary found herself in the unenviable position of being shunned by her former friends, who felt she had lowered herself by her marriage to a common working man, and viewed with suspicion by the villagers as having stepped down out of her proper class and therefore not adhering to the proper social code. Poor Mary “did her duty” as a wife, had three children, and then died of a decline – a “bruised heart” – when her youngest child, her only daughter, was eight years old.
Elizabeth – Beth – is that daughter, and she is the focus, along with the titular Peter West, of this story. Turns out that Mary, and then Beth, were befriended by a local upper-class Englishwoman, Prudence West, who recognized “something unusual” in the young Beth. When Prudence died, her son Peter, sensitive and gentle, and the possessor of a “bad heart” which precluded normal manly activities, carried on his mother’s patronage of young Beth. (I must add here that I stopped to do the math, and as this story starts Beth is sixteen, and Peter thirty-five. You may wish to remember this as the tale progresses.)
So here we have “sprite-like” Beth and sensitive Peter, thrown together by circumstances with predictable results. Beth’s father John is deeply suspicious of the “meddlings” of Peter, and when the opportunity to arrange his daughter’s marriage to a neighbouring farmer arises, he pushes his daughter into an early wedding. Beth, who has experienced a dawning suspicion of romantic love for Peter, is apathetic and goes to the church without a fuss, because Peter has become romantically involved with another woman, and Beth has witnessed a scene of passion between the two (they kissed!) which has left her stunned and heartbroken.
I’ll back up a bit to explain. Peter is possessed of a bossy elder sister, who occasionally descends upon him and makes a great ruckus and meddlement in his affairs. She has suspected an attachment with the unsuitable village girl, so she has brought along a lovely young woman to distract him; her ultimate goal is to marry Peter off to a bride of her choosing, and she quickly succeeds.
Peter’s new wife, the former Natalie Horner, is not quite the lovely, intelligent, playful creature she appears to be. Apparently she is heir to a family curse of insanity, and she also has a wee bit of a drinking problem. Peter learns of this too late, and he does the best he can with his wife, though her quick descent into full-blown depression shocks and saddens him. Eventually she runs into the night and tragically perishes in the river. Peter returns to his solitary life, giving up hope of romance and steeling himself for whatever the future brings. (The weak heart seems to be ticking along not too badly, by the way.)
Meanwhile Beth’s abusive husband Alec and her harsh-mother-in-law Mrs. Baines have between the two of them almost broken the spirit of sweet little Beth. She eventually runs away and ends up in Peter West’s study, where the two of them have a poignant scene and finally admit their mutual attraction. Beth is offered a way out of her difficult situation by another older man, Brownlow Forth, who was once in love with her mother, Mary, and has since cherished a deep interest in her daughter. Brownlow is in the neighbourhood staying with Mr. Maclaren, and while visiting Peter he becomes enmeshed in the dilemma of Beth’s desertion of her husband, and offers to take her to London to get a job and live independently though under his (Brownlow’s) protection.
So off they go in the night, leaving the village agog with Beth’s mysterious disappearance. Peter is eyed suspiciously, as his affection for Beth and hers for him are naturally well-known to the local gossips, but as Beth is not anywhere in evidence, he stands up to investigation and the rumours die down.
Fast forward a few months, and a flu epidemic strikes peaceful Kintoul. Both Beth’s father and husband are stricken, and Beth, hearing of this, returns at once to care for her now-remorseful father. She pulls him through, but Alec, weakened by his self-indulgent lifestyle, succumbs.
Their first spouses handily disposed of, Peter and Beth are now free to resume their interrupted courtship. The novel’s ending is not quite as expected, though it will satisfy the most romantic-minded of readers, and I will leave that a secret, though I’ve given away most of the high points of the plot already.
A fast little read, and full of melodrama and romantic situations – perfect serial fare.
Rather a solemn story, missing the humorous touches of D.E. Stevenson’s later books, but I thought it a quite respectable first novel, and a more enjoyable read than I had first anticipated. I’m glad it was a short one, though – that was definitely a point in favour!
Recommended for the D.E. Stevenson fan who would like to check off every one of her books from their reading list, but probably not a good sample of her larger bibliography, and not a place to start for the fledgling Stevenson reader, unless they are willing to take a leap of faith and trustily go on to the much more light-hearted Mrs. Tim and her literary descendents.
Posted in 2000s, Read in 2012, tagged Chick Lit - Ick, Yawn on October 6, 2012| 3 Comments »
A
Hidden Life by Adèle Geras ~ 2007. This edition: Orion Books, 2008. Paperback. ISBN: 978-0-7528-9394-5. 439 pages.
My rating: 3/10. I made it halfway through, right up to the you-could-see-it-coming-from-Chapter-One lesbian love scene, and I speed-scanned the rest just to make sure I wasn’t missing any unforeseen developments. I wonder if the author was paid by the word? This book just went on and on and on. Every prediction I made came out bang on, and the ending was so! gaggingly! upbeat! it! made! me! want! to! scream!
Such a disappointment. I had high hopes for Adèle, having heard good things about her YA novels, in particular Ithaka. But this one was a definite miss. I wish I had my two hours back. I’m going to cut my losses and give a very quick un-review, then into the Sally Ann box – not going to waste any space on this one.
Not completely horrible, hence the generous “3”, but the author could do so much better with every aspect of this attempt.
From the back cover:
When Constance Barrington dies, she leaves behind a wealthy estate and a complex family network. But when the whole family gathers to hear her last will and testament, they are in for a terrible shock. Constance – possessed of a long memory and a spiteful disposition – altered her will shortly before her death. The new provisions are far from fair; some benefit hugely and others hardly at all. Constance’s granddaughter, Louise, is bequeathed the copyright for her late grandfather’s novels (barely remembered, long-since out of print and valuable only as a reminder of the man she loved). It is a paltry inheritance and one that comes to symbolise the inequity at the heart of the Barrington family. Soon, old family feuds and long-hidden resentments come to the surface, and with them, secrets start to emerge. But it is through Louise’s inheritance – those dusty, long-forgotten books – that the most explosive secret of all will come to light, bringing with it a very different future for her and the rest of the family.
Sounds promising, yes?
The reality: no.
The Barringtons and their friends, enemies, in-laws, ancestors and descendents are all a bunch of damp whiners. Even the infidelity and the “passionate” love scenes are yawn-making, and almost everyone is sorry in the morning. A contrived happy ending for one or two of the favoured ones; a final poke in the eye for the vindictive Constance, watching from her celestial cloud.
The in-text excerpts from the grandfather’s prison camp book, “Blind Moon”, were indescribable. This is not a compliment. Constance was right. Her husband wrote dreck.
This is a book for a waiting room, or possibly, if nothing else is about – an old People or Vanity Fair magazine would be more enticing – for the beach or poolside. Go ahead – get it wet! That’s its natural state, I’m afraid.
Many apologies to those of you who may be Geras fans. Feel free to talk me around – I don’t like to dislike books – it makes me feel all prickly and glum.
Posted in My World, tagged My World on October 4, 2012| 8 Comments »
Hello, dear fellow bookish friends. I would love a little input, if you feel so moved.
As some of you may have gathered from previous occasional comments, I provide books for my very frail, completely house-bound, 87-year-old mother. We happily share some of the same reading tastes, though she tends to be more tolerant of – how shall I put it? – more romantic, or uplifting books than I, and completely uninterested in anything smacking of historical fiction, memoirs, non-fictional travel or history (unless it’s local history, and she knows some of the people referred to), fantasy, sci-fi, satirical humour, or dark realism, which eliminates a huge percentage of my personal library for sharing with her.
Joanna Trollope, Maeve Bianchy, Mary Stewart, and their ilk all find favour, as do such authors as Miss Read, Monica Dickens, Daphne du Maurier and Pearl S. Buck. Classic mystery writers such as Agatha Christie, D.L. Sayers, Patricia Wentworth and Ngaio Marsh are acceptable, and I do believe I now have most of each one of those authors’ large production! She’s read and re-read everything even vaguely suitable from my collection, and with winter coming on, with its long, dark evenings, I’m racking my brains for new authors for her to explore and enjoy.
Yesterday, while trying to pick out some likely to be appealing books, I remembered someone on some blog I frequently read speaking quite highly of Rosamunde Pilcher, and – lo and behold! – there were quite a number to choose from in the several secondhand bookstores I visited. So I’ve purchased a few – The Blue Bedroom (short stories), The Empty House, Another View, and September.
Today I’ve dipped into all of them, reading a page here and there, and several of the short stories, and I’m just not finding them terribly appealing. Is it just me, or did I pick the wrong ones, or??? These seem very “romantic fiction”, in all the worst ways. Could it be just that I’m coming off a course of Elizabeth Taylor (whom Mother did not at all enjoy when I slipped a few into her last box), and haven’t yet lowered my expectations?
What’s the general view on Rosamunde? Am I wasting my time with her, or do I need to dig deeper with a little more tolerance? Are there some books that are better than others, and if so, which would they be? Obviously The Shell Seekers must be one, as it is referenced favourably on every single flowery cover, as is Coming Home.
Your Pilcher opinions and other author suggestions most welcome!
Posted in 2010s, My World, Poetry, tagged Canadian, My World, Poetry on October 3, 2012| Leave a Comment »
Posted in 1940s, Read in 2012, Taylor, Elizabeth, tagged 1949 Novel, A Wreath of Roses, Taylor, Elizabeth on October 2, 2012| 8 Comments »
A Wreath of Roses by Elizabeth Taylor ~ 1949. This edition: Penguin, 1984. Softcover. ISBN: 0-14-00.2587-1. 176 pages.My rating: Easily a 9/10 for the writing, perhaps a bit less for the dark mood it engenders.
Well, no, I don’t really mean that. There are abundant gleams of light. As a middle-aged person myself, fast approaching the half century mark, much in this novel resonated with me, and I felt a strong sympathy and emotional kinship for all three of the female main characters, “maiden, woman, and crone”, as another reviewer referred to them.
There are several excellent reviews on this early Elizabeth Taylor novel, only her fourth, which I’ve linked for your enjoyment below. Anything I have to say merely echoes what these others have said, so I won’t go into too much detail, or describe my response to this interesting novel except to say that I found it much more enthralling than expected.
Three women spend a summer holiday together year after year, but this visit highlights the inexorable march of time, and is one of those “years where everything changes” which happen to everyone from time to time; markers which we think of later in the context of “before” and “after.”
Frances, the eldest, owns the cottage where the three convene. A retired governess and a confirmed spinster, she has for years pursued a secondary career as a modestly successful painter. Liz, the youngest, was once Frances’ charge, and in the year past has married a much older clergyman and has borne a child, whose inclusion in the party is looked upon with something like apprehension by the adult trio. Camilla, a school secretary, is approaching middle-age; she too is a spinster, though not by choice; circumstances and her fastidious personality have left her out in the cold in the mating ritual, and her pride reinforces her smooth shell; she pretends not to mind her state, and the pretence is so finely wrought that she has begun to believe in it herself.
It is Camilla who has the most outwardly eventful time. Her journey to the cottage has been horribly punctuated by a suicide at the railway station; shaken out of her usual reserve, she has made the acquaintance of a handsome young man who turns out to be going to the same village. Claiming to be a writer on a trip of nostalgic research, it is soon apparent that Richard is not averse to weaving a web of lies about his past and present. Camilla is attracted to him and he returns her interest, to the concern of Frances and especially Liz, who sense something “off” in Richard’s manner and constantly shifting explanations.
All three of the friends are “paired up” as the summer progresses. Liz’s husband Arthur drops in from time to time, and Liz flits between her home and the cottage. Frances apprehensively prepares to meet a man who has been a long-time artistic patron and correspondent. Film director Morland Beddoes is himself uncertain as to whether the woman of his long-distance friendship will be the kindred spirit he yearns for.
As the various personalities clash with each other, self-analyze and readjust, the truth about Richard slowly becomes revealed, with deeply disturbing repercussions.
I must also add that Frances’ dog Hotchkiss is one of the most unpleasant canines I’ve yet met in literature. I suspect that Elizabeth Taylor was more of a cat person, as she uses feline comparisons in a rather favorable way in describing some of the characters, and incidentally gives a beautiful cameo appearance to a pregnant Siamese.
Check out the following for more detail and some very thoughtful analyses of this work:
Bentley Rumble: A Wreath of Roses
Laura’s Musings: A Wreath of Roses
Posted in 2000s, Read in 2012, Rosoff, Meg, tagged 2009 Novel, Rosoff, Meg, The Bride's Farewell, YA Fiction on October 1, 2012| 2 Comments »
The Bride’s Farewell by Meg Rosoff ~ 2009. This edition: Viking-Penguin, 2009. Hardcover. ISBN: 978-0-670-02099-7. 214 pages.
My rating: 7.5/10. A fast little read. Fairly typical “young adult” adventure-romance, but a well-written and nicely plotted example of its genre.
The author’s name sounded familiar, and looking on her list of previous titles I realize I already own and some years ago read one of her earlier books, How I Live Now. Must delve around for that one – it was quite different in setting – fictional post-apocalyptic Britain versus vaguely historical Industrial Revolution Britain.
I’m tagging this one “alternative world” because though the setting has many real world parallels, it doesn’t feel quite right in a historical sense; it is apparently set in the 1850s, but is almost medieval, or possible mid 1700s, in some of the incidents, and how the people think, talk and live. (Or maybe it is quite historically correct, and the disconnect is just my own take.) For much of the book I was wondering if this was perhaps set in post-modern times, in a newly primitive society, and that was even before I made the How I Live Now connection.
On the morning of August the twelfth, eighteen hundred and fifty something, on the day she was to be married, Pell Ridley crept up from her bed in the dark, kissed her sisters goodbye, fetched Jack in from the wind and rain on the heath, and told him they were leaving. Not that he was likely to offer any objections, being a horse.
Though Pell sincerely loves and respects her childhood sweetheart Birdie, she is repelled by the thought of what marriage means: a subservient position versus her present equality as Birdie’s tomboyish companion, a life of continual pregnancy and childbirth, and the speedy degradation of her body, as typified by her own mother’s sorry example. The morning of her marriage, Pell sneaks out of the family cottage with her few possessions, and accompanied by her horse Jack and her small mute brother Bean, heads into the unknown.
Pell has no real plan but to escape, though she feels that she might find employment at Salisbury Fair, so that is where she heads, narrowly missing discovery by her father who has headed there as well to seek out his errant children. An itinerant fire-and-brimstone preacher, Joe Ridley has a compulsive weakness for strong drink and womanizing, and his neglect of his family has been the root cause of Pell’s decision to flee.
Pell and Bean fall in with a fatherless Gypsy family, and meet with a certain amount of kindness from strangers during their days at Salisbury, though by the end of the fair this hopeful beginning has come to nought. Pell has been stiffed by the man who employed her to help choose some horses, and Bean and Jack have disappeared.
Bad turns quickly worse, as Pell desperately seeks her missing brother (and her horse); she eventually ends up spending the winter living in a shed beside a poacher’s woodland cottage. The poacher, never named but dubbed Dogman by Pell, is a mysterious, silent man who mostly ignores his desperate hanger-on, until she falls afoul of an amorous villager, whereupon Dogman rescues her, brings her into his home, and, inevitably, his bed.
The horse and the boy have their own adventures, and Pell eventually reconnects with both, as well as with two of her younger sisters.
Much angst, tragedy, and drama, and teasing gleams of romance. Pell of course has marvelous hidden abilities – a stereotypical necessity for a classic YA heroine – in her case an almost magical affinity for horses. This is a very horsey book, by the way. In quite a good way.
Suspend your disbelief – and oh, yes, you’ll need to! – and go along for the ride. Nicely diverting tale, for teens and adults. Rosoff gets my nod – good work. (Gorgeous cover, too.)
Posted in 1970s, Read in 2012, Short Stories, Taylor, Elizabeth, tagged 1972 Short Story Collection, Taylor, Elizabeth, The Devastating Boys and other stories on October 1, 2012| Leave a Comment »
The Devastating Boys and Other Stories by Elizabeth Taylor ~ 1972. This edition: Viking Press, 1972. Hardcover. ISBN: 670-27067-9. 179 pages.My overall rating: 7.5/10. Competently and beautifully written, this is a quietly memorable collection of subdued short stories, written between 1965 and 1972.
I’m not quite embracing the Jane Austen comparisons though, of which there are two from different reviewers on the dustjacket.
Elizabeth Taylor. Hmm. As a broad statement, I very much like her work, but I don’t indiscriminately love it, with a few stellar exceptions. A mistress of concise, clean and crisply descriptive prose, I find I enjoy her voice the best when she lets herself go with keen, wry humour. The detail she picks up on is one of her best qualities. Thinking a little more about this author, I do think that perhaps her short stories are her best work. Like hyper-detailed miniatures they allow us to focus intensely for brief time on the minutiae which too often blurs in a larger, more ambitious narrative.
Here’s what we have in this collection. I’ve included first paragraphs and a brief summary of each short story.
Laura was always too early; and this was as bad as being late, her husband, who was always late himself, told her. She sat in her car in the empty railway-station approach, feeling very sick, from dread.
It was half past eleven on a summer morning. The country station was almost spellbound in silence, and there was, to Laura, a dreadful sense of elf-absorption – in herself – in the stillness of the only porter standing on the platform, staring down the line: even – perhaps especially – in inanimate things; all were menacingly intent on being themselves, and separately themselves – the slanting shadow of railings across the platform, the glossiness of leaves, and the closed door of the office, looking more closed, she thought, than any door she had ever seen.
She got out of the car and went into the station, and walked up and down the platform in panic. It was a beautiful morning. If only the children weren’t coming, then she could have enjoyed it.
The children are two inner city six-year-olds, coming for a two-week country vacation to Laura and her university don husband. Nothing turns out as anticipated; the experiment refocuses Laura’s conception of her place in the world, and in her marriage. Unexpectedly upbeat ending. 8/10.
“England was like this when I was a child,” Gwenda said. She was fifteen years older than Polly, and had had a brief, baby’s glimpse of the gay twenties – though, as an infant, could hardly have been really conscious of their charms.
It was France – the middle of France – which so much resembled that unspoilt England. In the hedgerows grew all the wild-flowers that urbanization, ribbon-development, and sprayed insecticides had made delights of the past in the south of England where Gwenda and Polly lived.
Polly had insisted on Gwenda’s stopping the car so that she could get out and add to her bunch a new blue flower that she was puzzling over. She climbed the bank to get a good specimen and stung her bare legs on some nettles. Gwenda sat in the car with her eyes closed.
Gwenda acts as slightly simple, middle-aged Polly’s companion and guardian, and the trip to France is something of a journey into the past for Gwenda as the two retrace the course of Gwenda’s last journey with her late husband. An unexpected stopover in a French village gives Polly a chance to experiment with the pleasures of physical love, while Gwenda pursues her more sophisticated goals. The journey continues to its tragic (?) end. I quite liked this longish, rather rambling dual portrait. 7/10.
This Sunday had begun well, by not having begun too early. Jasper Jones overslept – or, rather, slept later than usual, for there was nothing to get up for – and so had got for himself an hour’s remission from the Sunday sentence. It was after half past ten and he had escaped, for one thing, the clatter of the milk van, a noise which for some reason depressed him. But church bells had begun to toll – to him an even more dispiriting sound, though much worse in the evening.
West Indian expatriate Jasper leads a starkly solitary life as a labourer in the “better” world of London. A poignant portrait of loneliness. 6/10.
The sunlight came through dusty windows into Miss Smythe’s Gown Department on the first floor of the building. Across the glass were red-and-white notices announcing the clearance sale. It was an early summer’s evening, and the London rush hour at its worst. Rush hours were now over for Miss Smythe, and she listened to the hum of this one, feeling strange not to be stepping along the crowded pavement towards the Underground.
In a corner of the department some of the juniors had begun to blow up balloons. The last customers had gone, and several of the office staff came in with trays of glasses. With remarkable deftness, as soon as the shop was closed – for the last time – they had draped and decorated Miss Smythe’s display counter, and they set the trays down on this.
The great store, built in the 1860s, was due for demolition. As business slowly failed, like a tide on its way out, the value of the site had gone on growing. The building had lately seemed to be demolishing itself, or at least not hindering its happening. Its green dome still stood with acid clarity against the summer sky; but the stone walls had not been washed for many years and were black with grime and dashed by pigeons’ droppings.
Fastidious, self-contained Miss Smythe prepares for her enforced retirement. 7/10.
Kitty Miller, wearing a new red hair ribbon,bounced along the vicarage drive, skipping across ruts and jumping over puddles. Visiting took up all her mornings during the school holidays. From kitchen to kitchen round the village she made her progress, and this morning she felt drawn towards the vicarage. Quite sure of her welcome, she tapped on the back door..
“Why, Kitty Miller!” said the vicar, opening the door. He looked quite different from in church, Kitty thought. He was wearing an open-necked shirt and an old, darned cardigan. He held a tea towel to the door handle because his fingers were sticky. He and his wife were cutting up Seville oranges for marmalade, and there was a delicious, tangy smell about he kitchen.
Kitty took off her coat, hung it on the usual peg, and fetched a knife from the drawer where they were kept.
“You are on your rounds again,” Mr. Edwards said. “Spreading light and succour about the parish.”
Kitty glanced at him rather warily. She preferred him not to be there, disliking men about her kitchens. She reached for an orange and, watching Mrs. Edwards for a moment out of the corners of her eyes, began to slice it up.
Precocious young Kitty is something of a disturbing element in her village, sharing her “innocent” observations and reporting happenings from house to house, cleverly pinpointing secret weaknesses and touching sensibilities on the raw. Perfect twist in the ending. Good one! 9/10.
Phyl was always one of the first to come into the hotel bar in the evenings for what she called her apéritif, and which, in reality, amounted to two hours’ steady drinking. After that, she had little appetite for dinner, a meal to which she was not used.
On this evening she had put on one of her beaded tops, of the kind she wore behind the bar on Saturday evening in London, and patted back her tortoise-shell hair. She was massive and glittering and sunburnt – a wonderful sight, Stanley Barrett thought, as she came across the bar towards him.
Middle-aged barmaid Phyllis has been sent on a solitary holiday by her husband to recover from a hysterectomy; she and widower Stanley inevitably draw together as kindred spirits among the more staid fellow members of their group tour to Malta. Taylor keeps just on the kind side of parody while painting a brutally honest picture of their brief “affair”. 8/10.
On a Thursday morning, soon after Mrs. Mason returned from shopping – in fact she had not yet taken off her hat – a neat young man wearing a dark suit and spectacles, half gold, half mock tortoise-shell, and carrying a rolled umbrella, called at the house and brought her to the edge of ruin…
Über-respectable Mrs. Mason’s skeleton in her closet is her long-ago cast-off sister, an author whose fanciful descriptions of their shared childhood brought writerly fame at the cost of familial shame. The young man in question brings up memories long buried, and casts Mrs. Mason into a state of panic. 6/10.
The hallway, with its reception desk and hat-stand, was gloomy. Madame Bertail reached up to the board where the keys hung, took the one for Room Eight, and led the way upstairs.Her daughter picked up the heavier suitcase, and began to lurch lopsidedly across the hall with it until Leonard, blushing as he always (and understandably) did when he was obliged to speak French, insisted on taking it from her.
Looking offended, she grabbed instead Melanie’s spanking-new wedding-present suitcase, and followed them grimly, as they followed Madame Bertail’s stiffly corseted back. Level with her shoulder-blades, the corsets stopped and the massive flesh moved gently with each step she took, as if it had a life of its own.
A newlywed couple, nervous, impulsive Melanie and methodical, staid Leonard, are traumatized in their separate ways by an overheard argument in the room next door in their French honeymoon hotel. 6/10.
A new motorway has made a different landscape of that part of England I loved as a child, cutting through meadows, spanning valleys, shaving off old gardens, and leaving houses perched on islands of confusion. Nothing is recognizable now: the guest-house has gone, with its croquet-lawn; the cherry orchard; and Miss Alliot’s and Miss Martin’s week-end cottage. I should think that little is left anywhere, except in my mind.
Looking back to childhood summers forty years ago, the narrator paints telling portraits of the summer visitors she came to know, in particular two schoolteachers, sincere and quiet Miss M. and heedlessly vivacious, manipulative Miss A. Devastating. 9/10.
On Wednesdays, after school, Sylvia took the bus to the outskirts of the nearest town for her music lesson. Because of her docile manner, she did not complain of the misery she suffered in Miss Harrison’s darkened parlour, sitting at the old-fashioned upright piano with its brass candlesticks and loose, yellowed keys. In the highest register there was not the faintest tinkle of a note, only the hollow sound of a key being banged down. Although that distant octave was out of her range, Sylvia sometimes pressed down one of its notes, listening mutely to Miss Harrison’s exasperated railings about her – Sylvia’s – lack of aptitude, or even concentration. The room was darkened in winter by a large fir-tree pressing against – in windy weather tapping against – the window, and in summer by holland blinds, half drawn to preserve the threadbare carpet. To add to all the other miseries, Sylvia had to peer shortsightedly at the music-book, her glance going up and down between it and the keyboard, losing her place, looking hunted, her lips pursed.
I’m not going to tell you anything about this one, except that it’s a perfectly crafted little shocker. 10/10.
Harry and Rose, returning to Mahmoud Souk, found it a great deal changed. Along the sea road there were neat beds of mesembryanthemum. There were lamp standards, too; branches of globes, in the Parisian manner. Four years before, there had been only a stretch of stony sand, a low sea wall, an unmade road. Now new buildings were glittering along the shore – a hospital, a cinema, a second hotel.
A young couple returns to a memorable holiday destination of the past, expecting a happy, nostalgic visit with their pet “locals”; they find instead that you truly can never go back again. While beautifully written as always, I did think this was perhaps the weakest story of this collection. 6/10.
Progress Report: 6/100
Leaves & Pages 