(Boats at Pin Mill, Suffolk)
With the beginning of September, Belgian teachers and students return to school like swallows to the south. Last week I squeezed into the tiny study, nearly breaking my neck on assorted heaps of books, to start preparing for the new school year. Quite how it will pan out, of course I do not know, although early signs indicate that a great deal more cleaning than usual will be involved.
So here I am at the computer again after a lovely summer. Despite lurking Covid-19, the horror of the explosion in Beirut and the absolutely disgusting re-emergence of immigrant hatred expressed by British politicians and public, I have enjoyed myself. I have even been travelling! And what is peculiar is that I have travelled more than usual (well, I did in July; since I came home I’ve barely left the house...).
First, we visited some friends in France, in the mountains near Chamonix. It was astonishingly beautiful! My daughter, who has never been in mountains before, went slightly crazy – it was a mighty contrast to the flat Flemish countryside.
Then, we took advantage of what turned out to be a relatively brief period of time when one could travel to the UK without quarantining, and visited my family for the first time since the world turned topsy-turvy. This was a strange but also happy experience.
(This is the house in Essex designed by Grayson Perry, which we peered at through the hedge.)
Back here in Belgium I have started going for a run a few times a week in a feeble effort to become fitter – and I do mean feeble: dog walkers overtake me as I wheeze along. Surely at some point I will (a) improve and stop looking such a wally and (b) actually start to enjoy the experience, aren’t there supposed to be endorphins involved somewhere?
I am also – roll of drums – taking driving lessons. After I passed my theory test a hundred years ago my husband said he would teach me to drive. Readers, this will surprise you, but our lessons were not a success. So now I am taking lessons from a proper instructor, who specialises in teaching weedy people who are scared of everything and don’t really want to learn to drive anyway. (That is me.) So far no one has died, although my heart did almost give out when we had to drive on the motorway last week. So. Much. Terror. And my instructor shouting, ‘You must drive faster Helen!’ when I swear my molars were flying out the back of my head there was so much g-force.
Naturally I have been reading... and here are a few books I read.
I am working my way verrrry slowly, for it is BIG, through Fiona McCarthy’s biography of William Morris. Morris attended the boys’ public school Marlborough College not long after it had been founded. It turns out that there was a massive riot there in 1851, ‘the Rebellion’, in revenge for disciplinary measures taken against boys for bullying peasants and dancing by moonlight; the boys went berserk and threw fireworks at the masters, trashed the school and marched on the local town. For weeks on end! They even burnt the headmaster’s manuscript copy of his translation of Sophocles! School life has become considerably duller since the mid-nineteenth century, perhaps for the best.
I am also working my way, less slowly, through She Merchants, Buccaneers and Gentlewomen: British Women in India by Katie Hickman. This is a fascinating book and if the beginning of term doesn’t kill me dead I plan to write about it here.
Some months ago I read an article by Samantha Shannon recommending Under a Pendulum Sun, a novel by Jeanette Ng. With such a splendid title I was reaching for my purse even before I saw that it is about Victorian missionaries in Fairyland, with strong Brontë overtones. The Revd Laon Helstone has travelled to Arcadia, land of the Fae, to convert the inhabitants to Christianity. When his letters to his sister Cathy cease, she goes in search of him but no sooner arrives in Arcadia than is pent up in the creepy house of Gethsemane. Cathy’s problem is as much ‘reading’ the land and its people as it is finding Laon and surviving her encounter with Queen Mab and her fairy court. Ng’s Arcadia is properly weird and her Brontë references add depth (her version of Jane Eyre’s first encounter with Rochester is particularly cleverly done). Either I or the book ran out of steam a bit at the end – me, probably – but I do recommend this anyway.
Back in the day Ruth Rendall was pitched as P.D. James’s rival to queen of crime writers. But for me, Rendall has always been superior: James is good at place but Rendall’s characters are acutely (dispassionately!) observed and even her monsters have a credible psychological depth to a degree that James never achieves. The House of Stairs is one of her Barbara Vine novels, and is narrated by Lizzie who, by chance, encounters Bell, a woman she had known in the 1960s who has just been released from prison. Feeling compelled to write down the experiences that led to that long-ago murder, Lizzie allows herself to be drawn back into Bell’s life due to a sense of complicity in what happened and with possibly yet further terrible consequences. You may consider it as a warning against reading too much Henry James...
So how was your summer?