a gallimaufry

some short reviews

Time has passed and I haven’t written here.

I’ve been busy gardening...

...collecting some odd eggs from the hens...

...releasing a frog back into the wild (don’t be like Some People in my family and bring them home, leave frogs be where you find them)...

...attending to the whims of cats...

...and actually working too.

I have also been reading! But since my reviewing energies are all focused on preparing something for Shiny New Books, I thought I’d just mention some other books briefly here.

• Bath Tangle, by Georgette Heyer – If Heyer ever wrote an anti-Heyer novel, this is it. Her hero is so atrocious that you are simply begging the heroine not to marry him, quite opposite from the usual dynamic. He shares characteristics with some of her other, more likeable, heroes, but here we see only the dark side of them. Arrogant, rude, snobbish, bullying and guilty of sexual assault if not worse (his crime is alluded to in rather vague terms), Rotherham has not one redeeming feature and after reading this I doubt you will be able to look at Avon, Beaumaris and Alistair quite so indulgently ever again.
  (Though I did always worry about Avon and Léonie, even as a teenager that struck me as rather a dodgy relationship...)
• The Immaterial Murder Case, by Julian Symons – A rather brittle but engaging spin on the detective novel which pokes fun at the art establishment. Immaterialism is an art movement that believes in the value of what is not there, so the subject of a painting is what is omitted from it. During the opening of an exhibition of Immaterial art Stephen Follett, a universally loathed art critic, is found murdered.
  The case is narrated in turn by one of the suspects, a fairly dreadful amateur detective and a professional detective, somewhat in the manner of the multiple narratives of The Moonstone. The comedy is occasionally a little heavy-handed but I enjoyed Immaterialism a lot.
• Waiting for Willa, by Dorothy Eden – I started this hoping for something Mary-Stewartesque and it had a good premise: Grace receives a letter from her cousin Willa, who now lives in Stockholm, which is signed with their childhood code for ‘help’. When she arrives in Sweden, Willa has vanished.
  Overlooking the rather leaden writing and uninspired characterisation I read on but the dénouement was disappointing and basically everyone was an idiot. The only surprise was Grace’s callous victim-blaming at the end. Eden seems to have been very popular so perhaps this is not representative of her work?
• The White Witch, by Elizabeth Goudge – I read this over quite a long time as it has a slow pace and bears being put down and picked up again well. It’s a historical novel set during the English Civil War, and explores how a group of characters are tested by the conflict: Robert Haslewood, the squire; Froniga, his cousin and the white witch of the title; and Francis, a nobleman masquerading as an artist in order to spy for the Royalists.
  Goudge shows how courage on the battlefield is only one sort of courage, and that those without much power – children, women, gypsies, the elderly – are no less brave than the rich men who are prepared to die for their ideals. It was very soothing while Brexit madness was whirling about and a helpful antidote to cynicism.
• Gingerbread, by Helen Oyeyemi – As ever Oyeyemi’s work defies expectations, categorisations, and cleverly seduces you into accepting whatever she throws at you. A country that may or may not exist? Gingerbread that tastes like revenge? A childhood friend who might be secretly influencing every step of your life?
  I can’t even begin to summarise this novel and am still reeling from finishing it last night, it’s rich, playful and mysterious to the end.
• The Diaries of Sylvia Warner, edited by Claire Harman – I am slowly reading these for Sylvia Townsend Warner week and they are wonderful.

Friday evening and a glass of wine are calling. Happy weekend everyone! Have you read any of these books? What did you think of them?

my blog’s name in books

This is the latest bookish meme to be doing the rounds and never one to let a bandwagon pass by, I’ve decided to join in. The idea is that you raid your TBR and find titles whose first letters spell out your blog’s name. It is considerably more fun than what I’m supposed to be doing this morning (finalising the organising of our school’s trip to Canterbury). Karen and Faye have both done it, which is where I read about it, although it apparently originated on Fictionophile.

So I have just frittered away quite a bit of time scouring my bookshelves for unread books, since I don’t keep TBR separate from my other books (this has disadvantages as well as advantages). I abided by the Literasaurus Variation which forbids the inclusion of titles beginning ‘The’ unless under ‘T’ (thus The King of Ireland’s Son is a T not a K under this rule). I actually thought I’d have to cheat on this one when it came to the letter Y, but then I rediscovered Geoff Dyer! And to my surprise, I had several candidates for I and even U; R proved more of a challenge. A was also a little difficult as I had to find three books beginning with A and I seem to have made a concerted effort to read any possible contenders. But hurrah, I succeeded, here is A GALLIMAUFRY spelt out in unread books and featuring poorly lit photographs. Bet you can’t wait.

A Thatched Roof, by Beverley Nichols – I’ve never read this because it’s a sequel and I don’t have its predecessor, Down the Garden Path. But I know that one day I shall. It seems to be an alluring combination of autobiography, house restoration and pottering about, and it’s illustrated by Rex Whistler (which is why I originally blew £3.99 on it).

Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England, by Juliet Fleming – back in the day, I studied for an MA at the University of Kent and intended to continue and study for a PhD, in preparation for which I bought this book. But then I moved to Belgium and had a baby instead. Dusting this down I see just what a fascinating topic it discusses: graffiti, tattooing and inscriptions on jewellery, clothing and other objects in the early sixteenth century. ‘These are writing practices that invite us to imagine a world in which writing and drawing were not fully distinguishable, the page was not an important boundary, and modern assumptions as to what constitutes literacy, either in writing or in reading, were irrelevant.’ Must read it.

A Lost Lady, by Willa Cather – I couldn’t resist the title when I bought this, in Charing Cross Road I think, for a pound a very long time ago. I had also recently read The Song of the Lark and wanted to read more Cather. As yet, I haven’t read this. This description on the Penguin web page is enticing.

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of his Age , by Dava Sobel – this was one of several little books (there was a history of cod, there was one called Nathaniel’s Nutmeg) about scientific history that were bestsellers in the 1990s. It includes ‘basic astronomy, navigation and the science of clocks’. As ever, I am amazed that I haven’t read this yet.

Love in a Bottle: Selected Short Stories and Novellas, by Antal Szerb – I love Antal Szerb but this little book and The Queen’s Necklace are the only published works of his that I haven’t read yet, and for some reason I don’t want to have read everything and have no more new Szerb to look forward to. A bit silly of me, perhaps? But since I don’t actually own a copy of The Queen’s Necklace, I could probably safely read this and still know there’s more Szerb out there.

Inferno, by Auguste Strindberg – this copy is intriguingly stamped ‘Denmark House, Long Melford, Suffolk, England’ and came from a second-hand bookshop somewhere in Suffolk, I no longer remember which one. It’s one of four autobiographical works Strindberg wrote. In this one, ‘Strindberg passed through a series of spiritual crises which took him to the verge of madness’. He started carrying out research in what he called chemistry but the jacket flap of this edition refers to as alchemy, through which he hoped to alleviate his poverty. He also believed himself to possess supernatural powers and was involved in the occult. This looks bonkers and also sad.

Make-Believe, by Elizabeth Goudge – this contains eight stories about the du Frocq family from Goudge’s novel Island Magic; I have the impression that it is not one of her greatest works but I am always happy to read her stories about or for children and there are pictures by Walter Hodges in it, what more could one ask?

Artemisia, by Anna Banti – unlike some of the other books here, I haven’t owned this one for long. ‘Written in 1947, Artemisia immediately established itself as a classic. At the centre of the book is Artemisia Gentileschi, a painter influenced by Michelangelo and Caravaggio. [...] The closer Anna Banti gets to her subject the more she is forced to reflect on the condition of women today and on her own life in German-occupied Italy. In doing so she elucidates the nature of art, femininity and the creative experience.’ I bought this on the internet; the cover is certainly not doing it any favours.

Up the Country: Letters from India, by Emily Eden – Eden’s brother George was Governor-General of India and in 1836 she went out to join him. She spent six years there, two of which were devoted to touring the country, during which time she wrote many ‘delightful’ letters to her sister. According to the back-cover blurb, she has ‘an unfailing eye for the eccentric and picturesque’.

Farmer’s Glory, by A.G. Street – all right, I bought this aeons ago principally for the illustrations, which are woodcuts by Gwen Raverat. It is dedicated to Edith Olivier, who apparently encouraged Street to write his book. Street was the son of a tenant farmer and turned to writing to supplement his income during the agricultural depression of the 1920s and 1930s. He writes in his author’s note: ‘This book is simply an attempt to give a pen picture of farming life in Southern England and Western Canada’ and it seems that it is lightly fictionalised autobiography.

Romola, by George Eliot – has any living person read this novel and actually enjoyed it? I bought it during the height of my Eliot love in the 1990s before the internets existed and were filled with people deriding it. I can’t believe she wrote a bad book. Or did she?

Yoga for People who Can’t be Bothered to Do It, by Geoff Dyer – I could not walk past a book with a title like that, though as yet I am a person who can’t be bothered to read it. From the back cover: ‘Part string of stoner anecdotes, part memoir, part travelogue, part philosophical treatise, part comic tour-de-force [...]’ ‘Reading Dyer [... is] akin to the sudden elation and optimism you feel when you make a new friend, someone as silly as you but cleverer too, in whose company you know you will travel through life more vagrantly, intensely, joyfully.’

Have you read any of these? Any recommendations? Should I finally consign Romola to the charity shop?

The Joy of the Snow, by Elizabeth Goudge

I am one of the fortunate for I have never lived in a place that was not beautiful, and if at the end of my life I appreciate roses more than snow it was not the case at the beginning. Then, in company with all children and most dogs, I thought snow the wonder of the world. The snow-light filling the house with magic as the white flakes drifted down in windless silence, the splendour when the sun came out and hills and fields and trees sparkled under the arc of blue sky, the thought of the things one did in the snow, tobogganing and snow balling and building a snowman; it was all ecstasy. And somewhere tucked away at the back of one’s mind was the knowledge that every crystal in the vast whiteness, though too small for the human eye to see, was fashioned like a flower or a star. How could snow not be the wonder of the world?

It was not myself as a child but the daughter of a friend of mine who gave me the title for this book. Her mother, accompanied by the dog Coach, had ploughed her way through a deep fall of snow to fetch her youngest home from nursery school. The hard going had been a weariness, the cold a misery to the flesh. Ploughing back again, her youngest attached, a small voice sang out beside her, ‘Look, Mummy! Look at Coach and the joy of the snow!’ Coach was leaping and rolling in the snow, his yeys like stars, his tail a banner. The little girl’s eyes were as bright as his, her face pink inside her hood. She glowed like a flame. Coach glowed. The mother for a few moments looked at the snow through their eyes and the earth had not smutched it.

I hadn’t realized that Elizabeth Goudge had written an autobiography until I read some excerpts from it quoted on Terri Windling’s lovely blog, Myth and Moor. Goudge wrote it in her seventies when she had finished writing novels, and it was first published in 1974. It both is and isn’t what one might expect – as sensitive to beauty and nature as her novels, drily humorous, yet also distinctly unforthcoming about many private matters and quite oblique about her writing. It is also very self-deprecating. But she explains her purpose at the beginning:

[...] this book is hardly an autobiography, it is more an attempt to recapture happy memories and with them some of the joy in places and people that I have known, and to share them. And to share, too, some of the conclusions I have come to about life and work. Neither will be in the least exciting and so my hope for this book is that it will be a good bedside book, and keep nobody awake.

and this is a delightful memoir, glowing with the enchantment of her childhood memories, her joys and her love of the natural world.

Elizabeth (it seems a bit impolite to call her Goudge) was born in 1900. Her father was vice-principal of the Theological College at Wells; her mother had wanted to be a doctor: ‘Interested in anatomy as she naturally was she carried human bones about in her handbag and tipped them out upon the seats of railway carriages when looking for her ticket.’ Agreeing to marry Dr Goudge was difficult: ‘She did not want to give up studying to be a doctor and if she had to marry the very last man she wanted to marry was a clergyman.’ Shortly after Elizabeth’s birth she had a bicycling accident which left her an invalid for the rest of her life; despite this she lived to an advanced age and seems to have been a remarkable person.

(Watercolour of Wells Cathedral, anonymous twentieth-century artist, ca 1920; found here)

Elizabeth laments that she finds it easier to love places than people and her evocations of her childhood homes and her holidays with her grandparents on Guernsey, are wonderfully and vividly recounted. Her descriptions of St Peter’s Port, the cathedral close at Wells, the wonderful Harewood House (Damerosehay) and the lush Devon countryside will be instantly recognisable to readers of her fiction. Some of her real life found its way into her novels. Every Christmas, her father insisted that she choose some of her old toys and give them to poor children; this episode is used in Sister of the Angels (I think) – however, if, like me, you were a selfish child and chilled to the bone to read of Henrietta’s giving away her favourite doll, you may be heartened to know that the real child Elizabeth was not quite as self-sacrificing of her most beloved toys. Elizabeth’s great-uncle, William, emigrated to New Zealand and wrote back to Guernsey to ask the wrong sister to marry him, which forms a major plot point in Green Dolphin Country. It’s nice to spot these moments.

(Rose Cottage, where Elizabeth lived with her friend Jessie 1952–84; found here)

Despite her lament, it is very clear that Elizabeth loved many people in her life and she recreates those of her childhood with great vividness and affection. If she is discreet about any romance she experienced, or about people who are still alive, that is perhaps part of the greater value her generation placed upon privacy. It doesn’t prevent the memoir from being truthful in the best sense, and I derived from it a very strong sense of who she was and what had shaped her. She was clearly a very humble person, and not at all greedy. When the film rights to Green Dolphin Country were sold, it was reported in the press that Elizabeth would receive a very large payment for this – and she panicked at the horrible thought of all that wealth and was heartily relieved when taxes ate up almost all of it.

(Photograph of Elizabeth, undated, from Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings)

Elizabeth mainly deals with her work as a novelist in one chapter (significantly entitled ‘Storytelling’, rather than ‘Writing’), in which she answers the questions readers most often ask her. Even then she doesn’t write a great deal about the process of writing, although later in the book she does remark of The White Witch ‘I like the book, it is one I actually enjoyed writing’, which suggests that it was not an unalloyed pleasure. She does write movingly of depression and her faith, and her attempts to reconcile suffering with her love of God. She also writes about ESP and her belief in fairies, ‘not fairies as seen in the picture book but nature spirits whose life is part of the wind and the flowers and the trees’. But it is her Edwardian childhood that she captures most vividly, in my opinion, and for which she remains nostalgic. This memoir shines with Elizabeth’s sensitivity to place, her great kindness and sympathy, her feeling for the magic of life and her joy in detail, both in nature and in people.

And now I am sure I am remembering not what was there but what I thought was there. A locked door and a key in one’s hand, and the power to unlock the door and pass from one world to another, is enough to send any child’s imagination off at the gallop. [..]

Now what I am sure was not there was the thick dense wood into which the door opened after I had turned the key. Nor do I think that a door could have been set not in a stone wall or wooden paling but in the living wall of the wood, a dense wall of twisted briers and plaited branches, thickset with crimson thorns and pointed leaves as firm and hard as onyx and chrysopase. One opened the door, went through it and beyond was the darkness of the wood. [...]

The darkness of that wood has fallen upon every memory except one of the gardens through which I ran to reach Mrs Kennion in the Long Gallery. I know that they were beautiful but I have only that one memory. It is of a mossgrown garden path arched over by nut trees in full leaf, the green moss a soft carpet under the feet, the cool green leaves making the place as secret as a shrine. There is no one to be seen but an ecstasy is alive under the trees. But did I really run along that path?

(I have written about The Joy of the Snow for Lori’s Elizabeth Goudge Day.)

phyllis & elizabeth

I have recently been sent two pieces of news of a bookish nature, and it seemed churlish of me not to share them.

(Phyllis Shand Allfrey, from the missing slate)

A while ago now, I wrote about The Orchid House by Jean Rhys’s compatriot and friend Phyllis Shand Allfrey.  This week Polly Pattullo, who is the publisher at Papillote Press, wrote to tell me that they have re-issued The Orchid House, and published a collection of her short stories It Falls into Place and a collection of her poetry. Now there is no excuse not to read her! Papillote Press specialises in the work of Dominican writers and their list is intriguing.

Fans of Elizabeth Goudge may not yet be aware that the Elizabeth Goudge Society website has been overhauled and updated. It looks great!

(Elizabeth Goudge, photograph by Bassano Ltd, 1934; London, National Portrait Gallery)

Now I am off to enjoy the weekend with a glass of wine and Variable Cloud (Carmen Martín Gaite, translated by Margaret Jull Costa). This is a novel which had lain about unread and unloved for twenty years and was almost taken to the charity bookshop when I had a small clear-out in August. But its time had come! And it is excellent.

The Valley of Song, by Elizabeth Goudge

When Lory first announced that today would be Elizabeth Goudge Day, I thought what a splendid idea it was and wondered what I might read to join in. I have had my grandmother’s copy of Green Dolphin Country sitting unread on my shelves for a while. But then I just happened to be fiddling around on the internet as one does and just happened to see that Miss Goudge (I can’t imagine she’d have cared to be referred to as ‘Goudge’ or ‘Elizabeth’) had written a children’s book I’d never heard of before, The Valley of Song. It seems it ran to only one edition (in 1951) and copies of it are rather expensive. However, this review by Lory intrigued me, so I sold my first-born and purchased the cheapest copy I could find. The stakes were fairly high: was this book worth selling my child for?

The story is set in about the 1830s or 1840s in the Hard, a small town on the river which makes its living building ships. Tabitha Silver, fat, cheerful and kind but often naughty, jumps out of the classroom window when Dame Threadgold’s back is turned and runs off to the yard to visit her friend Job, an elderly wood-carver. But Job is depressed, for work has stalled on the tea clipper which was being built for for the East India Company, since the money for it has run out. At dawn the next morning, Tabitha takes him off, accompanied by the Master Builder’s dog and some snails, out of the town and into a secret, quarry ‘all overgrown with travellers’ joy, honeysuckle, sweetbrier, rowan trees and hawthorn [...] the perfect children’s playground’, where a tiny door leads to the Valley of Song. There they find the Workshop, where all the world is made, and they ask for wood to finish building the ship. In subsequent visits, Tabitha and other characters explore some of the wonderful parts of the Valley of Song and request more materials so that they can complete the ship. Of course, things from this magical world are finer than anything in ours and what they are given is very special: silken cloud for the sails, Vulcan’s gold for the hull’s casing. The workers of the Hard are delighted to be able to use them. They create the most beautiful ship ever seen.

That is the plot: there isn’t any real conflict or tension, the delight of the book lies in its marvellous descriptions of the world of the Valley of Song. It’s a place where nothing hunts or kills anything else, and encompasses woods and meadows, beautiful gardens, the sea and the mountains. It’s watched over by the creatures of the Zodiac, and inhabited by the Good People, who are fairies, gnomes, dwarves, etc., and the Great Ones, who seem most like angels. Children can enter this world, and so can animals and birds and fishes, but grown-ups can only do so if they are children at heart and usually even then only in their dreams. However, children can bring such grown-ups with them. There are many ways in and out of the Valley of Song, through dreams but also through forge fires, wells, stables and even kennels.

The Valle of Song is not, however, Heaven. There is, at its highest point, a Crystal Door which is the entrance to Heaven and the Dead pass through it:

Below them the slopes of ice and snow fell away so steeply upon either side that the great gorges and crevices beneath were filled with shadow, like a purple sea from which the ice peaks rose like islands. Gliding over the sea, in and out between these islands, were wonderful sailing-ships with billowing sails, pearl-coloured and filled with light. [...] They were great ships, yet they sped forward as airily as though their sails were made of thistledown. The wind that carried them was still soundless, and the shadowy waves they rode made no whisper. The silence was vast and deep. [...] She ran after [Simon], turning by a tower of ice and finding herself running uphill upon a path that was narrower and more dangerous than ever. But she was not conscious of the precipices because the great cloud-ships had risen up from the depths below and were sailing upon either side of her. If she could have stopped, she believed she could almost have touched their lovely shining sails. She could not stop, but as she ran she was gloriously aware of the beauty close beside her, and aware too of hidden decks below the sails thronged with people. Shiploads of people were sailing along beside her, people who out in the world were called dead [...]

An important link between the Hard and the Valley of Song is the value of work, specifically, of crafting. The whole of the Valley of Song is dedicated to making things that for our world, while life in the Hard revolves around building ships:

‘It is hard work to build a ship,’ said Anthony. ‘It is hard work to plant a garden. It is hard work to make a world. But only in workshops are men happy.’

The love and joy that people have in making things is transmitted to the objects they make and they acquire a sort of life. This happens most clearly with the ship. Tabitha and Job are standing on her skeleton when they feel her come alive: ‘It seemed to Tabitha that a sudden shiver passed through the planks benath her feet, a tremor like the rising of sap.’ The work ethic is a very Protestant value, but here Elizabeth Goudge is I think taking it further to say that what we create takes on a part of our selves and our lives and makes them something more than just inanimate objects. I suppose it’s a sort of animism. I think I wrote before about a generous pantheistic quality to her spirituality, and that is evident here in her feeling for the life of things but also for the importance of the Zodiac in the Valley of Song and the existence of fairies alongside angels. I think she has a kinship with C.S. Lewis and Narnia, as well as with George MacDonald (as Lory has rightly pointed out); she certainly has a talent for creating amazing worlds you long to visit.

For the Valley of Song is just so wonderfully beautiful and so perfectly described, with a sensitivity to inner as well as outer beauty. I would like to quote chunks of it at you all day. For instance, there is this exquisite and poignant passage about the experiences in the Valley of Julie, the wife of the Master Builder, whose children all died in infancy:

Never in her life had she longed for anything so much as she longed to come to that country. She could see it clearly now, violet-shadowed golden hills and deep blue valleys, fields of rosy flowers and orchards of silver-leaved trees with golden fruit, and above them the shining snows with the stars among their domes an peaks, and long gleaming slopes of white where surely angels paced. [...] The globe of light about her was dissolving, but the starry children were holding her hands and she was running with them down the blue slope of the sky. And then their cool hands loosed hers and she was running alone down the golden slope of a hill to a deep blue misty valley filled with singing. The hill-side beneath her feet was soft as a cloud yet firm with unconquerable joy, and in case the joy of this country should at first be more than she could bear, the merciful air below her hid the treasure of the valley while she ran to it.
    It took her and held her for a moment, as her mother might have done, and then set her down upon a path of silvery moss that led through a long aisle of those silver-leaved trees, long and narrow like a silver lance of joy, and at the far end of the aisle she saw as through a doorway a meadow of rosy flowers and children playing there. She ran and ran, and she blessed the length of the aisle, because at every step she took the piercing of this silver lance of joy grew easier to bear. She ran on [...]

(I love ‘a silver lance of joy’.)

Was The Valley of Song worth the price of a child? Oh definitely. (Actually I didn’t sell my child. I love books but not quite that much. Not quite.) I can see that its appeal to children, even in 1951, might be limited because of the lack of a compelling plot and the lengthy descriptions; but I do hope that it will be reprinted because I am sure that a lot of older readers would enjoy this enchanting and very special book.

Thank you Lory, for hosting this Elizabeth Goudge Day and prompting me to discover The Valley of Song!

The Little White Horse, by Elizabeth Goudge

If you have noticed that my reading of late – the little I’ve actually mentioned here – inclines towards children’s books, you’d be right. I consulted my list of books read, and this year I’ve only managed seven ‘grown-up’ books (not including Barbara Kingsolver’s Lacuna, by which I really did try to do my duty but within whose pages I just couldn’t find anything to interest me, sorry Barbara) – and twenty-seven ‘children’s’ books (if you include The Nutcracker). And the latest of these is The Little White Horse, a childhood favourite I last re-read only a couple of years ago – and yet I’d forgotten so much of it.

[Sir Benjamin said,] ‘In our family, Miss Heliotrope, we spell Wrolf with a W, for we are of Viking ancestry and great fighters.’

‘Yes,’ sighed Miss Heliotrope. ‘When Maria was little, I had great trouble in getting her to eat rice pudding.’

Those who are going to read The Little White Horse have probably already read it. Unless they are still a small child. It’s a delightful story about the reconciliation of opposites (female and male, night and day, moon and sun, good and evil) suffused with a rather pantheistic High Anglicanism I mentioned when I wrote about another of Goudge’s books, Linnets and Valerians). In fact, I would go so far as to say it’s a righting of Adam and Eve’s transgression in the Garden of Eden, but with a girl as the redeemer and the place as England. The orphaned Maria Merryweather is sent to live with her cousin, Sir Benjamin Merryweather, in a beautiful Devon valley quite secluded from the rest of the world. It is a bucolic idyll, there is even a Paradise Hill upon which stand the ruins of a monastery. However, all is not perfect: the Black Men who live in the pine forest steal sheep and lambs (and other, less Biblical things, like cider and cake), and the Merryweather family lives with the consequences of pride and greed (which sins were also the causes of the Fall). Female curiosity (for which Eve was blamed) is a vice which must be conquered if Maria is to right past wrongs and restore peace and harmony to the valley. The presence of, among several intelligent and helpful animals, a lion and a unicorn who assist Maria in her task gives a specially English flavour to it all, I can’t help but think of Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’, the re-imagining of Christ’s story in England.

(C. Walter Hodges, illustration of Maria, Wiggins and Miss Heliotrope in a carriage, The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge, London: University of London Press, 1946; found here)

Accompanying Goudge’s trademark humour are luscious descriptions of food. All the Merryweathers take their food seriously, and the power of a shared meal to reconcile plays its part in Maria’s dealings with the Black Men. The novel (almost) ends, as I shall, with the masterpiece of meals, Maria’s wedding feast:

The white-iced wedding-cake was the size of a cartwheel at its base and was six feet tall, mounting up like a pyramid. It was decorated with sugar flowers and fruit and birds and stars and butterflies and bells, and right at the very top there was a tiny sickle moon and a tiny sun enclosed within a silver horseshoe. There were lots of other kinds of cake, of course, and every possible sort of sugar biscuit and iced bun, and all the different kinds of sandwiches it is possible to think of, and dishes of candied cherries and crystallised ginger and sugared almonds and chocolates. And there were jellies and creams and syllabubs and ices, and hot coffee and iced coffee, and tea and lemonade and sherbet, and mulled claret and champagne.

Everybody had lots to eat and drink, and everyone enjoyed it, but nobody ate or drank too much, because they did not want to spoil this happy day by having aches in their insides later on; they wanted this day to be happy right through to the end.

Epiphany

(Three kings, from a Nativity set made by the Women’s Multipurpose Co-operative in the Philippines, from the flickr site of mlsj)

I was going to write today about Twelfth Night, a favourite festival of mine even if I never celebrate it, but I have just learnt from Wikipedia that Twelfth Night is actually the 5th January! So I’ve been mulling over misrule and merrymaking on the wrong day for years! Oh horror.

I do hope that you have all enjoyed the holidays. I had really a perfect Christmas – as many sparkly lights, over-excited small children, board games, glasses of sherry and slices of cake as anyone could desire. We arrived back in England in time for the carols from King’s, without which no Christmas Eve could be quite complete for me. I also attended a magical puppet show (‘The Magician’s Daughter’, by the Little Angel Theatre) with two spellbound little girls, and along with my father and brother discovered the delights of Metaxa, only fifteen years after I brought the bottle back from a Greek holiday (it was the first spirit to be consumed in space don’t you know). I also continued my Iris Murdoch binge. I am really devouring them, not bothering to think about them particularly (sorry, Iris, you deserve better I know). I think my favourite so far is The Nice and the Good, but I haven’t thought about why. Any other fans out there? Which ones do you like most – and which do you think are the best?

Back in Belgium I was able to make space for and unpack many of my childhood books. Unpacking and arranging books is always pleasing, but this time I was able to wallow nostalgically in memories of the person I was aged about eight or so. Seeing those faded Puffin paperbacks sitting there all together, I thought how much they had shaped my view of the world, and I suppose they continue to do so. Tomorrow the real world intrudes once more and it’s back to the teacher-training course, of which I have been feeling more and more scared as the holiday progressed, ridiculous as I know it’s not that bad. But setting out my books the other day, I couldn’t help but feel that Joan Aiken, Elizabeth Goudge, Susan Cooper, C.S. Lewis, Lloyd Alexander, Penelope Lively, Diana Wynne Jones – they had my back. Onwards!

Linnets and Valerians, by Elizabeth Goudge

I loved Elizabeth Goudge’s books as a child – in particular, The Little White Horse – but I hadn’t heard of Linnets and Valerians until recently (thanks to a review here). I started reading it one mizzly grey day and thereafter could hardly leave the sofa to feed my daughter, speak to my partner, etc. etc. Nothing lifts the heart like an Elizabeth Goudge novel.

Written in 1964 but set in 1912, this is the story of the four Linnet children (Nan, Robert, Timothy and Betsy) who, locked up as punishment by their exasperated Grandmama and her companion (the Thunderbolt), escape to the garden rubbish heap:

Behind the hedge the sky was a bright blue. It dazzled the eyes and got inside the head and exploded there as a wild desire for wings, so that one could take off and soar up into it. There was a bird up there who had done just that, and his song came down to the earth he had left in a clear fall of music that was lovelier than anything the children had ever heard...

So it’s up over the hedge and off, their dog Absolom trotting along behind them. As dusk falls, they find a pony and trap outside a pub and ‘borrow’ it; the pony takes them back to his home, up on the moors. By great good fortune this home belongs to the children’s uncle, a vicar and retired schoolteacher, who lives there with his long-suffering factotum Ezra (who dances drunk in the moonlight), a dyspeptic owl named Hector, Andromache the cat and several hives of bees. Despite his gruff exterior (‘If there’s one thing I dislike more than a child, it’s a dog’) Uncle Ambrose takes in the children and loves them, and they adore him.

Exploring the village the children encounter wickedness, in the shape of shopkeeper Emma Cobley and her horrible cat Frederick, old Tom Biddle and the Lawsons, who run the pub. They also find the Lady Alicia, a recluse in an overgrown manor house, who has never recovered from the loss of her son. The children must play their part in vanquishing the evil and healing the tragedies of the past, and everything ends satisfactorily as it should.

Part of the great charm of Linnets and Valerians is the dry humour which weaves through it and prevents the good characters from being unattractive:

But in the library, with newspaper spread on the table and the boots and shoes arranged in rows, it transpired that Uncle Ambrose had cleaned shoes as a boy and had not forgotten the trick of it. He showed Timothy exactly how to set about it and he cleaned away himself with great concentration. Hector paced up and down the table like Napoleon on the deck of the Bellerophon, the cover of the tin of polish in his beak.

‘Manual labour,’ said Uncle Ambrose, holding up his right-hand Sunday boot and admiring the shine he had got upon it, ‘can be of great assistance in the development both of intellectual and spiritual powers.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Timothy dutifully, rubbing away at Betsy’s indoor strap shoes.

‘The Cistercian monks are agriculturists,’ continued Uncle Ambrose, ‘and all great saints either dig or cook according to sex or temperament.’

‘We aren’t digging or cooking,’ said Timothy.

Uncle Ambrose looked at him over the top of his spectacles. ‘Do you consider that you and I are great saints?’

‘No, sir,’ said Timothy.

‘I am glad to find you possessed both of humility and observation,’ said Uncle Ambrose. ‘Pass me the brown polish.’

Goudge is also very good at evoking place, and at writing about lonely people. But what really marks out her work is that it shimmers with spirituality and with the sense of other realities brushing up against our own, in particular a moral dimension. Here is the passage where Betsy is in Linden Manor and pursuing the monkey Abednego, who has run off with her doll Gertrude:

The door closed itself behind her and she was in darkness. She ran and ran, and felt as she ran that the strange dark tunnel was taking her right into the heart of a mountain. She forgot this was a house. Now and then a faint glimmer of light suggested that other tunnels led off to right and left, but she kept straight on because she very soon became so frightened that she could not stop. She was brave, but she thought she heard long swift loping footsteps padding up behind her and she pictured some creature rather like Abednego, but more horrible, reaching out for her with furry paws. She very soon forgot about Gertrude and even about the others and home, she forgot about everything except the hairy creature coming behind her. Then she tripped over something and fell headlong. She did not hurt herself, partly because she was so well cushioned with fat and partly because she fell on something soft, but she was startled and for a few moments she could only lie still with her face pressed against the softness.

Then she heard not the footsteps of the hairy creature but a soft humming, and it was so familiar and reassuring that immediately all the fear went out of her and she sat up and opened her eyes, and the first thing she saw was a slanting sunbeam, and slowly and happily revolving in it, as though bathing their wings in the gold, were three bees. It was not total darkness about her now, but a dim green underwater light with the sunbeam slanting through it, and she thought at first that she was sitting on thick green moss in a cavern in the mountain. Then she realized that this must be a house after all because she was sitting on a green carpet.

The halls and passageways of the manor transform themselves into something alien and terrifying where a monstrous creature preys. One might say that Betsy’s internal state has engulfed her but in the context of the rest of the story, what happens is ‘real’. The manor, site of grief and what is past, is vulnerable to Emma Cobley’s magic and frequently stalked by Frederick (who is no ordinary cat and can suddenly grow immensely big). The bees protect Uncle Ambrose and those in his house, their harmonious and hard-working society a model for human society (I think this is a medieval trope in fact). In times of need or when one of the Linnets is unsure of where to go, a trio of golden bees appears to guide them. As such they surely represent God’s Trinity. Goudge’s magic is very Christian, Anglican, rather, with a strong sense of good, evil and duty; but also broad-minded, encompassing Pan, fairies and witchcraft in its world view as all part of Creation. Linnets and Valerians is just a lovely novel, I am only sorry that I never read it as a child.