Tea or Books? #126: Should Books Be Banned? and Lessons in Chemistry vs Dear Mrs Bird

Banned books, Bonnie Garmus and A.J. Pearce – welcome to episode 126!

In the first half of the episode, we discuss banned books – should books ever be banned? Does a book being banned make us want to read it more? In the second half, we pit two recent novels set in the mid-century: Dear Mrs Bird by A.J. Pearce and Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus.

You can get in touch with suggestions, comments, questions etc (please do!) at teaorbooks[at]gmail.com – we’d love to hear from you. Find us at Spotify, Apple podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. And you can support the podcast at Patreon. If you’re able to, we’d really appreciate any reviews and ratings you can leave us.

The books and authors we mention in this episode are:

Strangers May Kiss by Ursula Parrott
Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott
Spinsters in Jeopardy by Ngaio Marsh
Dear Octopus by Dodie Smith
How To Be Multiple by Helena de Bres
The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield
The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer
Barbara Pym
Day by Michael Cunningham
A Clergyman’s Daughter by George Orwell
The Vicar’s Daughter by E.H. Young
The Rector’s Daughter by F.M. Mayor

How To Be Multiple by Helena de Bres

When I discovered there was a new collection of essays out about the philosophy of twins, and that it was written by an identical twin, I couldn’t resist. Having tweeted my excitement, Manchester University Press kindly sent me a review copy – it’s been out in the US for a while (published on my and my twin’s birthday!) and is just out in the UK now.

You may well know that I have an identical twin, and that relationship is the most important one in my life. Of all the things I’m grateful for in my life so far, having the good fortune to be born a twin is right up near the top – I still can’t quite get my head around the idea of having a sibling who is a different age to you. Must be weird, huh?

I’m not sure I’d have raced towards a collection of twin essays written by a singleton, but I had confidence that I’d be in safe hands with another identical twin – and these aren’t objective essays written solely with academic philosophy in mind (though Helena de Bres is a professor of philosophy at Wellesley College, a liberal arts college in America). She draws deeply on her relationship with her own twin sister, Julia, who also illustrates the beginning of each chapter.

But what makes How To Be Multiple so interesting to me is that it goes beyond the twin’s point of view: this is about what twins tell us about identity in general. That comes across in the five chapter titles: ‘Which one are you?’, ‘How many of you are there?’, ‘Are you two in love?’, ‘How free are you?’ and ‘What are you for?’. It’s also about how the singleton’s gaze informs the ways in which twins are perceived and discussed.

So many of our cultural ideas about twins are driven by the perspectives and priorities of singletons. Given the numbers, maybe that’s inevitable, but it’s an unfortunate restriction on humanity’s intellectual resources. […] When twins aren’t treated as indistinguishable, they’re often cast as binary opposites, on one or more axes. One twin’s the Chaos Muppet, for instance, the other the Order Muppet; one’s the empath, the other the narcissist; one’s the tomboy, the other the femme. This tendency to binarize twins is rife in individual families, and in myth, art, and culture across the board.

Yes, Helena! The first chapter is largely about this binarising, and our broader human desires to define ourselves in opposition to other things – and to understand other people partly by understanding what they are not. The complexity and clever arguing of her chapters is too detailed to reproduce here, so I’m only going to be able to hint at the contents – but de Bres does a brilliant job in this first chapter at demonstrating how many of our anxieties about identity are crystallised in the way we treat twins. And by ‘we’ I mean, of course, ‘you’. Unless you’re a twin.

I’m going to slip little bits of twin autobiography into this post; hope that’s ok. Because I’ve certainly found that people fixate on the personality/interests differences between Colin and me, and make them loom larger than they do – and I’ve done the same thing myself as I’ve grown up. One studied English at university and one studied Maths? One loves football and one hates it? One is vegetarian and one chooses pizzas based on ‘what has the most meat on it’? There are definitely areas where we are miles apart – but far more where we overlap, without comment.

One way to see the widespread tendency to binarize twins, then, is as a panic response, a knee-jerk defense to the social, moral, and existential threat they pose. Twins remind us, consciously or not, of how frail human identity-detectors can be, and therefore how slippery our associates and our own selves might be. Tagging twins as binary opposites is a way of corralling their disturbingly similar bodies and minds into easily distinguishable ends of the psychosocial field. The lack of subtlety is the point.

The differences between me and Col seemed big to me as I was developing and maturing because I wanted to find areas where I could distinguish myself. But the reason they seem significant to singletons is, I think, because singletons expect twins to be exactly the same. When people have the childhood fantasy ‘what if I had a twin?’, I imagine they are thinking of themselves multiplied by two. When they encounter traits that challenge the one-person-doubled hypothesis, this vision is undermined. In order to cope with this disruption of the fantasy, these differences are magnified into opposites. Good twin / evil twin being the nadir of this particular way of thinking.

This persistent tendency to binarize twins is striking, especially in light of the exactly opposite companion tendency to portray twins as highly similar.

Try thinking of the twins you read about in literature – and identical twins feature far more frequently in literature than we do in real life. They probably fit this line adeptly, and only occasionally does someone do it brilliantly. The greatest example is Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker, at least from the books I’ve read.

More unsettlingly, it is strange how often authors include ‘twincest’ in their books, and this is something de Bres mentions in the chapter ‘Are you two in love?’ I’ve read some very good novels that include twins having sex, but (a) it doesn’t happen in reality any more often than any other two siblings – which is to say hardly ever at all – and (b) it says so much about the way Western writers conceive of closeness. Two people have a closer relationship than most have experienced? The only paradigm for expressing it is romantic or sexual. It shows a great limitation on the capacity of people to comprehend the wide range of love.

At this point, I’ve realised that all the quotes I noted down are in the first chapter – which perhaps did have the pithiest bits to excerpt, but the other chapters were equally interesting. The second looks at ‘how many of you are there?’ – coming from the idea that identical twins are one egg split in two, so have some claim to being one person. De Bres also looks at the experiences of conjoined twins, and the way that all twins seem to threaten the concept of individuality a little. No, there are no proven examples of twins mind reading (though some conjoined twins can apparently see out of each other’s eyes) – but twins do offer some counterpoint to the idea of people as unique identities.

I was a little sceptical about this chapter at first. One of the very few times that de Bres’s philosophising got a little too abstract and scholarly for a layman like me to understand was when she writes about theorists who believe all humans may externalise some of our mental processing, thus (?) having our brains outside our body in calculators, computers, and even other people. It was getting a bit high-falutin’ for me. Surely nobody thinks two twins are fewer than two people?

But then I thought about last year. More autobiography here. I started getting strange neurological symptoms in my feet and hands. A few months later, Colin started getting the same symptoms. Long waiting lists later, it turns out we are thankfully both ok – but there was a period when we were both quite worried about more serious neurological issues. And I cannot tell you how strange it is to simultaneously worry about yourself and the person you love most, waiting to see if our shared DNA has the same trapdoor in it. It is the nearest I have come to questioning my individuality – when my body and its possible flaws are both me and not-me. (As it happens, Helena and Julia de Bres both have a connective tissue disorder, and much of How To Be Multiple also considers life as a disabled person – as disabled people – and particularly how that identity is partly shaped by other people’s perspectives. It’s also interesting on the ways the disability differently affects Helena and Julia, and what that is like for them.)

I enjoyed the whole collection a great deal, though the final two chapters perhaps a bit less than the others. ‘How free are you?’ looks at the fact that twins separated at birth often find, when reunited, that they have followed similar paths. Reports of such things always highlight curious similarities – they both walk into the sea backwards! they married women with the same name! – but, of course, you could find any two random people and they’d have a handful of odd coincidences. But twins (whether identical or non-identical, raised together or apart) are fodder for nature/nurture debates and always have been. This essay is interesting, but it re-treads familiar ground. If you’ve ever considered free will vs fate, or nature vs nurture, then this chapter isn’t particularly ground-breaking – and certainly felt like it had the least personal content about Helena and Julia’s lives, which is the strong through-line of How To Be Multiple. And I have to admit that the final essay, ‘What are you for?’, felt quite like a miscellany for various other philosophical ideas that Helena de Bres had that didn’t fit into other chapters. The only other criticism I wanted to mention is that de Bres is a bit lazy in her assumption that her readers will all be atheists, or in suggesting (even flippantly) that nobody believes in God anymore. It feels like quite a Western-centric view, ignoring the huge numbers of the Global South who have theistic faith – and, of course, plenty in the Global North too. Indeed, only 15.6% of the world describe themselves as non-religious. Maybe all academic philosophers come from that percentage, but I suspect not.

But I certainly won’t end on a negative note, because I loved this book. I enjoyed feeling chimes of recognition in what de Bres writes. ‘For the first few years of elementary school,’ she writes, ‘Julia and I wore our initials pinned to our clothes’ – snap! Colin and I had ours stitched onto the front of our pullovers for the first few years of primary school. More trivially, we were also due to be born around Christmas, and were in fact born more than a month earlier. And I had to message Colin my favourite line in the book, which I absolutely agree with: “We had the standard twin view about triplets, quads, and other ‘supertwins’, which is that they take a good idea and overdo it.”

More generally, there are constant touchstones for what it is like to be a twin. I’ve only been an identical twin for about a decade – well, that is to say, I have only known I was an identical twin for about a decade, after almost 30 years believing I was a non-identical twin. It’s an interesting divide, in terms of having slightly different philosophical experiences of twinship and identity. But I’ve never been a singleton, and I feel so seen and understood by How To Be Multiple, as well as realising new things about my experience of the world – and other people’s experience of me as a twin.

De Bres weaves in philosophical understanding so fluidly, and balances autobiography and objective analysis perfectly. It’s quite a fun and funny book, aimed at a non-academic audience more interested in anecdotes than footnotes (though there are plenty of endnotes for people wanting to explore more). I would particularly recommend it to a twin – but, then, I would also particularly recommend it to a singleton. Because you might get a bit more of a glimpse into what twinship is like – and also be a little less likely to ask the same questions that every singleton asks when they discover you’re a twin. I suppose the only people I wouldn’t recommend How To Be Multiple to are triplets. You guys need to calm down.

Lady Living Alone by Norah Lofts

I picked up Lady Living Alone by Norah Lofts in a wonderful, cavernous bookshop in Whitehaven, Cumbria, when I was there last year. I bought it off the strength of the title, and the fact that I’ve never quite disentangled Norah Hoult and Norah Lofts. The novel is from 1945, but if I’d found an original edition (rather than this reprint) then I wouldn’t have known it was by any Norah. It was originally published under the name Peter Curtis, perhaps to distinguish from the historical novels for which she was, and is, best known.

The lady of the title is Penelope Shadow (what a name!) She is ‘one of those women who is never described without the diminutive: a sweet little thing, a funny little thing, poor little thing’ – and she is not unattractive, but she has never been married. She is reaching the onset of middle age, or at least what was considered middle age in 1932 (when the novel is set), and realising that she is likely to remain single.

And again, however much women may wish to deny this fact, it is a fact that a woman who wishes a man to marry her must do a little – especially in the initial stages, towards bringing this desirable state of things about. After all, Pygmalion, falling in love with a beautiful and unresponsive statues, is unique enough to be remarkable; and even those women who most ardently wished matrimony upon their little friend could hardly say that Penelope ever ‘tried’. She didn’t; she hadn’t; and for the very simple reason that to be married was never one of Penelope’s ambitions.

OK, you might think, but how is Miss Shadow going to survive financially as an unmarried women in 1932? Well, she has recently come into a lot of money – because she turned out to be so chaotically bad at every job she turned her hand to, and decided as a last resort to write fiction. Her first efforts went unnoticed, but the latest novel – Mexican Flower – has become a runaway success. She can certainly afford to live alone. But she has an absolute terror of it.

In a convincing and delightful novel, this is a conceit that takes a bit to swallow. You can understand why someone might not like long stretches on their own, but Penelope Shadow cannot abide a single night. Rather than be alone for a full evening, she will wander the lanes and fields. Let’s assume this trait is believable, and move on.

Being the 1930s, Penelope Shadow has household staff – she can avoid being alone, because she always has a live-in servant who does more or less all the work needed to keep a single-person household going. But they routinely quit or have to be fired. Lofts is quite funny about some of the absurd ways these servants behave, and we rattle through a few. Indeed, particularly at the beginning of Lady Living Alone, Lofts has a delightfully amusing turn of phrase – a mixture of exaggeration, ridicule, and realism that makes a fun concoction. For instance…

The great future opened, as it was bound to do, with a happy burst of generosity towards Elsie and the children – now big enough to enjoy substantial presents. There was a car, too. And to everyone’s surprise and carefully suppressed horror, Miss Shadow herself learned to drive it. That is to say, she mastered the mysteries of making it start, increasing its speed, and bringing it to a standstill; nervous, inattentive, impulsive and completely lacking in road sense, as in most other kinds, she was quite the worst driver in four counties.

I love Miss Shadow’s combination of ineptitude and power. She is evidently, if accidentally, very good at writing a bestseller. She is single-minded in what her spirit needs and forgetful about what necessities she actually needs. She’s great fun to be around.

One evening, keen to evade a night’s loneliness, she sets off as chaotically as ever in her car. Eventually she ends up at a fairly rundown hotel, perhaps closer to a motel. For lack of other options, she decides to stay the night. The proprietress is unhelpful and unfriendly, but she becomes friendly with a young man who works there as a chef – but also as a general dogsbody. When they first meet, he goes off to find some help.

He disappeared, still calling, and several moments passed. Miss Shadow occupied them in staring about the hall. Empty it would have been lovely with its elegant proportions and creamy panelling; but its furnishings were hideous; the carpet looked as though pounds of liquorice all-sorts had been stamped viciously into mud; there was a fiercely bristling hatstand. a Windsor armchair painted a bright sticky red, and the panels were defiled by pairs of Victorian pictures, hung irregularly; Beckworth Bridge in summer and in winter; lovers parted and re-united, married couples quarrelling and making it up again.

Hopefully you can see why I enjoyed Lofts’ writing so much. She is brilliant at this sort of teasing, deprecatory fun. But the tone of the novel slowly becomes something else.

Spontaneously, after a disastrous night and breakfast, Miss Shadow asks this young man – Terry – if he would like to come and work for her instead. He is industrious and kind, clearly equipped for more than his role. Yes, he is muscular and good-looking, but Miss Shadow hardly has that on her mind – she simply sees a solution to her eternal problem. Here is a young man who will not abandon her. She need not be a lady living alone anymore.

I shan’t spoil what happens after that – but Lofts takes us from the funny, fun style at the beginning of the novel through something with more pathos – through to something closer to a thriller. Is Terry the man to protect her? And will their relationship remain one of mistress and servant?

I loved Lady Living Alone, and the way that Lofts expertly manages the shifting tone. It’s not a particularly long novel, but it takes the reader on a long and vivid journey. There are brilliant scenes later in the novel that could be from a psychologically tense film – but because we are bedded in the silliness of Miss Shadow and her whims, Lofts tethers her novel to the domestic and everyday. Her writing style continues to be brilliantly done, and the way she structures sentences is so well observed. It keeps anything from feeling over the top.

This is my first Norah Lofts. I’m not particularly interested in the historical novels, but I’ll certainly be looking out for the three other novels she wrote under the Peter Curtis pseudonym. In my opinion, it’s something unusual and special.

Unnecessary Rankings! British Library Women Writers

 

Since it’s International Women’s Day, I thought I’d commemorate the occasion by… ranking books by women! Yes, putting successful women up against each other probably isn’t the MOST #IWD thing, but it’s really a celebration because all these books are brilliant.

Obviously I’ve read (and reread and reread) all the British Library Women Writers series, but I’ve decided to stick to a top 15 – because it wouldn’t be the best advertisement for the series to put something in last place, especially when I think they’re all very good. So if something from the BLWW series is missing from the list, then I still like it, just not as much as these 15 marvellous books. Ranking was VERY hard, since they’re basically all 10/10 reads in my opinion.

I’d love to know your thoughts – from the ones you’ve read, how would you rank them?

15. Mamma (1956) by Diana Tutton
Guard Your Daughters may be Diana Tutton’s masterpiece, but she is on more sombre form with Mamma. It’s a love triangle between a woman, her daughter and her son-in-law – but the least shocking version of that premise. Beautiful, almost elegiac, and very human.

14. Introduction to Sally (1926) by Elizabeth von Arnim
Elizabeth von Arnim is so good at finding relatable humour in absurd situations. Sally is like a Greek goddess come alive, but with a ‘common’ accent and working in a shop – von Arnim takes this idea and turns it into a novel with pathos, as well as a great deal fo humour.

13. The Home (1971) by Penelope Mortimer
A spiritual sequel to Mortimer’s much-loved The Pumpkin Eater, this novel is based on the author’s own separation from her husband and re-establishing her life. It’s strange, funny, poignant and expertly written.

12. Which Way? (1931) by Theodora Benson
This forgotten novel gets a little boost up the charts for its brilliant Sliding Doors premise: Claudia has to choose between three weekend invitations. The next three sections of the novel follow, in turn, the very different lives she’d live depending on which invitation she accepts.

11. Tea Is So Intoxicating (1950) by Mary Essex
Some of the books in the series are beautifully writen works of significant literature. Some are just silly, delightful fun. None comes sillier or more delightful than Mary Essex’s Tea Is So Intoxicating, following a couple in their ill-advised attempts to open a tea garden.

10. One Year’s Time (1942) by Angela Milne
Another one that had truly disappeared, despite Milne’s famous uncle – the novel follows a year in the life of Liza, particularly focusing on her romantic and work lives. It feels so modern and fresh, and it makes the top 10 because of the sparkling dialogue.

9. A Pin To See The Peepshow (1934) by F. Tennyson Jesse
I’d argue A Pin To See The Peepshow is the best book in the series – but, of course, best doesn’t always equate to favourite. It is very closely based on the Thompson/Bywaters murder case, with very evident sympathies for Edith Thompson – who, in FTJ’s hands, is an eloquent, compassionate, creative woman. Incidentally, the afterword is perhaps the one I’m proudest of.

8. Keeping Up Appearances (1928) by Rose Macaulay
Macaulay seems to be best-remembered for The Towers of Trebizond, but I much prefer her in witty, lively 1920s mode. Keeping Up Appearances is about two very different sisters – and a lot about middlebrow vs highbrow culture at the time. A constant delight.

7. Dangerous Ages (1921) by Rose Macaulay
And this novel slightly nudges above the other – perhaps because she covers so many generations of women, in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 60s, and 80s, if memory serves. Very, very funny on things like the free love movement and Freudianism, while also surprisingly poignant on the topics of ageing and trying to return to the workplace after raising children.

6. Strange Journey (1935) by Maud Cairnes
I love a high-concept novel that retains heart and humour – and few do it better than this 1935 body-swap comedy, which is really about class, as a titled lady and a middle-class housewife find they are inadvertently switching places.

5. Tension (1920) by E.M. Delafield
It’s a crime that Delafield is only known for a handful of novels when she wrote so many brilliant books. I think Tension is one of her funniest, as well as having one of the all-time great monsters in Lady Rossiter, who sets out to destroy another woman’s life in the name of morality.

4. Father (1931) by Elizabeth von Arnim
Another well-known author with an unjustly neglected book: Jen is one of the ‘surplus women’, expected to look after her father’s household until he marries a much younger woman and turfs her out. I love Father because of Jen: such a spirited, fun, naive, joyful creation.

3. The Love Child (1927) by Edith Olivier
I wrote quite a lot of DPhil thesis on this novella, so of course I love it: Agatha accidentally conjures up her childhood imaginary best friend, and this miracle turns into something rather darker as a power battle develops. This is a tour de force in quiet form – an extraordinary work of imagination with a lot to say about the perils facing unmarried women in the 1920s.

2. Sally on the Rocks (1915) by Winifred Boggs
Another one that gets so high up for its heroine. Sally is a delight – funny, feisty, going after what she wants. She ends up in a love triangle, fighting for the hand of a man she despises but can offer security. What makes Sally on the Rocks so ahead of its time is that both women in the love triangle are amicable and even friendly: there’s no maligned ‘other woman’ here.

1. O, The Brave Music (1943) by Dorothy Evelyn Smith
My number one BLWW title is also one of my favourite ever novels. We follow Ruan from 7 to the cusp of childhood, finding freedom from a repressive home by exploring the moors and befriending a wise older boy, David. The novel has such heart and, even though many sad things happen, it feels full of hope of possibility.

Come to Esther Rutter’s online book launch (with me!)

Many of you may have read Esther Rutter’s brilliant This Golden Fleece about the historical, cultural and social significance of knitting and wool – it’s not a topic I knew anything about, but I loved it.

Her next non-fiction work is coming out soon – on a very different topic. All Before Me is about Esther’s own life – recovering from a breakdown in Japan by moving to work at the Wordsworths’ house in Cumbria – and about William and Dorothy Wordsworth moving and living there. I read it last week, and it’s marvellous. Moving, insightful, honest, beautiful. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

And you are invited to the book launch! It’s next Friday at 7.30pm – and I’ll be doing the Q&A with Esther. We’ve been friends ever since university, and I’m so delighted that she asked me.

Find out more about the event (and book tickets) on the Eventbrite page – hope to see you there!

Why I’m Not A Millionaire by Nancy Spain

Nancy Spain has been having a new lease of life recently, with the re-issue of her detective novels. To a certain generation, she is also remembered as a regular on radio and TV panel shows. For me, I first came across her as a young journalist mentioned in Ann Thwaite’s biography of A.A. Milne – and I knew that she talked about it in her 1956 autobiography, the eccentrically titled Why I’m Not A Millionaire.

The conceit of the title is that she explains how she has got to where she is – and why that path hasn’t led to untold riches. Along the way she covers her time at Roedean (a posh girls’ school), activities in war service, her big break in radio – adapting a novel by Winifred Watson, of all things, though not Miss Pettigrew – and her much-feted whirl through journalism, novel-writing, and celebrity. It’s such a delightfully insouciant and fun book which manages to bottle why she was so popular with public and stars alike.

We race through childhood rather quickly, though not without a few well-aimed barbs at Roedean and the type of woman who never moves on from her Roedean days. Quickly, we are thrown into her joyful 20s – moving with a wealthier crowd, but nobody appearing to give anything too much serious thought. Spain writes with exactly the right level of self-mockery, so you don’t dislike her younger self but also don’t particularly respect or envy her. Her abiding characteristic throughout the book could be described as ‘giving it a go’, and she doesn’t let experience, ability, or

All the West Hartlepool girls had a lot of money. They lived in big, prosperous houses with a full quota of maids cavorting in the back premises. They drank burgundy and fizzy lemonade for lunch and I was mad about them all. I thought they were a Very Fast Set Indeed. Considering that I was all the time mooning over Paddy or Michael they were very nice to me.

Then one day I ran out of money and couldn’t afford to pay for my round of gins-and-tonics. Bin pointed out in words of one kindly syllable how I mustn’t allow this to happen again. I had already spent the £50 Father had given me on rushing about to Liverpool and so on. (And my share of the petrol.) What was I to do?

Basically, she describes her life like we imagine the Mitford sisters lived (albeit a little earlier). She writes with the same exuberant flippancy of Nancy Mitford. It’s so fun – I wondered if it might get wearing over this number of pages, but I never stopped enjoying it. She’ll start a paragraph with something like ‘It was about this time I discovered all my savings had been swallowed up and I was in an advanced stage of insolvency.’ That might irritate someone who likes their fictional and non-fictional heroines to be sensible and wise, but I am not that person. This isn’t the book to read for soul-searching, but it is a constant delight.

Spain’s multi-faceted rise through the entertainment world is interrupted by World War Two, and it’s the nearest we get to genuine pathos – when she describes some of the men she knew and lost. But mostly she takes the opportunity to be very funny about her experiences in the W.R.N.S – exploring the well-meaning chaos behind the scenes, and her own comic incompetency in the midst of it.

The Recruiting Department was very grand, seeing as how it was all the time in contact with the general public. Recruiting Officers were so terribly smart to look at that it hurt: some of them wore almost royal blue uniform monkey jackets and all of them wore black satin ties bought at Hope Brothers. I joined a circus of Third Officers whose business it was to whip around the London medical boards, making brief notes on the character and personality of candidates in the teeny weeny space provided on the interview form. People who engrave the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin in their spare time might well take lessons from a W.R.N.S. Recruiting Officer. Contrary to general belief, however, all successful candidates for the Service were not (a) titled or (b) the Last First Sea Lord’s second cousin once removed.

Spain’s experiences in the W.R.N.S. were turned into his first book, a memoir (I haven’t read) called Thank You, Nelson. She details its chequered path to publication – and then its unexpected success. A copy was sent to A.A. Milne by some well-meaning publicist, and apparently he was livid at the idea of a woman writing a book about war – then read it, and considered it marvellous. His review in the Sunday Times was apparently responsible for Thank You, Nelson selling out its first and second editions more or less overnight. As Spain writes, “I knew the book must be a success when the Chief Officer Administration at W.R.N.S. Headquarters said, ‘The book was very disappointing after the review.'”

Spain wrote to thank Milne for his review and, in turn, he wrote to invite her to visit him at their home in Sussex. And thus we get the handful of pages which first led me to the book – and how I delighted in them. Not least because Spain is unaffectedly admiring of Milne. Her tone is often so light and unserious that her moments of genuine, unadulterated admiration are particularly noticeable. How I loved this paragraph, and how perfectly it describes any truly perfect, short period of time:

He said a lot more, that darling man, but I have forgotten the details. It has fused, shimmering into the golden light of that magic afternoon in the sun.

Once Spain was established as a successful writer, her adventures still seem surprisingly chaotic – jumping between different newspapers and periodicals, as well as different genres in her own books – the one after Thank You, Nelson was a biography of Mrs Beeton – always (at least in her depiction) moments away from some sort of literary or pecuniary crisis. A lot of 21st-century social media is taken up with self-deprecating humour, pretending that our lives and careers are forever on the point of collapse – and it’s a brand of humour I enjoy. It’s also a brand a humour that we see throughout humorous British writers of the early- and mid-20th centuries – particularly women. Think a more exuberant E.M. Delafield.

Something I particularly appreciated about Nancy Spain’s autobiography is that she is not ashamed to name drop. If you’re like me, you want the celebrity gossip – particularly about the authors and actors of the period. Many memoirists coyly pretend they never meet the great and the good, or treat them simply as everyday friends. Spain is canny enough to know her audience are starstruck by them, and treats each person as the Name they are. And she is delightfully pithy about some of them, without letting herself off the hook – here she is on Eudora Welty:

Eudora Welty still takes high marks as a Remarkable Author. She is very tall, pale, and slender, and she comes from Jackson, Mississippi, in the deep, deep South of North America. She has hands like graceful fish. Her books are always exclusively about those deep, deep parts and I cannot understand one single solitary word of them. In those days that pleased and impressed my very much. I longed to write a book that no one could understand. (Alas, when people read my books they understand me only too well.)

I started the dropped names. Here is an incomplete list of the authors, actors, and others that she writes about – just the ones she spends time with, not including those she relates about at second hand: Noel Coward, Osbert Sitwell, Clemence Dane, Barbara Beauchamp, Pamela Frankau, Rebecca West, Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Beverley Nichols, Wolf Mankowitz, Monica Dickens, Dorothy Parker, Cynthia Asquith, Mae West, Vivien Leigh, Katherine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, Marlene Dietrich, Orson Welles, Clark Gable, Henry Green, Francis Wyndham, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, Joyce Cary, Angus Wilson, Noel Langley, Nancy Mitford, Colette, Christian Dior, Joyce Grenfell and Winifred Atwell. I daresay Spain was discreet, but she gives a wonderful sense of indiscretion – or at least a lack of artifice.

The only really heartrending moment is the final line of the book – which is this:

Whatever the next forty years turn out to be, I am sure of one thing. They couldn’t possibly be more fun than the forty years that have gone before: whether I manage to become a millionaire or not.

When Why I’m Not A Millionaire was published, Nancy Spain was just under 40. She wouldn’t get another forty years – she would, in fact, die in a plane crash at the age of 46. What a lot of life she managed to pack into those few short decades – and what a joyful record of it. Every moment of this autobiography is a breath of fresh air, and I thoroughly recommend you spend the time with her.

The books I bought in Hay-on-Wye (it was a lot)

I’ve just been away for a week to a lovely cottage on the Dinefwr National Trust estate with some friends. It’s in Wales, and only just over an hour away from Hay-on-Wye… so naturally we took the trek to the UK’s foremost book town.

It was nice to see, this time, that one or two bookshops had opened since we were last there – and I don’t think any had closed. That’s against the trend of Hay visits – and it will probably never reach the highs of 20+ years ago, but while the Cinema Bookshop is still there, it’ll always be worth a visit. I went to eight bookshops, and bought something in all but one of them. Most excitingly, I held a copy of Two People signed by A.A. Milne! I didn’t buy it, because it was £350, but it was very exciting to hold a book that AAM had held. (Speaking of Milne, I’m on the latest episode of the brilliant podcast Lost Ladies of Lit talking about One Year’s Time by Angela Milne – check it out wherever you get podcasts.)

Ok, without further ado, here is the exciting haul of books that I brought back with me from Hay-on-Wye…

Strangers May Kiss by Ursula Parrott
After really enjoying Ex-Wife (reprinted by McNally) I was so pleased to come across another of Parrott’s novels. There aren’t any cheap editions on abebooks, so this was a bit of a coup for a few pounds.

No Peace for the Wicked by Ursula Torday
To be honest, I picked this up because Ursula Parrott had put ‘Ursula’ in my mind – turns out Ms Torday wrote a lot of books, and No peace for the Wicked includes scenes in a boarding house: yes please! It’s also very scarce, so another good spend of £3.

The House of Defence by E.F. Benson
Limitations by E.F. Benson

The Princess Sophia by E.F. Benson
The Weaker Vessel by E.F. Benson
Benson was so very prolific that I haven’t even heard of these books, despite having been a fan for years. I’ll always snap up an EFB, and he is at that perfect level of scarcity – where his books probably will turn up at some point, but it’s a delightful surprise when they do. A couple of these are little Everyman-style editions, and I’ve long learned the wisdom of checking those shelves of small hardbacks – it’s often just endless sets of Forsyte Sagas, but sometimes something more unexpected shows up.

The Artless Flat-Hunter by Joanna Jones
Since one of my favourite things in fiction is house-hunting, I was never going to ignore this satirical non-fiction about the chaos of flat hunting. So up my street that I can barely believe it exists.

A Late Beginner by Priscilla Napier
Anytime I find a Slightly Foxed edition I don’t own, you know it’s coming home with me.

The Professor’s Legacy by Mrs Alfred Sidgwick
I seem to have quite good luck finding Mrs Alfred Sidgwick in the wild. I’ve read a handful now, and Cynthia’s Way remains the most fun – but I’ll keep getting more.

John Dene of Toronto by Herbert Jenkins
You might know I adore his frothy novel Patricia Brent, Spinster, so I couldn’t resist another of us – especially one with a Canadian connection.

The Handyman by Penelope Mortimer
For an author who is so renowned and respected, there are a lot of her novels I know nothing about. The Handyman was her final novel, from 1983.

Spinsters in Jeopardy by Ngaio Marsh
I enjoy Ngaio Marsh’s books, but anybody at all could have written a novel called Spinsters in Jeopardy and I’ve have snapped it up.

My Arnold Bennett by Marguerite, his wife
What a decorous way of putting your name on a book! I’ll always go for a personal memoir over a scholarly biography, so this is right up my street.

Those United States by Arnold Bennett
Speaking of Bennett, I couldn’t resist a little volume of essays with his take on the US. Having read some of his other essays, I suspect it won’t be the most balanced or complimentary.

Testaments Betrayed by Milan Kundera
I love Kundera and have almost all his books – I hadn’t come across this non-fiction book before, so have added it to my teetering pile of unread Kunderas.

The Holiday Friend by Pamela Hansford Johnson
Important to Me by Pamela Hansford Johnson
I have mixed success with Pamela Hansford Johnson but am certainly happy to try another. I don’t remember hearing much about The Holiday Friend – do any PHJ fans know if it’s a good’un? Important to Me, meanwhile, is non-fiction about things PHJ likes, and that can only be charming.

Family by Susan Hill
Susan Hill’s non-fiction is always engaging. I’ve heard a lot about Family, about losing her very young daughter, and will be keen to read when I can steel myself for it.

Return Journey by Beatrice Kean Seymour
Ending with one I know nothing about – but the Cinema Bookshop had a handful of Beatrice Kean Seymour novels inscribed to a friend, and I thought I could take a gamble on one.

I’m delighted with my haul – one of the most exciting Hay hauls I’ve had for a while. Where would you start? Anything you are particularly interested in, or recommend?

Unnecessary Rankings! Stella Gibbons

My ‘Unnecessary Rankings!‘ series have quickly become my favourite blog posts to write, and I love reading your comments – sometimes in agreement, but usually not, and that’s the most fun. Of all the authors I’ve done so far, Stella Gibbons has the widest range – i.e. some of her novels are all-time favourites, and some are unbearable trash.

As I put this together, I realised I’d read fewer than I thought – and she was very prolific. So it’s only ranking eight of her 30 or so books. Let’s treat this more of a way to find out what I SHOULD be reading… recommendations, please.

8. Beside the Pearly Water (1954)
This feels like one of the worst books I’ve ever read, let alone Gibbons’ worst. It’s based on an idea that doesn’t make any sense and is worked out with frustrating stupidity. An attempt to stay up-to-date that truly didn’t work.

7. Here Be Dragons (1956)
There are elements of Here Be Dragons that I really enjoyed, particularly the heroine getting a job in a café and seeing that world – but the rest didn’t arrest my attention particularly. A theme I’ll return to is that Gibbons is fantastic in general but very bad at romance storylines.

6. Nightingale Wood (1938)
A lovely Cinderella-style story that reminded me quite a lot of the scenes from I Capture the Castle where Cassandra and her family visit their rich neighbours. The individual characters haven’t stayed with me, but the atmosphere has.

5. Bassett (1934)
The first half of this novel is absolutely sublime – two incompatible spinsters decide to set up a boarding house together. It’s hilarious, and just the right side of outright farce. I lapped it up. And then… the second half weirdly transfers to a love triangle between three very tedious young neighbours. Apparently that half is autobiographical, and it is not at all interesting – Bassett is so high because the first half is so delightful.

4. Westwood (1946)
Gibbons in slightly more poignant mode – the introduction to my edition, by Lynne Truss, says: “If Cold Comfort Farm is Gibbons’ Pride and Prejudice then Westwood is her Persuasion.” I think that’s a very astute observation – the humour is still there, but this is a more sombre, heartfelt novel.

3. Enbury Heath (1935)
I’ll race to any novel about house moves, and the first third of Enbury Heath is about siblings setting up a little cottage together with a small inheritance – and jettisoning the advice of their pestering aunts and uncles. The rest of the novel didn’t quite match that high for me, but I really enjoyed my time with this one.

2. Miss Linsey and Pa (1936)
Gosh, I love this book! Miss Linsey and her dad move to be near relatives but aren’t welcomed in their home – so move to a horrible flat in a run-down building. Miss Linsey works in the home of some thinly-disguised Bloomsbury types, and Gibbons has great fun mocking them. The whole cast of characters are wonderful, and I think it’s Gibbons’ greatest success at combining pacing, humour, and pathos.

1. Cold Comfort Farm (1932)
I think Gibbons is a good example of the most famous book also being the best. Cold Comfort Farm is such a tour de force, quite unlike any of her other books, and she fuses the madcap cast of characters with endless energy – whether they are bitter, annoying, good-intentioned or witless. Having Flora as the breezy, unsentimental outsider is perfect. Unmatched and unmatchable.

Tea or Books? #125: Do We Read Celeb Memoirs? and Day vs Landscape in Sunlight

Celeb memoirs, Michael Cunningham, Elizabeth Fair – welcome to episode 125!

In the first half, Rachel and I discuss celebrity memoirs – do we read them? What do we count as a celebrity memoir? In the second half, we each chose one of the other’s favourite 2023 reads – Day by Michael Cunningham (one of my favourite reads from last year) and Landscape in Sunlight by Elizabeth Fair.

You can get in touch with suggestions, comments, questions etc at teaorbooks[at]gmail.com – we’d love to hear from you. Find us at Spotify, Apple podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. And you can support the podcast at Patreon. If you’re able to, we’d really appreciate any reviews and ratings you can leave us.

The books and authors we mention in this episode are:

Convenience Store Woman by Suyaka Murata
Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton
At the Pines by Mollie Panter-Downes
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Max Beerbohm
Storm Bird by Mollie Panter-Downes
Katie Price
Peter Kay
John Gielgud
No Leading Lady by R.C. Sherriff
Virginia Woolf
Delicacy by Katy Wix
Sidesplitter by Phil Wang
Strong Female Character by Fern Brady
What’s That Lady Doing? by Lou Sanders
Glutton by Ed Gamble
Spare by Prince Harry
The Meaning of Mariah Carey by Mariah Carey
The Woman in Me by Britney Spears
Toxic by Sarah Ditum
Paris: The Memoir by Paris Hilton
Inferno by Catherine Cho
Malory Towers series by Enid Blyton
You’re a Brick, Angela! by Mary Cadogan
The Naughtiest Girl in the School by Enid Blyton
St Clare’s series by Enid Blyton
The Hours by Michael Cunningham
By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham
The Snow Queen by Michael Cunningham
Miss Read
Bramton Wick by Elizabeth Fair
Emma by Jane Austen
Barbara Pym
A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
Dear Mrs Bird by AJ Pearce

The Oracles by Margaret Kennedy

It’s not often that I buy a book and read it straightaway, but I was so intrigued by The Oracles (1955) by Margaret Kennedy when I picked it up in Chipping Camden last weekend that I immediately started it.

Everybody has been reading The Feast in the past couple of years, and I enjoyed it a lot – but had to add it to the list of Kennedy novels that haven’t quite bowled me over. I’ve read four or five of her novels – I’ve liked some, admired some, disliked some, even given up on one. But I’ve finally loved one: The Oracles is my favourite of hers by some distance.

Also published as Act of God in the US, the cover of my edition tells you how the novel starts. We are instantly flung into a vicious thunderstorm:

The thunderstorm frightened a great many people in East Head. It came after a phenomenal heatwave, and it reached the Bristol Channel upon a Saturday night.

During the afternoon it had rumbled a long way off, to the north-east, over the Welsh coast. At ten o’clock the thunder-claps were coming fast upon the heels of the flashes. An hour later it was described by everybody as right overhead, although this hardly did justice to its menace. Had it remained vertical it would at least have kept to its own place; it became horizontal, a continuous glare, punctuated by short sharp cracks. It no longer descended from the sky, but sprang out of the earth – sizzling along the roads and blazing through drawn window curtains.

Little does East Head know the far-reaching effects this storm will have… more on that in a moment. East Head is a small village that is ordinary in almost every respect. The one thing that sets it apart is the presence of Conrad Swann, the noted sculptor. His name looms large in avant-garde circles and he is widely revered by a sizeable group of acolytes, all of whom long to be close to him but who receive minimal encouragement in return.

Swann is better as a sculptor than a husband or father. He is living in East Head with a woman who is not his wife (who is, in fact, the wife of his best friend) – though this scandal is no longer new, and the villagers don’t much care anymore. This is 1955, after all, not 1925. He has a sizeable brood of children and his mistress has brought a couple with her too – all the children are left alone to live more or less wild, looking after one another and playing out elaborate fantasies in their back garden. There is little money to spare, and neither the villagers nor the acolytes want anything much to do with them – but they are self-sufficient. Which is just as well, because Swann has absconded.

Conrad Swann has been working on a new sculpture – all anybody knows is that it is called Apollo. There is a group of local intellectuals who want to put their village (and themselves) on the map, and they want to secure the sculpture with local public funds. Other intellectuals think it should be taken to a more prestigious place. And most of the villagers are contentedly mystified by it, and anticipate being mystified by anything Swann produces.

What only the reader – and one of the young Swann siblings – realises is that ‘Apollo’, discovered in the shed, is not the sculpture Swann was working on. What is taken for ‘Apollo’ is actually… a garden chair that was struck by lightning in the storm. It has been melted and bent out of shape. And – deliciously – the intellectuals think it’s a wonderful piece.

“Mr. Pattison!” said Martha solemnly. “Here is a work of complete integrity. It makes no compromise, no concession, to what the public may demand, or think that it likes. To state his secret, private vision is all that concerns Conrad. Can’t you understand?”

“That,” put in Carter, “is something which you can’t expect anybody to understand but us, Martha. The artists are the only honest people.”

Margaret Kennedy has great fun throughout the novel in poking fun at this sort of person – but The Oracles is much more than a satire of artistic elitism. I’ve not mentioned them yet, but the real central characters are Dickie and Christina. They have only been married for a couple of years, but is evident that both of them think it was probably a mistake. He is a solicitor regarded as ‘bumpkin’ by the oracles and considered too clever by half by some of the villagers. He has an honest, unpretentious interest in Swann’s work and is keen to learn more – and, brilliantly, he doesn’t fall for the hype: he even reads several books on Apollo to try and see a connection between the chair/sculpture and the god, without success.

This pursuit of art makes Christina feel alienated and judged, though. He makes the mistake of suggesting she could be ‘provincial’, and this unintentional barb echoes throughout the rest of the novel – Kennedy expertly shows us how someone can return time and again to a word that cuts them to the quick, and Christina retaliates with increasing unkindness. Ironically, Dickie is quite provincial himself much of the time, and doesn’t seem to mind. It is a marriage of unequals in many ways, and it comes to a head over a seemingly unrelated question of art.

Kennedy’s talent is to make both Christina and Dickie quite sympathetic – certainly moreso than any of the other adults in the novel. Dickie is driven by a genuine wish to learn, and Christina has an intense compassion for others, particularly children. They are seeing the worst in each other, but the reader can see the best in them. Here’s Kennedy on the aftermath of one of their feuds, caused by Dickie getting embarrassingly drunk at an event:

He could not, in any case, have told her much, because he remembered very little. He was desperately ashamed of himself. He had been drunk before, once or twice in his life, but only upon excusable occasions and never since his marriage. It shocked him deeply to think that his wife should have been obliged to put him to bed – that he had left her all alone and frightened for hours while he made a beast of himself. She had, he felt, every right to be furious and he was most anxious to apologise, if allowed an opportunity. He got none. She would not even permit him to say that his conduct had been bestial. Not at all. If he must know what she thought when she found him lying on the mat, he had better understand that a man in such a condition is generally rather pathetic. No, she was not angry. She was sorry for him. He need say no more about it.

Free and full forgiveness is the good woman’s most formidable weapon. Nothing makes a man feel smaller; yet few husbands have the brutality, or the strength of mind, to reject it. Christina was aware of its essential unfairness, but she was really very angry.

The Oracles is a very funny book but it’s a book with a lot of heart to it. Towards the end, as we see more of Swann himself, it feels little less heart-filled – but I still really fell for it. The ingredients I’d enjoyed in different Kennedy novels come together here in the perfect recipe – for me, at least. I’m aware that I probably think it’s Kennedy’s best work (that I’ve read) because it is the one that is closest to my taste. If it sounds like it could be closest to yours too, then I recommend seeking it out.