One Year’s Time by Angela Milne (British Library Women Writers)

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I’m delighted that One Year’s Time by Angela Milne has been out for a month now, and I realise I’ve mentioned it a few times but haven’t ever actually written a review of it. I’ve only seen one or two online so far, so I want to spread word more about this marvellous book.

And, gosh, it so nearly didn’t happen! I may have told this story before, but it bears repeating. It was all lined up a couple of years ago, and I think it was even in the catalogue, but it was proving impossible to track down the family. The British Library are brilliant at finding estates and negotiating publications, so it did feel like a lost cause. With the thought ‘well, it can’t hurt’, rather than any real expectations, I put a plea out here. And it turned out that one of Angela Milne’s nephews had once commented on Claire’s blog, so she got in touch with him – and he was able to connect us with Angela Milne’s children. How wonderful! The blogging world stepped in where every other attempt had failed – and the result is that One Year’s Time is back in print.

This was Angela Milne’s only novel, published in 1942 but set in the 1930s – the exact year isn’t clear, but war is clearly on the horizon. It tells of a year in the life of Liza, particularly her romantic entanglements with a young man called Walter (!), and of her work in an office. It’s rare to get the career angle of a woman’s life in a novel from this period, and I particularly enjoyed that.

As the book opens, Liza is painting the floor – rather unsuccessfully. She surveys her flat, and feels a bit sad about being single.

There was a scrubby patch on the carpet where she had washed the ink out; and two cushions hardly counted as heaping a divan, and chintz curtains weren’t necessarily chintzy, and they weren’t gay, they were just curtains hanging up. She thought, oh, all these things the newspaper say about what they call Bachelor Girls.

‘Bachelor Girls’ is a term that recurs throughout the novel. Liza feels some disdain for women who are unmarried, particularly those who have settled into lifelong friendships with other women (and one does wonder how much she might be missing about lesbians…) But she also stands up to Walter when he mentions the same topic:

“You have to wear a collar and tie and have square legs to be a bachelor girl.”

“It’s awfully unfair that they don’t call men spinster boys. I mean, men who aren’t married. Why do you think they don’t?”

“I suppose they aren’t a new enough invention,” said Walter.

We chart the ups and downs of Liza and Walter’s relationship, and what I most enjoyed about it was the dialogue. It’s very hard to get flirtiness and wit onto the page, but I think Milne does it brilliantly. A lot of what they say is quite stagey, and reminded me of Noel Coward, so it gives the sense of what their relationship is like – rather than being actual conversations that real people would have. And that, to my mind, makes it much more entertaining.

As I wrote in my afterword to the new edition, two themes that dominate One Year’s Time, or at least preoccupy the characters, are sex and money. It is surprisingly frank for a 1942 novel, particularly one probably aimed at a wide audience rather than a small literary elite. Walter casually says that the thing he likes best in the world is sex, and Liza and Walter go speedily from meeting each other to ‘me in bed with nothing on, and him kneeling there with only socks’. They have no qualms about discussing their past sexual history with each other, and Walter even casually mentions having had an affair with a married woman. 

And then there’s money. Liza earns a living and has a small legacy from an uncle, but she is very conscious of not having quite enough to live the lifestyle she’d like. We get the details of her salary, her potential raises, her rent – even how much different food items are in shops, and her silent indignance when a friend spends more than others at a restaurant then splits the bill. Such things are perennial.

So much about this book feels fresh and modern. It’s also, of course, a snapshot of the late 1930s – in a way that helps us remember that human nature doesn’t changed very much, and we all have more or less the same concerns that our parents/grandparents/great-grandparents did. Most of all, I think it’s a very funny book with a memorable pair at the centre who are often frustrating but always compelling. I’m so pleased it’s back in print, and I finally have my own copy.

Cactus by Ethel Mannin

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After reading Rolling in the Dew, I was keen to read more of Ethel Mannin’s fiction  – particularly something in a non-satirical mode. I wondered if something she wrote could be suitable for the British Library Women Writers series, so hunted down one that was clearly about a woman’s life: Cactus (1935). Sadly my Penguin copy more or less fell apart as I read it, so I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to re-read it, but it was certainly an interesting experience.

Elspeth is the heroine of Cactus. The novel opens when she is a young girl, with family in the north of England and in Scotland – she doesn’t really fit in with her family and their expectations of her, and she doesn’t have friends her own age. They don’t understand her and she doesn’t understand them. Her greatest friend is her Uncle Andrew – an eccentric man who chooses to live alone rather than with the rest of the family. They tolerate him with bemused affection.

In these early sections of Cactus, he teaches Elspeth to be an independent thinker. He quietly reveals the dangers of group-think, whether that be jingoistic nationalism or the meek place of a woman in Edwardian middle-class life. They are lessons that she takes very much to heart. And, on a more tangible level, he introduces her to the beauty of cacti. Others wonder why she is train to something spikey and plain, but…

When a cactus came into flower, said Uncle Andy, it was the most wonderful flower you ever saw, and it lived on long after other flowers, which bloomed more readily, had died and been forgotten. It was worth waiting for, said Uncle Andy.

And if you’re thinking ‘hmm, I wonder if this will be a metaphor for Elspeth herself’ then, yes indeed, you are right. Throughout the novel, Mannin returns to this metaphor – it becomes a little unsubtle at times, and perhaps didn’t need to be quite so foregrounded, but it’s an interesting enough idea.

Elspeth grows older and moves to Germany in the late 1930s. She falls in love with a slightly tempestuous young man called Karl, defying convention on the one hand while remaining quite bound by it on the other. For instance, she is shocked when he wants to have sex before marriage – shocked a little, in fact, that this friendship has developed into love almost unawares. Mannin isn’t condemning her for this element of conventionality. Elspeth is no more an obedient disciple to modern, bohemian thinking than she is to old-fashioned morality. She forges her own path, with her own decisions and standards.

But even the most independent thinker cannot avoid being affected by war. As it becomes clear that Germany will soon be at war – and possible (though still, to the characters, unlikely) that Britain will also enter the war – Elspeth decides to leave Germany and return to her family home. It is, she hopes, a temporary absence. But she has also been chilled by the bellicosity she had never anticipated in Karl. It is equalled by the ‘Hun-hate’ (a common word in the novel) that she finds back home. In vain does she try to explain that she may disagree with Germany’s authorities while still liking, even loving, individual Germans. I was so impressed that Mannin would write about this in the mid-1930s, when anti-German rhetoric was clearly on the rise again in Britain. Her nuance in resisting mindless nationalism and hatred of other countries is done perfectly.

These tensions become more palpable when two German prisoners of war are left at Elspeth’s family’s farm. One is a bit of a brute, but Elspeth instantly feels a connection with the other – Kurt. The similarity of his name to Karl’s is not a coincidence. While the two men are quite different, Elspeth explains that Kurt reminds her a lot of her lost love – a man she has to accept may well be dead now, given his keenness to fight. Her family won’t let the men in the house, and initially only give them food fit for the pigs – but Elspeth wears them down a little, and forges a connection with Kurt that is central to the second half of Cactus.

Mannin really doesn’t hold back in her visceral writing about war. Elspeth’s brother is working in an army hospital, but Kurt says he cannot really understand what front-line war is like. (Skip this quote if you are sensitive to graphic descriptions.)

“He doesn’t know what war is. No man who hasn’t been in the trenches does.”

“He sees every day what war does to men.”

“It’s not the same as having it happen to yourself. you can know all about building a trench parapet of human bodies and walking on human faces, and such things, but it doesn’t do anything to you unless you’ve experienced it for yourself. It’s not a case of being physically shocked compared with being intellectually shocked, it’s a case of knowing something in your bowels. In English you talk about having guts. Mind is an abstraction, but guts are damnably real. They get twisted round your bayonet. Round your pick when you’re digging. That’s the kind of knowing, when your own guts writhe with it.”

It’s hard to believe something like this is in a 1930s novel by a woman better known, I believe, for light-hearted comedies and romances. While Cactus never takes us to the front-line, the brutality of war seeps through its pages. She doesn’t address the impending war, which was becoming inevitable in many people’s eyes by the time Cactus was published, but it is a silent subtext to the reading experience.

Cactus isn’t a perfect novel. There are times when it loses a little of its subtlety and gets too close to melodrama. It is very earnest, and I would have appreciated more of the wit that played through its first chapter or two. But, for the most part, I found it an involving, passionate cry against unthinking conflict and herd mentality. I’m certainly keen to keep exploring Mannin’s fiction.

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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It’s the weekend, and I’ll be preparing for my first ever sermon/talk at my church – that I’m giving in a couple of weeks, on Jesus healing a blind man in John 9. I’ve done talks in other places, and contributed to talks at my church, but this is New Territory. Wish me luck, or something more spiritual!

I hope you have a good weekend lined up. As ever in the miscellany, I’ll send you on your way with a book, a link, and a blog post…

1.) The book – praise be for Michael Walmer, continuing to republish the wonderful Stella Benson. I’ve read the four they’ve already published, and now I’ve bought Pipers and a Dancer and am looking forward to getting started on that one. Order your own, or catch up on Benson’s quirky, funny, inimitable backlist, over at his website.

2.) The link – this New York Times article by Sophie Hughes on literary translation is fascinating, and brilliantly interactive in the way it’s laid out.

3.) The blog post – I enjoyed the overview of 2023 reading so far from You Might As Well Read – so many excellent choices, and some very tempting ones I haven’t read.

Mrs Hart’s Marriage Bureau by Sheena Wilkinson

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I mentioned Mrs Hart’s Marriage Bureau is a recent weekend miscellany, and I might have mentioned there that I tend to say no to offers of review copies nowadays. I realised years ago that I wanted to protect my reading time – making sure that I only read things I wanted to, rather than the hit-and-miss of review books. That’s particularly true when an author gets in touch themselves, because I’ve had a couple of not-so-nice experiences with that.

BUT rules are made to be broken – and when Sheena Wilkinson got in touch to ask if I would like a copy, I was very much tempted, and indeed said ‘yes please!’ It helped that she mentioned Dorothy Whipple in her email, and clearly knew my reading tastes well – unlike the press releases I get with ‘I love [your most recent post]; would you like an article about children’s playmats?’

I’m waffling. Let’s get onto the book. Mrs Hart’s Marriage Bureau is set in 1934 and the heroine is April McVey – she has come to England from Northern Ireland, intent on finding a career and not at all interested in marriage. She is a bundle of energy – and we first meet her when she is late for an interview to work at a marital bureau run by Martha Hart.

April rushed on. “I know I’m late. I got lost. My Aunt Kathleen said the hotel was just by the station, she said you couldn’t miss it, only I went to the wrong station.” She sounded close to tears though she faced Martha with a jaunty chin.

“I can see that would be easily done,” Martha said. “But, my dear, you’re three hours late.”

“Och, I know. But when I got here and I worked out you were you, if you know what I mean, I could see you were busy and I didn’t like to interrupt, so I waited till you were done. I never knew I could make a pot of tea last that long. It’s great the way they bring you fresh water, isn’t it, but I didn’t like to ask more than twice. And” – she lowered her voice – “it’s awful dear. You could get dinner for a family of six for that in Lisnacashan.”

It isn’t the last time we’ll hear about Lisnacashan (a made-up town) – April seems able to connect anything she sees with an experience or relative back in her hometown. April won me over instantly by her choice of reading material while she waited: ‘the new E.M. Delafield’. Naturally I had to get into the details and find out what the new E.M. Delafield was in 1934, and her only book that year was The Provincial Lady in America, so I can imagine April was having a lovely time.

Martha (middle-aged for the 1930s – i.e. younger than me) is a bit uncertain at first about hiring April as her assistant, but she is won over. There is certainly something winning about this talkative, slightly indiscreet, very well-meaning young woman. She combines competence with her chaotic energy, and is ready to give her all to matchmaking. (April tends to consider herself more of a partner in the company, and gives herself different job titles when explaining the work to others – she is technically solely an administrative assistant, but watch this space.)

Mrs Hart’s Marital Bureau (curiously a slightly different name from the title of the novel) has been running for a decade. In an era long before dating apps, this was one of the ways that people tried to find prospective partners – a step more discreet and customisable than putting an advert in a lonely hearts column. As Wilkinson notes at the end of the book, the first marriage bureau in the UK wasn’t licensed until 1939, but we can certainly forgive that anachronism. It’s a very entertaining and intriguing premise for a book.

April is a little shocked by the dated nature of Martha’s marriage bureau. She says the name will be off-putting (suggesting True Minds instead), and points out that the people on their books tend to be a little old and often left unmatched for a long time. People are combined simply because there aren’t enormous numbers of locals who want the services of a marriage bureau, and there are far more women than men – partly, of course, because the legacy of the First World War meant there were more women than men in the general population. The bureau has had a fair amount of success, and Martha treasures the stories of couples who have tied the knot – but it needs some updating.

The two other key cast members are Fabian and Felicity – adult brother and sister. April meets widower Fabian when she thinks he is trying to steal her taxi, and remonstrates with him – she doesn’t recognise him when they meet again in the community. Felicity, meanwhile, is April’s landlady. She lives in a slightly insalubrious part of town, and is a delightfully bohemian, intellectual character – a writer who mystifies April with some of her secrets and the confusing comings-and-goings of her finances. Both Fabian and Felicity play important roles in April’s life, and both come with surprises.

In an article in the Belfast Telegraph, Wilkinson describes the book as feminist feel-good, and that’s exactly right. She says: “I wanted to write something uplifting, but I also wanted it to be smart, feminist and kind of politically engaged with it, with a small p.” Well, Mrs Hart’s Marriage Bureau is bang on the money. I found it really fun and funny, without being frothy. There are some more serious undertones that give the novel depth, and Wilkinson obviously has a deep appreciation and understanding of the 1930s.

I’m sometimes dubious about reading a novel set in the 1930s (as opposed to reading one written in the 1930s), but it pays off when the novelist is doing something a contemporary writer couldn’t have done – Wilkinson incorporates our knowledge of what would develop in the next few years, as well as the brilliant idea of the marriage bureau. There are other elements that a 1930s novelist wouldn’t have felt comfortable introducing, and which enhance the novel without pulling it too much from its context.

But most of all I enjoyed Mrs Hart’s Marriage Bureau because of April. Give me a spirited and garrulous heroine and I’m sold. I love the delightful chaos of a character who combines good intentions with putting her foot in it. It’s a real treat of a book, and I had a lovely time reading it.

Tea or Books? #119: Amateur Sleuths or Professional Detectives? and Women Talking vs Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead

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Miriam Toews, Olga Tokarczuk and detective fiction – welcome to episode 119!

In the first half of this episode, we discuss detective fiction – do we prefer the mystery-solver to be a professional or an amateur? And in the second half we compare two fairly recent novels – Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, and Women Talking by Miriam Toews.

Do get in touch if you have any questions or suggestions for the podcast – at teaorbooks[at]gmail.com – and you can listen wherever you listen to podcasts! You can support the podcast at Patreon, should you so wish, with various available rewards.

The books and authors we mention in this episode are:

Mrs Hart’s Marriage Bureau by Sheena Wilkinson
Day by Michael Cunningham
No Leading Lady by R.C. Sherriff
Journey’s End by R.C. Sherriff
Marghanita Laski
The Dark Fantastic by Margaret Echard
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
The Love-Child by Edith Olivier
The Venetian Glass Nephew by Elinor Wylie
Sherlock Holmes novels by Arthur Conan Doyle
Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple novels by Agatha Christie
Lord Peter Wimsey novels by Dorothy L. Sayers
Jackson Brodie novels by Kate Atkinson
The Thursday Club Murders by Richard Osman
Murder Before Evensong by Richard Coles
The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith
Sergeant Cluff series by Gil North
Mrs Bradley series by Gladys Mitchell
Quick Curtain by Alan Melville
Maigret series by Georges Simenon
Illyrian Spring by Ann Bridge
A Favourite of the Gods by Sybille Bedford
A Compass Error by Sybille Bedford
Travels With My Aunt by Graham Greene
Balkan Trilogy and Levant Trilogy by Olivia Manning
Flights by Olga Tokarczuk
William Blake
The Book of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk
The English Air by D.E. Stevenson
The Morning Gift by Eva Ibbotson

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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Happy weekend one and all. I will be spending some of my Saturday at Charlbury Old Shed, which I heartily recommend to anybody visiting Oxfordshire. There’s cake AND donkeys (and other things, but those are two of my favourite things in the world).

I hope you have good plans – and, to accompany you on them, here’s a book, a blog post, and a link.

1.) The link – I loved this Guardian article about indie publishing – how indie publishers are often publishing the most interesting and innovative literature, getting prizes etc, and what motivates the people running these small presses.

2.) The book – On the latest episode of Good Reads (by BBC’s Radio 4), I was totally sold by what they said about The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt. I’m umming and ahhing over buying it, since it’s £12.99 for a book of 64 pages, but I’ll keep an eye out.

3.) The blog post – The first reviews of Angela Milne’s One Year’s Time (the latest addition to the British Library Women Writers series) are coming out, and I love this one over at Books and Wine Gums.

R.C. Sherriff’s wonderful autobiography

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R.C. Sherriff has had something of a renaissance in the past few years, thanks to the good people at Persephone Books. They’ve published A Fortnight in September, Greengates, and The Hopkins Manuscript, and other publishers have followed suit. The film adaptation of Journey’s End was very well received recently, and the play remains a text that is often studied in schools, I believe. And yet nobody has reprinted his autobiography, 1968’s No Leading Lady.

It goes for big sums online, but I didn’t know that I stumbled upon it in a Marylebone bookshop in 2019. It was only on the way home that I googled it and found that I secured something of a bargain – and, as so often, it took me a few years to read it. And oh my goodness, I absolutely loved it.

Many authors tend to write their autobiographies with their own lens for nostalgia. They will dwell on childhood memories and anecdotes about family members with no claim to distinction, beyond association with the author. Some rush through their writing career with some sense of embarrassment – others even end their books before they have gained success. I often find this approach infuriating. After all, I am interested in them because they are authors – not because they once left their hat on a train on the way to boarding school.

So, hurrah and hurray to R.C. Sherriff! In the first paragraph, we are thrown into the maelstrom of his writing:

I had left home early that morning on my round of calls, to be back in good time to change and get to the theatre well before the curtain went up. It was the first night of my first play in the West End, and I wanted to find out whether the director had been able to rescue anything from the shambles of the dress rehearsal. I had been at the theatre until near midnight the previous evening, and had caught the last train home worn out with worry and disappointment. The whole thing had crumbled to pieces; the play was in ruins, with the curtain due to go up on the first performance in a matter of hours.

I wondered if this would be an introduction to get our attention, and he’d jump back into the past. Well, he does after a few pages of this – but only back to the beginning of that play’s genesis. And yes, the play is Journey’s End, based on Sherriff’s experiences of World War One – well, based on his knowledge of life in the trenches, rather than specifically based on his life. And it started life as a play to raise money for the rowing club that Sherriff was in.

Marvellously, the first 200 pages of No Leading Lady – more than half the book – is about Journey’s End. Sherriff goes gradually from this humble start to trying (and failing) to get an agent for it. People were put off by it having no leading lady (one of the reasons for the autobiography’s title) and by believing, in the mid-1920s, that no audience had an appetite for being taken back to the trenches.

You’d have to read those 200 pages to experience the hopes and failures, the gradual back and forth of getting to success. Sherriff is turned down many times before he finally gets somebody willing to put on the play at a private club – where the lead part is played by a then-unknown actor called Laurence Olivier. It gets rave reviews, but this doesn’t translate into a proper transfer for the fee-paying public. Eventually, though, someone gives it a chance… and it is a runaway hit.

I have raced through the gradual way Sherriff reveals this, and he goes on to chart its fortunes in the West End, in America, as a film etc. I loved how steadily, slowly he did – he is not coy to tell us about the financial aspect, or the various setbacks that were obstacles before this ‘overnight’ success. We so seldom get this level of detail about a writer’s work, and I absolutely loved it – and I haven’t even read or seen Journey’s End! He does assume you’ll have familiarity with it, but I didn’t find it much mattered. Whenever I review a Sherriff book, I say that is a perfect storyteller – and No Leading Lady is another example of this perfection. He measures the pace so brilliantly, so that the 200 pages feel fully earned.

From another writer, it might have felt braggy. But even when Sherriff is discussing his big pay-outs, enthusiastic reviews, or huge audiences, he does so with a sort of childlike disbelief that you can’t help be happy on his behalf. He never felt something like this could happen to him, a humble insurance salesman (oh, and I loved the sections on his insurance work too). The other part of the book which gets a lot of focus is his time as an undergraduate at Oxford – delayed until his 30s, and with the same sense of being unexpectedly privileged and finding himself in a world he never thought he’d be part of.

But success isn’t guaranteed, of course. He doesn’t spend as much time writing about the next play, but it fails. So does the one after. Sherriff has over-extended himself far too much on his house – and while some of his frets about economising aren’t particularly relatable (he insists he needs two indoor servants, three gardeners and a chauffeur) he is candid about them. It is the most personal he gets. He also writes beautifully about his relationship with his mother, who goes everywhere with him. It’s an impressive balance of genuine openness about what he does write about, and a careful line around the parts of his life he doesn’t want to disclose.

Sadly, for me, he decides not to write much about his novels – except for The Fortnight in September, his first novel which restored his renown. The others don’t even get a mention, and I would have loved to read more about some of my favourites. He also worked for a time as a scriptwriter in Hollywood at a time when studios were flinging eye-watering sums at well-known writers to try to lure them. He writes a lot about his first screenplay, an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, but skates past others – including the one that got him an Oscar nomination, which isn’t mentioned in the book.

I can see that some publishers wouldn’t want to reprint No Leading Lady. It doesn’t follow the usual trajectory of an autobiography, and some might think it would only be of interest to fans of Journey’s End. But I thought it was a spectacular, involving and delightful look at a writer’s life. Sherriff is such a brilliant storyteller that I would happily hear him tell any story – in this book, he captivated me completely.

Some books from Michael Moon’s in Whitehaven

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I’m up at the Keswick Convention this week, in the Lake District, and one of the things on my list was to visit Michael Moon’s bookshop in Whitehaven. It’s perhaps not as well known as nearby Bookcase in Carlisle, but it’s almost as wonderful a treasure trove. A warren of rooms, very reasonable prices, and a huge amount of older books – many of which seem to be the sort of books that were read by the masses (piles of Warwick Deeping, Ethel M. Dell etc.).

I went last year but was doing Project 24 – this year, I could be a lot less restrained. I bought one to give away (a compilation of Cornelia Otis Skinner’s best sketches in That’s Me All Over), and this lot for myself… I leant towards authors I’ve heard of but not read, and would be particularly interested in any recommendations from this haul.

Cleo by Mary Lutyens
A very 1970s cover for this (signed!) novel about a 15-year-old and her first romantic experience – and how her understanding of it changes in the years that follow. I don’t know if this will be insensitive or ahead of its time – time will tell.

The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice by Stephen Leacock
Only the other day I was wondering which Leacock books I was still missing – and then I stumbled across this one, which looks like it is Leacock in serious rather than comic mode. The opening line, ‘These are troubled times’, reminds me that every period feels more or less like that.

The Inn at the Edge of the World by Alice Thomas Ellis
One of my favourite tropes is a group of strangers gathering together – And Then There Were None and The Enchanted April being two excellent examples. This novella by Alice Thomas Ellis seems to do the same thing – five people at a remote Scottish island at Christmas.

Young Claudia by Rose Franken
I don’t know why I know the name Rose Franken, but it hovers on the peripheries of my knowledge. This one caught my eye, and I was sold by the opening line – ‘Half-way through the job, Claudia knew she was a fool to have begun with the hedge in the first place.’ I now see from Scott/Furrowed Middlebrow that she wrote a lot of novels about Claudia, so I’m not sure where this falls in that series.

The City of Pleasure by Arnold Bennett
There’s always room for another Arnold Bennett on the shelves.

So Many Loves by Leo Walmsley
Having loved Walmsley’s autobiographical trilogy of moving to Cornwall (or at least the first two, as I have yet to read the third), I was happy to pick up a book that I don’t know anything about. It turns out that this is straight autobiography, particularly about his childhood.

A Porch At My Door by Rex Matthews
The bookshop had quite a lot of books from The Country Book Club (which, rather thrillingly, say they must not be sold to the general public – what a maverick I am!). I bought a couple – I don’t know anything about Rex Matthews, but the lure of a book about house-hunting was enough for me.

Village in the Sun by Dane Chandos
This was the one Country Book Club choice, and an author I have read – only one book, Abbie, but I enjoyed it a lot. If memory serves, Dane Chandos is the pseudonym of a pair writing together. I rather expected this book to be about England, but it turns out it’s set in Ajijic, Mexico.

Lady Living Alone by Norah Lofts
I get Norah Hoult and Norah Lofts confused. The latter is predominantly a historical novelist, but she wrote four suspense novels under the pseudonym Peter Curtis – at least one of them, Lady Living Alone, was reprinted under Lofts own name in the 1980s. I’m intrigued by the story of a historical novelist with a phobia for being alone, and how she gets involved with a man who may or may not help…

A Cat in the Window by Derek Tangye
The bookshop had quite a few books by Tangye, all apparently about moving to Cornwall and life there – I toyed with buying the lot, but chose instead just to get the small volume dedicated to a cat.

No Lady With A Pen by Ursula Bloom
Bloom was the incredibly prolific writer (500+ books) among whose output was the British Library title Tea Is So Intoxicating, under the name Mary Essex. I’ve bought a few of her non-fiction titles, and this book about her early career on Fleet Street looks interesting.

Quorum by Phyllis Bentley
Another name I’ve seen around a lot, I certainly had plenty of Bentley books to choose from in the bookshop. In the end I chose Quorum because it looks like an interesting structure – it’s about a committee, and the chapters are dedicated to different committee members and then different matters (minutes, finance, analysis of project etc.) It could be successful or not, but it looks like an innovative and unusual approach,

And all that for £30! I’m excited to see what gems are among them – I think the Norah Lofts will be my first port of call. Any recommendations – and where would you start with this haul?

Foxybaby by Elizabeth Jolley

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I think I started buying Elizabeth Jolley books because Kim at Reading Matters made them sound really interesting – I bought a few but never got around to reading any under Lisa at ANZ LitLovers said she would be turning to Jolley to celebrate her birthday. I started Foxybaby (1985) then, but it took me a while to finish. And then even longer to write about it.

What an unusual writer, and I honestly can’t decide if I liked Foxybaby or not. It’s a very misleading title – ‘Foxybaby’ is the name of a play that Alma Porch introduces to a group of people at a weight loss camp in a remote part of Australia. It is a residential summer school, supposedly, but people are there primarily with weight loss in mind – the other bits are simply extras. They have many activities at this pricey camp – one of which is putting on a performance, though there are considerable disagreements between Alma Porch and the camp leader Miss Josephine Peycroft. The novel opens with a glorious exchange of letters between the women, which reveal that they are already temperamentally and tonally at total odds with one another. Miss Porch isn’t particularly enthusiastic about going, but cannot turn down the offer.

As she is nearing the destination, this happens…

An ancient bus, once the property of a reputable boarding school for young ladies from good families, still bearing an uplifting motto and emblazoned with crests and colours, travelling in an easterly direction some distance ahead and, because of starting to round the long bend, out of sight, stopped to pick up an elderly woman who was proceeding slowly on foot in the same direction.

The woman, who was dressed in respectable black, Miss Porch thought in the briefest possible time for any thought, must have walked a tremendous distance to be in that remote and lonely place. As she was about to raise a heavy and obviously weary foot to the iron step, Miss Porch, reaching top G, took the first part of the bend in a style suitable for a prima donna and crashed into the substantial fender at the back of the bus.

Her car and another car are badly crumpled in the crash, though thankfully nobody has any serious injuries. It turns out that this is all devised by the ruthless Miles Finch to drum up business for his nearby garage, and the old woman in respectable black has been paid a sum for her services to vehicular collision. Miles pops up throughout the novel and I found him a convincingly infuriating man – caring only about chances of profit, he steals the props and sells them, looks for any opportunity to make charges, and is generally a tolerated thorn in the side of everyone at the college.

Alma Porch is an eccentric character, fixated on Samuel Johnson and incapable of making any sort of utterance you might expect – but she meets her match in a world of eccentric characters. There are the cloak-and-dagger lesbian infatuations between women who don’t seem to much like each other, the dominant older woman who is determined to be in charge of everything, the mother and child who are constantly on the edge of hysteria. There could hardly be group less qualified or less prepared to put on a searing play about drug abuse (for such, unexpectedly, is ‘Foxybaby’). They do their best, and their best is bad. Miss Porch continues in her role, an intriguing mix of helpless and unmoved by the chaos.

Reading Foxybaby was quite a surreal experience. At the beginning, I loved Jolley’s precision with words which I often found very funny. She felt like Australia’s answer to novelists like Muriel Spark, Beryl Bainbridge, Jane Bowles who write with careful, odd brilliance. But along the way the plot and characters became a bit too stodgy for me, and I never find the introduction of a secondary narrative – here, the play ‘Foxybaby’ – works very well for me. Even Virginia Woolf couldn’t convince me it was a success in Between the Acts, so who else has a chance?

I’ll definitely still read more from my Jolley shelf, but I think I’d prefer her with a slightly less chaotic, overstuffed plot. And perhaps some standout eccentric characters, rather than a cast who are all dizzyingly bizarre. I enjoyed much of Foxybaby, but also wasn’t particularly enthused to keep going at times.

I’ll finish with a couple of sentences that show Jolley’s ability to dive from sublime to ridiculous:

She knew too that this profound despair was a part of the loneliness which accompanied writing. Added to this was the emotional stress of offering a partly-written work to a group of people who were concerned chiefly with losing weight.

A bunch of books I’ve read recently

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It’s that time again when I look at a big pile of books I’ve been intending to review, and don’t really have a full-post’s worth of things to say… so here they all are, in a round up. Hope you’re all reading something fun at the moment.

Because of Jane (1913) by J.E. Buckrose

I have a few books by the near-forgotten Buckrose and really like her writing. My hope is that one of them will elevate itself above the others and be good enough for the British Library Women Writers series – but it won’t be Because of Jane. As I’ve written previously, Buckrose is very good on puncturing egos and awkwardness and social manners. She is much more formulaic and less interesting when it comes to romance – and there is a lot of romance in Because of Jane. The central one is ‘spinster’ Beatrice who reluctantly lives with her brother and his wife and daughter, and who begins to fall for a local widower, Stephen Croft.

“They were married at a registrar’s office. That always seems to me a little like buying machine-made underclothing. Doesn’t it to you?”

“Yes – no – I don’t know,” said Beatrice.

“And so,” said Miss Thornleigh, pursuing her train of thought, “it didn’t last. It was never likely to last.”

“I cannot think that Mrs Stephen Croft died because she was married at the registrar’s,” objected Beatrice in common justice.

“Well, perhaps not,” conceded Miss Thornleigh. “But it was a bad start.”

That was one excerpt I enjoyed, but sadly Because of Jane doesn’t have that much in this tone – and a lot more in Jane’s voice. Jane is Beatrice’s seven-year-old niece and the sort of irritating novelistic child who says things with wide-eyed innocence that sum up what other are truly feeling. The book was fine, but rather worse than the other two Buckroses I’ve read.

The ABC of Cats (1960) by Beverley Nichols

Reading the Meow week was the reason I started The ABC of Cats, but I didn’t finish it. He goes through the alphabet, writing about a different aspect of cats for each letter (e.g. Y is Yawn). It’s all delightful, and Nichols does cats extremely well – he is expert on their behaviours, habits, wishes without every getting saccharine or fey. It’s one for cat lovers certainly, and enjoyable if only for his apparent belief that he has invented the cat flap.

Things I Didn’t Throw Out (2017) by Marcin Wicha

Translated from Polish by Marta Dziurosz, this is a non-fiction reflection on Marcin’s mother’s life through the books that she left behind. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they are mostly Polish books – Emma by Jane Austen is the only one I’ve read. The book is also a lens to look at post-war Poland and how the Communist regime affected those who lived there.

I think Wicha writes really well, in sparse, curious way. But I struggle to know what to write about this book except that it’s unusual and beguiling – and probably better if you have a good knowledge of this period in Polish history and literature already, which I do not.

The First To Die at the End (2022) by Adam Silvera

I thought Silvera’s young adult novel They Both Die at the End was a brilliant premise worked out really well – it’s a world where people get a phone call from DeathCast on the day they will die, but aren’t told precisely when or how. And now he’s written The First To Die at the End, a prequel set on the first night that DeathCast is launched.

As before, there are two teenage boys who meet for the first time that day and spend it together – waiting for death (though I won’t spoil whose). It does feel a little like a repeat of the same sort of thing, done a little less compelling and with some extraneous side characters taking up some of the 550 pages. But it’s still a brilliant idea, and Silvera writes very engagingly. I didn’t remember the original book well enough to get all the references or Easter eggs, though did appreciate the two boys from that book appearing here briefly as their younger selves.