Still Life by Richard Cobb – #NovNov Day 16

Today’s book is cheating a bit, because I started it in September – and somehow it fell to one side, and I read the second half today. And it is twenty or so pages over the self-imposed 200pp limit. But no matter. I always loved Slightly Foxed Editions – not just beautiful books, but so brilliantly chosen. They’re always memoirs, and often of people I know nothing about. Sometimes, as in the case of Still Life by Richard Cobb, I’m none the wiser about why he’s famous by the end of the book. That’s fine.

Cobb grew up in Tunbridge Wells in a family that was respectable but not very well off, and Still Life is as much a paean to the Tunbridge Wells of his childhood in the ’20s and ’30s and beyond as it is to his family or anything else. Indeed, it starts with the different roads that lead into the town – viewing it from different angles, trying to work out where to start. As Arpita wrote in her review, the beginning of this memoir isn’t it strongest feature. It feels rather impersonal, and we don’t quite know where we are – disoriented, as we don’t quite settle in his house or in any one place.

But, thankfully, Still Life gets better and better as it goes on – and as Cobb fills in the gaps. He gradually adds details of neighbours, shops, customs. I loved his portraits of local notable people – not notable for their rank or even their achievements, but for their longevity, eccentricity, or other addition to the array of people in the community. I found particularly fascinating the contrast when the Second World War came and went – how people returned to their privacy and hierarchies, after a period where more doors were opened and people stood on ceremony less.

It continues with different ways of looking at the town, as a conceit, and here is the opening to a chapter called ‘Doors and Windows’:

In the course of my walks, at whatever time of day, I would pass many front doors behind which I had penetrated; and thus I came to see Tunbridge Wells as consisting of a series of interlocking privacies; a mingling of addresses at fixed times, and according to unstated, but recognised, conventions. There could be a proper time for the drawbridge to be brought down and for a carefully restricted breach of privacy. One would not expect to gain entry through a front door – unless it was that of a doctor or a dentist – in the morning, or any time much before 3. People did not ask one another to lunch, though they might arrange to meet at lunch -as they might meet for morning coffee at the Cadena or the Tudor Café – in one of those established that seem to have marked the Thirties and that served modest, three-course southern English meals by well-spoken ladies, generally in couples, and wearing artistic smocks over their tweeds, to show that they were not servants.

I loved what Arpita wrote about Still Life: ‘For as the dextrous miniaturist painter adds infinitesimal detail to his work of art, so too has the author added layer upon layer of minute detail of his retelling of childhood.’ That’s the feeling I got from this memoir too. Perhaps I enjoyed it more and more as it went not just for the things he included later in the book, but because I had more of a background to see each person and trait against. It was cumulatively enjoyable.

Another success from Slightly Foxed – but, at this point, that’s more or less tautology. The SF Editions remain one of the finest curated lists out there.