1977

My Darling Villain by Lynne Reid Banks

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It’s well-documented that I deeply love Lynne Reid Banks’ The L-Shaped Room and its sequels – and somehow it has taken me quite a few years to properly explore the rest of her output. Partly that’s because of how much I enjoy re-reading The L-Shaped Room, and partly it’s because I’ve been worried that the racism and homophobia that I’ve learned to expect and overlook in The L-Shaped Room might be too off-putting in a novel I’m not familiar with. Over the past few years I’ve been taking a deep breath and reading more Lynne Reid Banks.

Well, in 2021 I read The Warning Bell and it was super racist. Last year I read An End To Running and really liked it, with the caveat that it felt like two novels, barely hinged together. Onto My Darling Villain (1977) – which has ended up being the most successful of the lot for me, I’m pleased to say.

Firstly – look, my copy is signed! (Hopefully I have successfully embedded a post from my Instagram here.)

 

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My Darling Villain is, I supposed, a young adult novel – inasmuch as the characters are teenagers and the prose is suitable for a slightly younger audience – but I don’t think I’d have blinked an eye if it were marketed to adults. The main relationship may be between people on the cusp of adulthood, but the whole book is drenched in topics that could work at any age – at least any age in Britain. Because this is a book about that perennial British theme: a relationship between different classes.

The narrator of My Darling Villain is Kate. She has recently turned 15 and is (like so many heroines of such books) not in the first echelon of popularity at her school. She’s probably not in the second either, but she does have some good friends – and, together, they devise a party. It’s intended to catch the attention of a boy she has her eye on, and to be a quiet affair with a handful of people from school. She even invites a girl she actively despises, because they are curious about her mature-sounding boyfriend.

It turns out, of course, that the party is beset with gate-crashers. In an era before the internet, word doesn’t spread as disastrously far as it might – but certainly some unsavoury types come along. Crockery gets broken, food is smeared on the wall, unspeakable things happen in the bathroom, and far too much alcohol is drunk. It’s a disaster. Except for one thing – Kate meets Mark Collins.

At first, she categorises him among the unwelcome hoodlums who are doing dastardly things to the house. But he, in fact, is the one who stays behind to help clean up while others flee. And here is her first proper encounter, earlier in the evening.

“Let’s dance.”

“No thanks.”

“Why not?”

Ridiculous as it seems, I couldn’t find an answer. Except, “Because you’re an erk and I don’t dance with erks.” Maybe I should have said that. But all my life I had seen my father and mother behaving with perfect politeness to everyone who came to our house. They were even polite to the awful men who came to ask for our television licence (we had it all the time), and to the angry father who came to complain that Bruce had knocked his son off his bicycle (a lie) and even to the vicar, whom Dad afterwards described as an oily antediluvian old hypocrtie. Well, maybe Dad himself was the hypocrite, for welcoming the old fellow to his face and being rude behind his back; but I’d got the idea that the important thing was courtesy, especially in one’s own house, and because of that I was too inhibited to tell Mark Collins to get lost. So I danced with him,

He danced very well. You could say he was an expert. I’m crazy about dancing and very few boys I know really can. We danced apart, facing each other, and he fixed his eyes on mine in a strange way I wasn’t used to – our boys don’t look at you when they dance.

It’s clear from the outset that Kate categorises herself and Mark in different, well, categories. He is not one of ‘our boys’. Kate is very middle-class – slightly unconventionally so, since her father is an actor who has made a name for himself in a popular TV drama, but middle-class nonetheless. Mark is very working-class. He rides a motorbike everywhere, lives in a small house with a wide extended family, and is expected to follow his father into working as a mechanic. (Kate’s brother, meanwhile, would love to be a mechanic – but their parents aren’t unconventional enough to allow a career path that involves dropping out of higher education.)

If Mark had been in a very slightly different class, perhaps he could be snubbed. But he is so different from Kate’s that she feels she has to be ‘polite’ to him, and show ‘courtesy’. It is the performative friendliness of the middle-class. But it comes alongside the heart and hormones of a teenager. It isn’t long before Kate is smitten with Mark.

And, reader, I suspect you will be too. I fell rather hard for this pairing too. Perhaps Mark is a bit of wish-fulfilment – he is kind, honest, articulate and, of course, handsome. But Lynne Reid Banks does it well. She has crafted exactly the sort of young man that a heroine like Kate needs to open up her horizons, and to challenge her expectations.

The path isn’t plain sailing, of course. Both families have problems with them dating. Her parents are worried that her schoolwork will suffer if she is too distracted, and anxiously forbid her from getting on the motorbike – but Kate rightly suspect that class prejudice is part of their objections (and, indeed, has hardly shed her own). Mark’s family, meanwhile, feel awkward and unsure around Kate, and can feel the judgement that could come from her side. Lynne Reid Banks is so good at making a relationship – even one between teenagers – feel real and authentic, so that the obstacles they encounter seem organic rather than merely plot points.

Alongside this story are others that feel more uncomfortable – particulary one about a young woman lodging with the neighbours who claims the son of the family has got her pregnant, while nobody (including Kate) believes her. Then there’s the nearby Jewish family who face some anti-Semitism, and Lynne Reid Banks goes awkwardly over the top in her pro-Jewish descriptions, so that it somehow goes full circle and feels a little anti-Semitic itself.

I suppose what I’m saying is that there are plenty of elements in this 1977 novel that wouldn’t appear in a 2024 novel. But nothing terribly objectionable, and certainly nothing to match the racism of The Warning Bell. And Kate and Mark’s rocky teenage relationship feels timeless – certainly class remains a topic that British writers will return to, and Banks doesn’t offer any easy answers. She does give us two very appealing protagonists – flawed, absolutely, but people I ended up caring very deeply about. I can only imagine how heavily I’d have fallen for My Darling Villain if I’d read it as a teenager. I fell pretty hard as a 38-year-old.

 

The House by the Sea by May Sarton

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There is always something rather fun about spontaneously choosing a book to read next. You can forget the urgent pile of books that should logically be the next on the list and go, instead, for something that absolutely meets the mood of the moment. And so it was the other night when I was walking along my bookcases, pulling off various titles and deciding they weren’t quite right, that I decided to read Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton. Until I got to the ‘S’ section of my autobiographies/biographies bookcases and discovered that… apparently I didn’t own it. But I did have a later volume, The House by the Sea (1977) and so I chose that instead.

The journal takes place a couple of years after she has moved to the house of the title. The previous house saw an extremely difficult and sad period of her life – she doesn’t go into detail about this, and I assume it is the topic of earlier journals.

If there is one irresistible piece of magic here among many others, it is the slightly curving path down to the sea that begins in flagstones on the lawn, cuts through two huge junipers, and proceeds, winding its way down to Surf Point, through the wood lilies in June, to tall grasses in summer, the goldenrod and asters in September, leading the eye on, creating the atmosphere of a fairy tale, something open yet mysterious that every single person who comes here is led to explore.

I am drawn to any fiction or non-fiction about houses, and Sarton certainly gives us a sense of the idyllic remoteness of this home. She is still in touch with the world, still travelling for lecture series and communicating with a wide number of friends, but has this place to retreat to. But the beautiful place is not treated like a fairytale escape. In this volume, Sarton details her anxieties – about ailing friends, about her legacy, and often about the encroaching signs of old age.

Growing old… what is the opposite of ‘growing’? I ask myself. ‘Withering’ perhaps? It is, I assume, quite easy to wither into old age, and hard to grow into it. 

Sarton was only in her early 60s when she wrote the journal, and would live for another two decades, but she writes often about her fears of losing faculties – and, more than once, worries about falling and not being found. This is a precise honesty to the way she writes about fears that so many people must have, particularly if they live alone. It is not written with self-indulgence or false attempts to cheer herself up – rather, she documents her experiences and reflections with the emotion of a memoirist and the rigour of a historian.

But this is not a sad book by any means. The reflections are often more content, and nowhere more enjoyable than when Sarton is writing about the natural world around her. I loved this beautiful paragraph on snowfall:

I woke late … it was nearly seven when Tamas began licking his paws, his gentle way of saying, “It’s time to get up.” I woke to a world thickly enclosed in walls of big-flaked snow falling very fast. Now it is thinner, there is more wind, and it looks as though for the first time in this house I’m to be snowed in for the day. How exciting and moving that is, the exact opposite of an outgoing adventure or expedition! Here the excitement is to be suddenly a self-reliant prisoner, and what opens out is the inner world, the timeless world when my compulsion to go out and get the mail at eleven must be forgotten. How beautiful the white field is in its blur of falling snow, with the delicate black pencil strokes of trees and bushes seen through it! And, of course, the silence, the snow silence, becomes hypnotic if one stops to listen.

Sarton makes clear that she was writing the journal for publication, and so it doesn’t feel intrusive to read her day-by-day experiences. I’ve only read her novels before, and have now built up a much closer portrait of their author. She can be cross, particularly with fans who arrive at her door without warning and disrupt her day. She can go to great lengths to do kindnesses for others, and think little of it. She warmly appreciates the fine work of other artists and writers, and feels guilt when she has to censure any work that is sent to her – and values creativity too highly to ever lie or even prevaricate.

I really warmed to Sarton, and I loved reading The House by the Sea. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it on my favourite reads of 2023. She generously invites the reader into a fully realised world, without artifice or exaggeration, and I think it is that thorough reality that makes the book so beautiful to read. It felt like time spent with a friend.

Albert and the Dragonettes by Rosemary Weir (25 Books in 25 Days: #22)

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Last time I did 25 Books in 25 Days, I finished off with Albert’s World Tour, so it was only fitting that I picked up Albert and the Dragonettes (1977) for a busy day this time around. I squeezed it into a few spare moments – and it’s the final of the Albert the Dragon books on my shelves (since I don’t yet have Albert the Dragon and the Centaur).

For those who don’t know, the series is about Albert – a vegetarian dragon who lives on seaweed, and wins over the mistrustful villagers thanks to a young boy called Tony. Albert is gentle and thoughtful, and only breathes fire when he gets angry. The original books have illustrations from Quentin Blake, while the later ones in the series have various imitators (successful and less so). Albert and the Dragonettes is illustrated by Gerald Rose, and I don’t love them – particularly compared to Blake’s delightful originals.

The dragonettes are the two baby dragons that Albert adopted at the end of the previous book – Alberto (Berto) and Albertina (Tina). While they’re in the title, the book is mostly about trying to persuade a sea monster to leave the cave that Albert and the dragonettes have their eye on for their new home. It’s much less episodic than the previous books, which gives it a nice overarching theme.

Look, yes, this is a children’s book – but Albert and his world is a feast of nostalgia for me, remembering how much I loved them as a child. This was a fun pick.

25 Books in 25 Days: #1 A Way of Life, Like Any Other

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After reading Tolstoy and the Purple Chair by Nina Sankovitch – a reading memoir by someone who reads a book a day for a year – and then watching Madame Bibliophile do ‘Novella a Day in May‘ – I’ve decided I’m going to try something similar myself.

I’ve done a few weekends where I read as many novellas as I can, just to whittle down my tbr piles. And now I’m going try… 25 Books in 25 Days. Basically a book a day, though I may end up finishing off some I’ve got on the go. And sometimes those books will be SUPER short, depending on what else I’ve got on. But it’s a fun challenge, especially to see if I can fit it around my job etc., and will help me read some of the books I’ve got waiting for me.

And I’m going to write really quickly about all of them, as they happen, at least until I fail. OPTIMISM. I’m just going to go with where/how I got the book, a quotation, and quick general thoughts.

A Way of Life, Like Any Other (1977) by Darcy O’Brien

I bought this in April 2012, in Barter Books up in Alnwick, presumably because it’s a lovely NYRB Classics edition – though I do also seem to remember seeing it around the blogosphere.

It’s told as though a memoir by the child of Golden Age Hollywood actors (who are now a bit down on their luck). The main character negotiates a life dominated by his temperamental mother, but also filled with larger-than-life and slightly surreal other characters. The tone is heightened, but extremely engaging – and I really enjoyed it as a quirky, disruptive, often disjointed view of Hollywood. I’ve not read the introduction yet, so I don’t know how much Darcy O’Brien had to base on his own life.

“Stand there a minute,” he said. “I think I see a resemblance to your father.”

“I’m tired, Mr. Pines.”

“Please call me Peter. It’s in the mouth. You have his mouth. He was a very handsome man. You love him, don’t you.”

“Every son loves his father,” I said, getting into bed.

“You’re very young. It’s very hard on you, isn’t it? I know. I went through it myself. My father walked out when I was five.”

I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to hear about Mr. Pine’s father. He meant well. We all do.

“I think your mother deserves better than that cretin, don’t you?”

“He’s all right,” I said. I felt like crying all of a sudden. I turned my face to the wall. Poor Mother was going to be alone again. And poor Anatol, what would he do? Go on at Disney till he dropped? I felt sorry for everybody. What was I going to do? I wished people could stay together. I thought about baseball.

 

I Want To Be A Christian by J.I. Packer – #1977Club

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Sneaking into the final day of the 1977 Club with my second review. And it’s been another great bunch of reviews from everyone – amazing variety, and lots of authors I know very little about. News about the next club soon, but do keep any 1977 Club reviews coming for the next few hours!

I’ve had I Want To Be A Christian (since republished as Growing in Christ) by J.I. Packer since 2004 – it was one of the books my Dad gave me when I went to university. I’ve read bits and pieces of it over the years, finding the bits that were most necessary at any point, but this was the first time I read it all the way through. It is perhaps not particularly relevant to 1977 specifically – its themes are literally eternal – but they do draw a line from to my Dad in 1977, or thereabouts, reading it for the first time.

As the title suggests, this is a book for people looking to find out more about the Christian faith, or perhaps very early in it, and it explores the central tenets of knowing Christ and being part of His church. I’ve been a Christian for my entire adult life, so there wasn’t anything in here that came as a surprise to me – but Packer writes it very well, phrasing it neatly and concisely, as well as bringing out the joy and wonder of what he explains.

The book is in four sections. The Apostles’ Creed, baptism and conversion, the Lord’s prayer, and the ten commandments. For the first, third, and fourth sections, Packer can take the words one by one – explaining what they mean, how they relate to the Bible, and what they mean for a life walked with God. The second section is necessarily a little more abstract, but is backed up with scripture, and gives an overview of some of the discussions theologians have had. But this book isn’t about deep debates and minute interpretations – it’s all about the essentials.

Packer has a great way of summarising the essential truths of something well known, and illuminating them further. I liked this on the Lord’s Prayer:

We need to see that the Lord’s Prayer is offering us model answers to the series of questions God puts to us to shape our conversation with him. Thus:  “Who do you take me for, and what am I to you?” (Our Father in heaven.) “That being so, what is it that you really want most?” (The hallowing of your name; the coming of your kingdom; to see your will known and done.) “So what are you asking for right now, as a means to that end?” (Provision, pardon, protection.) Then the “praise ending” answers the question, “How can you be so bold and confident in asking for these things?” (Because we know you can do it, and when you do it, it will bring you glory!) Spiritually, this set of questions sorts us out in a most salutary way.

There are many, many books that introduce people to the Christian faith. Many would be a lot more like storytelling than this one – there are no anecdotes, no personal testimonies. I love those sorts of books, but I think there’s also a vital place for this gentle, simple, step-by-step explanation of the tenets of faith – particularly one that you can feel recognises, in every word, the glory and wonder of what he is writing about.

Apple of My Eye by Helene Hanff – #1977Club

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Why am I always super busy during club weeks? I will do catch-ups properly towards the end of the week (yes, it is already towards the end of the week, SORRY) but I’m really excited to be getting the notifications that people are joining in. And Karen is on it like a pro.

My first 1977 Club read is one I picked up in a brilliant bookshop called J C Books in Watton, Norfolk. If you’re ever in Norfolk, make sure you get there. It’s Apple of My Eye by Helene Hanff – most famed, of course, for 84, Charing Cross Road, though I don’t hear a lot about her other books. Any fan of 84CCR should get a copy of Q’s Legacy pronto, which is sort of a sequel – but I’ve enjoyed all the books I’ve read by her, more or less.

A few years ago I read Letter From New York, which was about the apartment building she lived in, her neighbours, and generally life in the city – collected, if I remember correctly, from various articles over the years. I rather thought that Apple of My Eye would be the same thing – but it is not. Rather, Hanff had been commissioned to write the accompanying text to a book of photos of New York, designed for tourists to get the most out of the city. I don’t know quite what happened to that book, but Apple of My Eye rather wonderfully combines her recommended highlights with an account of visiting them herself and choosing what to include. It’s not a guidebook, it’s more a witty memoir of writing a guidebook – but could certainly function as an edited highlights of New York nonetheless (or, at least, New York in 1977).

Like many people who live in a touristy city, Hanff found that she had actually visited relatively few of the Must See Locations. (I, for instance, didn’t go to the Pitt Rivers for my first ten years in Oxford, and still haven’t made it to the Oxford Museum.) If you have all the time in the world to do something, then you never do – but Hanff realises she has to do all the things she hasn’t. And someone else who hasn’t is her friend Patsy – who also, apparently, has a couple of months to spare. So off they go!

Now, I’ve never been to New York, and I don’t really like travel guides even to places I have been. So my heart sank a little when I realised what sort of book this might be. But it was wrong to sink! While I couldn’t get my head around 5th Street this and 84th Street that, and have never understood how you know which two streets something like ‘6th and 8th’ might be – because surely that could be the same as 8th and 6th – I really enjoyed this anyway. And the reason is because Hanff is so funny about the experience of exploring – and about her friendship with Patsy.

Hanff is brilliant at writing about her friends. In Letter From New York it was Arlene (and Richard and Nina et al), and here it’s Patsy – she tells us enough about them to understand not only their characters, but how she relates to them and what their friendship is like. With Patsy, Hanff has clearly got to the point in the friendship where they can squabble slightly, tease each other, rely on each other, and say precisely what they mean. Patsy is enthusiastic about coming on this tour, but also openly reluctant to do many of the proposed activities (often because of her fear of heights). Her refrain is “write that down”, often for details Hanff considers irrelevant – though, self-evidently, did write them down. Much is also made of their East vs West friendly enmities.

Curiously, while I find all the south-of-the-river vs north-of-the-river chat in London quite tedious (mostly because they seem exactly the same to me), I really enjoyed the way Hanff wrote about East vs West. For example…

Generally speaking, West Siders look dowdy, scholarly and slightly down-at-heel, and the look has nothing to do with money. They look like what a great many of them are: scholars, intellectuals, dedicated professionals, all of whom regard shopping for clothes as a colossal waste of time. East Siders, on the other hand, look chic. Appearances are important to them. From which you’ll correctly deduce that East Siders are conventional and proper, part of the Establishment and in awe of it – which God knows, and God be thanks, West Siders are not.

Hanff, it should be noted, is from the East Side – though does feel like a fish out of water sometimes.

Luckily for me, Hanff assumes no knowledge of New York at all – up to and including telling us that theatre happens on Broadway. As she darts on buses all over the place, we see Ellis Island, the Empire State Building, Bloomingdale’s, Central Park, and all the things one would expect – with a few little-known gems thrown in for good measure. The strangest part to read about was the World Trade Center  – still having bits finalised at the time of Hanff writing. Obviously she could know nothing of its eventual fate, and to read of it as an exciting new development in the city, with the best restaurant available, felt rather surreal.

Hanff is very concise in her tour – my copy of the book was only 120 pages. Obviously volumes and volumes could be written about New York, and have been, but I think this is a wonderful little book – probably even more so for somebody familiar with New York. For me, it is a funny and charming account of friendship, which just happens to have a dizzying tour of New York as its backdrop.

Apricots at Midnight by Adèle Geras

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My housemate Melissa (not to be confused with a different housemate Melissa, who has also written the odd book review for SIAB) wanted to borrow a book, and ended up with one I was given but have yet to read – Apricots at Midnight (1977) by Adèle Geras. As always, I encourage my friends to write reviews for SIAB. This is seldom taken up, but thankfully Melissa said yes, and wrote this fab review! Do (as always) make my guests feel welcome in the comments section… and enjoy the review:

Small pleasures. I picked this book off Simon’s shelf at his
first words of description, without waiting for the rest: ‘That one is a
children’s book.’ I love books written for children; the unpredictable-but-safe
plotlines, the freshness of the detail, the firing of the imagination; and this
one did not disappoint.

Actually, this is the sort of book that as a child I didn’t
really appreciate. It’s one of those books which describes someone’s childhood
memories, and why, I would wonder, should I read about another person’s
everyday life when my own was so interesting and there were plenty of books
about daredevil escapades, fantastic worlds, or true-to-life explorations? It’s
only through growing up (a little bit) that I’ve come to appreciate the beauty
of the everyday and of simple, happy memories.
This book is built around a quilt; a quilt sewn together,
patch by patch, by the narrator’s elderly relative Aunt Pinny, from fabrics
picked up throughout her life. Each patch is tied to a story, the cue to a
memory of long ago. The apricots of the title relate to the first ball Pinny
attended, a little girl sneaking down to join her working mother for a midnight
snack.
A child’s perspective is so different: everything is
fascinating, but nothing is truly surprising. For Pinny, the line between
make-believe and reality is not particularly important; there’s no
disappointment when the adventurer Major Variana admits his limp was gained by
dropping a crate of oranges on his foot rather than being bitten by a
crocodile, and no questioning of his reassurance ‘That was the only made-up
story, I promise you’. In her old age, Pinny retains this childlike ability to
take her experiences at face value, so that the tone of the book hinges
slightly on the fantastic.
The individual salient events, people and places slowly
build a picture of the beauty of Pinny’s daily life. The emergent character in
the backdrop is her mother: thrown from prosperity at the death of her husband,
and fighting to build a life for herself and her daughter on the strength of
her dressmaking skills. She is the constant in Pinny’s life, tying the book
together, providing stability and a structure. It is she who first suggests the
quilt and teaches a tiny Pinny to hold a needle and make her first stitches.
Like a fairy godmother, she can always produce something from whatever nothing
is to hand: a garden for a convalescent Pinny from scraps of flowered fabric;
an extra sixpence when Pinny’s allowance isn’t quite enough for the music box
she wants to buy; an overnight job at Mrs Triptree’s ball so that Pinny can see
the ladies in their beautiful costumes.
There is a chance for Pinny to be involved in everything she
does – sitting in on meetings with unusual and exotic guests, contributing a
not-so-successful stuffed zebra to the soft toy stall at the church fair,
cutting out the jam tarts for a picnic. Her tears and remorse on the day she is
delayed picking Pinny up from school, and gratitude to the teachers who took
the child home for tea and entertained her, is a moment of revelation for
Pinny:

It occurred to me then that I had not once, even in the
worst depths of my misery, thought what it must have been like for her, knowing
she would not be at the school gates, knowing that she was making me more and
more unhappy every minute she was not there.

Her selfless love and care for Pinny comes out at every
turn. On one occasion, she covers for her daughter, losing a rich client in the
process, when the little girl recovers a roll of cloth that she believes
belongs to the future king and queen of Borneo but was actually the client’s
curtains. I fell in love with her at the point when she stretches a tiny budget
to provide Pinny with bulbs for her garden:

I do not remember that we had trouble finding the money. I
was too excited at the prospect of my own garden. But now I can see that my
mother must have gone without something she needed or wanted, in order to save
what was necessary.

Her generosity is not reserved for her daughter alone: when
Pinny asks a visiting gentleman at a loose end to stay, she hesitantly but not
unwillingly opens her home to him until he is able to find his feet again.
To my delight, one of the stories turns out to take place in
Oxford. This is Pinny’s first taste of what she calls ‘the country’. ‘”It’s not
the proper country, Pinny,” my mother warned me. “Oxford is a large town, and
quite near.”’ Unperturbed, Pinny’s imagination runs wild: ‘Milkmaids in mob
caps and farmers in knee-breeches, small houses with roses growing round the
doors, stiles, carthorses, shepherds coming down from the hills at sunset,
wooden bridges curving over brooks.’
The reality is quite different, of course, but turns out to
be no less exciting. Not least, St Giles’ Fair, ‘the most splendid, exciting,
glorious fair in the whole world’, as Pinny’s Oxfordian friends, Miles and
Kate, delightedly inform her. The description is priceless, a snapshot of the
fair a century before I experienced it. Some things are quite different – the
long-banned prizes of live goldfish, the penny charge for each game, the steam
powering the organs. The exhilaration of the fair, however,
is unchanged over generations, and the bright colours of the rides which draw
the children’s attention, the reckless spending on hopeless attempts at
skewering a prize, the loud music and bustle of the crowd, sound tantalisingly
familiar.

Ten patches, ten stories; yet a quilt is so much bigger than
that. I’m left wondering what else is in there; the stories that Pinny would
not tell till her listener was older, the ones she perhaps would never tell at
all? 

Hovel in the Hills – Elizabeth West

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Last year I read, and very much enjoyed, The Egg & I by Betty Macdonald (and discovered that there is a thriving Betty Macdonald community out there).  Although the very thought of going to run a farm with a recalcitrant stove and marauding animals fills me with horror (and I am very much a country boy – albeit one with a fondness for electricity), I very much enjoyed reading her witty, self-deprecating take on her adventures.  It is non-fiction disguised as fiction.  And I was hoping to find its equal in Elizabeth West’s Hovel in the Hills (1977).  Well, er… it didn’t work out quite like that.

Elizabeth West and her husband certainly have many of the same difficulties.  They decided to move from the ratrace to the bleak middle of nowhere in Wales.  At high altitudes, with wind, rain, and cold being bitterly present throughout much of the year – with very little money to boot – this could easily have been an Egg & I Mark 2.  The obstacles – from wallpaper which grew mouldy with alarming alacrity, to the difficulties of crossing vast distances without a car – are funds for much wry laughter and rolled eyes.

But, although the cover assures me that the contents will be ‘warm, funny, [and] moving’, Elizabeth West seems to have (had?) almost no sense of humour.  Obstacle after obstacle is raised, with the smug solution given.  Almost every page drips with self-satisfaction.  They clearly feel an immense sense of superiority to all the fools in the world who wouldn’t know how to run a stove, or make a salad out of weeds, or have the curious weakness of preferring a flush toilet to a hole in a shed.

Perhaps it is just a weakness in me, but I found it hard to warm to a writer who had all the answers.  Her husband was worse – the sort of irritating person who fixes everything with little more than a spanner and a stern glance.  Self-deprecation is one of the qualities I find most endearing in fact and fiction (I am British, after all) and the Wests don’t have a drop of it.

I was on happier ground when she turned her attention away from their achievements and towards nature.  Particularly when she wrote about the birdlife of the area –  that was endearing and almost witty.  True, she wrote about how good they were with animals and birds, but that couldn’t get in the way of how fun it was to read about the wildlife and the personalities they displayed.  I was strongly reminded of Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water during these sections.  Here is a bit about the great tits which visited them:

We fed them on fat and peanuts as well as oatmeal and it soon became obvious which was the male and which was the female – from their behaviour as well as the slightly larger size and broad bely stripe of the male.  Pinny was always completely trusting, and quite at ease when feeding from our hands.  She flew to them without hesitation, ate daintily, and landed and took off with very gentle feet.  Podger, her mate, had an entirely different personality.  He only plucked up courage to come to our hands because he had seen Pinny do so.  But he made a great fuss about it.  Dashing in with great bluster, he would land with a clunk of clawed feet, grabbing what he could and making off with it straight away.  We went to the door with peanuts as soon as we saw the birds at our window in the morning.  If Podger arrived first he would sit on a nearby bush churring and chinking fussily until Pinny arrived to feed.  He was probably kidding her that he was being a gentleman, but we know that he needed the reassurance of seeing her feed first.
Besides the chapters on birds, I did also enjoy her descriptions of the wrangles they had experienced with the local council when they bought a caravan for holiday lets.  Everyone enjoys a tale of the small-mindedness of little people wielding power – so long as the tale is happening to someone else, of course – and West does give the whole saga amusingly.  Her sense of superiority feels justified here, at least – and there is an excellent coda to the whole rigmarole, which I shan’t spoil in case you decide to read the book.

But, as you’ll have gathered, I found that the irritating outweighed the enjoyable in Hovel in the Hills.  I’m probably just too cynical to enjoy the story of someone being better than everyone else.  Give me Betty Macdonald accidentally setting fire to things any day.

Injury Time – Beryl Bainbridge

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It’s Beryl Bainbridge Reading Week with Annabel/Gaskella… hope you’re joining in!

Can you imagine what would happen if the casts of Abigail’s Party and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? were held hostage in a siege?  Well, if you can’t, then read Injury Time and it’ll give you a pretty good idea.  The sexual bewilderment of George and Martha is combined with the 1970s would-you-like-an-olive stylings of Beverley et al in Bainbridge’s 1977 novel, somewhere in the middle of her writing career.

Edward is a somewhat hapless chap, working in dull job and in a marriage with Helen which, if not loveless, is hardly passionate.  And he has a mistress – albeit one with three unruly children at home, and no intention of staying submissively in the shadows.  His mistress rejoices in the absurd name Binny.

Binny was a wonderful mother, but she didn’t seem to realise he was a very busy man and his time was limited. They could never do anything until her ten-year-old had settled down for the night.  They could usually start doing something at about five to eleven, and then they had to do it very quickly because Edward had to leave at quarter past eleven.  He was always whispering frantically into Binny’s ear what he might do if only they had a whole evening together, and she grew quite pale and breathless and hugged him fearfully tightly in the hall, mostly when seeing him out.
Binny is tired of fitting in around Helen’s schedule (although Helen supposedly does not know of Binny) and demands that Edward ceases to treat her as a dirty little secret.  In order to pacify Binny, Edward agrees to invite his colleague Simpson, and Simpson’s wife Muriel, to a dinner party at Binny’s house.  What could possibly go wrong?

Bainbridge is great at showing the awkwardness of this dinner party and all its shades of morality: Simpson has overstated his wife’s approval of the night, for example, and Binny’s attempts to maintain a presentable dinner party in bizarre circumstances are drawn wonderfully.  My favourite character, though, is Binny’s neighbour Alma, who turns up mid-way through the party, rather the worse for wear.  I don’t know what I find so amusing about characters who incongruously pepper their conversation with ‘darling’ and ‘dear’, but it always makes me chuckle.  Indeed, the whole novel is very funny – mostly a humour which comes from dialogue, clashes of characters, and surreal turns of events.

“Drunken driving is a crime,” said Simpson stiffly.  “It should carry the harshest penalties.”

“What are you worried about, darling?  I lost my licence, didn’t I?”  All at once Alma’s face crumpled.  Tears spilled out of her ludicrous eyes.

“You can talk, George,” Muriel said coldly.  “You’re only wearing one shoe.”
The most bizarre twist, as I mentioned at the beginning and as the cover suggests, is that these characters find their evening’s festivities interrupted when two men and a woman come running through the front door (complete with a pram holding a doll) and hold them all hostage.  The house is chosen more or less at random, and they are simply a bargaining tool against the police.

What makes Injury Time so hilarious is that Beryl Bainbridge chooses not to change the tone when the hostage situation takes place.  The characters – especially irrepressible Alma – don’t alter the way they talk, and the dynamics between man, mistress, colleague, and wife all remain fraught, uncomfortable and very funny.  It helps that Ginger and Harry, the main two hostage-takers, are not your normal criminals.  Some fairly disturbing events occur in Injury Time, but they are described with such lightness, and focus upon social awkwardness rather than anything more traumatic, that this remains decidedly a comic novel.  As my first foray into the world of Bainbridge, I’m off to a fantastic start, and I look forward to seeing what else the week brings.