Voices From a Lost World

I had a feeling I'd read this book before! Searching my blog reveals that I bought Jan Roberts' Voices From a Lost World for the first time from the local library book sale in 2010 -- and I've now bought it again from Brotherhood Books at four times the price (still cheap). I can't find it on my shelves, though; perhaps it's in the box of PNG resources in the attic that I stashed there after I finished writing New Guinea Moon.

ANYWAY it's still a fascinating book. Published in 1996, it features interviews and stories from Australian women and children who lived in Papua New Guinea before the outbreak of WWII. Though some returned to live there after the fighting, a certain way of life vanished forever. In some ways it was a very hard life -- little medical care, isolation, few mod cons, tinned food, malaria and blackwater fever. In some ways it was incredibly privileged, compared with the lives of the local people. Despite the colonial exploitation, close personal relationships did form between individual families and their house staff, the cooks and 'boys' and nannies, and most white children of the era recalled a carefree and happy childhood.

Whether government administrators, gold prospectors, traders or hotel owners, the colonial life came to an abrupt end with the invasion of the Japanese. All white women and children were swiftly evacuated, but most of the men remained behind, many losing their lives in the sinking of the prisoner ship Montevideo Maru, a tragedy communicated to their families only long after the event.

Voices From a Lost World will go on my bookshelf and I'll try not to lose it this time (and I'll try not to buy it all over again).

The Marches

As a big fan of Rory Stewart on the UK politics podcast, The Rest is Politics, I swooped on The Marches when it turned up in a street library. The subtitle, Border Walks With My Father, is a bit misleading: in the first section, Rory walks along Hadrian's Wall while his 94 year old father takes a car and meets him at intervals for a meal and a chat; in the second section, Rory takes a much longer walk through the country on either side of the Scotland/England border, trying to discern whether there is a distinct 'border' identity, and how much people there are influenced by national identity imposed by being on either side of the line (in fish and chip shops, the favoured fish switches abruptly from cod to haddock!) This time, Stewart senior is only present in daily ruminative emails.

I found the final section of The Marches the most moving. It's a detailed account of Brian Stewart's death and funeral, and it manages to sum up and complete the rather muddled previous sections, where Rory in fact fails to find the 'border identity' or sense of local history that he's seeking. He contrasts his conversations with the Scots and English of this area with his previous walks through countries like Afghanistan, where each village along the way has a fierce and distinct individual history and identity (maybe too fierce). 

I don't always agree with Rory -- he's hugely sceptical about rewilding, for example, and much prefers cows -- but he is always stimulating and congenial company, and his close relationship with his father is really touching.
 

The Star of Kazan

I think I've now read just about all of Eva Ibbotson's books, but The Star of Kazan is a particularly good example of her formula. Reading an Ibbotson book is like sinking into a warm, fragrant bath; it's wonderful comfort reading. The Star of Kazan features an orphan girl (as usual, kind, generous and good at cooking!) who is unexpectedly whisked away from her close community in Vienna by a noblewoman claiming to be her long lost mother. The twist is that, while Annika's Viennese 'family' was warm, happy and comfortable, the grand household at Sittal with the von Tannenburgs is cold, miserable and poverty stricken. But wait! Some good fortune comes Edeltraut's way... but is it connected with Annika?

There is the usual cast of kind, capable boys, a courageous horse, some gypsies, a loyal bookish friend, delicious food, a cruel boarding school, missing jewels, and generous dollops of humour and pathos before everything comes right in the end. I can't believe I lasted so long without being exposed to Eva Ibbotson's work; it is so delightful. I would class The Star of Kazan as a children's book. Though some of her other novels straddle the line between young adult and adult, this one is perfectly safe (apart from one reference to suicide).
 

Angel with Two Faces

Angel With Two Faces, volume two in Nicola Upson's Josephine Tey murder mystery series sees Tey staying in Cornwall to write a new novel, at the childhood home of her closest friends, Ronnie and Lettice Motley, and their police detective cousin, Archie Penrose. Soon they are all deeply entangled in local secrets: the unexpected death of a young man which has left his two sisters bereft, and then the murder of a curate who apparently knew more than he should.

The Penrose estate, Loe Pool and the amazing clifftop Macklin Theatre are all real places, though Upson has taken liberties in allowing her fictional characters to be so thoroughly embedded in their history. The character 'Jospehine Tey' occupies an interesting space between fiction and reality, as it was a pseudonym for writer Elizabeth Mackintosh; 'Josephine' never actually existed. I can see how this light fictionalisation gives Upson a degree of freedom to play with Tey's personal history and character.

Angel With Two Faces centres around some darkly disturbing secrets (at one point I thought it was going to go even darker, but it pulled back), but it's worth it for Upson's assured writing and the intelligent, compassionate characters of Josephine and Archie, who share their own complicated history. I think there are now eleven books in the series, all set in my favourite period between the wars, and featuring real and imagined figures from theatre and literature. I will definitely be going back for more.
 

A World to Build

The history of Britain immediately after the Second World War is a period I know very little about. David Kynaston has written two books about Austerity Britain: A World to Build covers the years 1945-1948, and its sequel, Smoke in the Valley, takes us from 1948 to 1951.

Kynaston's method is to divide his narrative between the voices of ordinary (and sometimes not ordinary) people, expressed in diaries, Mass Observation interviews, letters and newspapers, and a broader political narrative tracing events in Parliament, policy development, elections and party conferences. I must admit the minutiae of Labour and Conservative party machinations made my eyes glaze over, though the story of the determination to establish a more equitable, yes, socialist, community after the war has its own fascination. As well as setting up the National Health Service, and nationalising many industries, there was an imperative to build new housing -- a struggle with interesting parallels to Australia at the moment.

But I must confess that I found the everyday observations of daily life riveting: complaints about food rationing and other shortages, a terrible freezing winter with low coal supplies, the ubiquity of the black market and 'spivs,' the beginning of ex-colonial immigration with the arrival of the Windrush from Jamaica, moans from the establishment about working class's apparent addiction to cinema and greyhound racing. A more egalitarian future was contemplated with horror by some and satisfaction by others, but it was very difficult to shift class attitudes and prejudice. This was played out clearly in education reforms, which did aspire to offer greater opportunity to bright working class children, but not at the expense of dismantling the public school system -- a bastion of class privilege that Australia seems sadly determined to cement here.

Ghost Wall

I saw Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss recommended by Penni Russon, who teaches it at uni, and instantly grabbed it from the library. Penni assured me I would love it, and I did. For such a short novel (less than 150 pages), it's incredibly powerful, weaving together questions of class and privilege, power, gendered violence, history and politics, into a seemingly simple but deeply charged situation.

Seventeen year old Sylvie is camping with her family, a handful of students and a professor, attempting to re-enact Iron Age lives -- fishing, foraging, hunting rabbits. Somehow the adult men end up doing the more exciting activities: hunting, drumming, constructing a 'ghost wall' hung with skulls to frighten the Romans away. Meanwhile, Sylvie and her mother, and the single female student, Molly, are stuck with washing the dishes, cooking, and searching for berries. But Sylvie's father, a bus driver with an unsavoury passion for what he imagines to be a more 'pure' British past, is simmering with frustration and the need to impress the professor, and violence is not far away.

Ghost Wall is a masterclass in tension -- even the first couple of pages are brimming with horror -- which builds like summer heat. References to the recently fallen Berlin Wall locate it in the early 1990s, perhaps a less informed time, when concepts like consent were not at the forefront of consciousness. Sylvie's dad is horrible, but he's also a fully rounded character, denied the privilege of a 'proper education' by entrenched class prejudice, trapped in a job that prevents him from spending time outside. I felt for her mum, too, walking on eggshells and longing for a 'sit down' (something Sylvie doesn't appreciate!)

Above all, Ghost Wall is shot through with the eerie presence of those former inhabitants whose lives the re-enactors are trying to imitate. This is a political and domestic novel, but it's also very creepy. Loved it, loved it, loved it.
 

A Fence Around the Cuckoo

Ruth Park's two volume autobiography, A Fence Around the Cuckoo and Fishing in the Styx, has been on my radar for a while -- as with any very popular books, they keep popping up on Brotherhood Books. Is Ruth Park an under-rated author? Unusually, she was extremely successful in three strands of fiction. Her children's books about The Muddleheaded Wombat were huge favourites of my kids (though I never read them myself as a child); her young adult book, Playing Beatie Bow, was possibly the seminal Australian time slip story; and I studied at least one of her adult novels, Poor Man's Orange, in Year 9 at high school (I wonder why they didn't choose the first book about the Darcy family, A Harp in the South? The prequel, Missus, wasn't published until after I'd left school.)

Anyway, to those achievements we can add autobiography, because A Fence Around the Cuckoo is a tremendous piece of writing. It covers Park's childhood in the New Zealand bush, her family's struggles during the Great Depression, and her first jobs in journalism before she emigrated to Australia in 1942. From Park's account, the Depression hit New Zealand slightly less hard than it hit Australia, but it hit hard all the same. It was sobering to read about the same era as Weevils in the Flour from the perspective of one family. The Depression must have left psychological wounds just as deep as the two wars, at least on the poor, and yet it's rarely discussed -- I guess it was less dramatic.

A Fence Around the Cuckoo ends with Park's arrival in Australia, greeted by her pen friend D'arcy Niland, who was to become her husband. I gather Fishing in the Styx picks up where this volume leaves off, and I cannot wait to read it.

The Leopard

I don't know what happened to my original copy of The Leopard, which I studied in HSC a looong time ago, but I replaced it some time ago with the one pictured above. I was prompted to re-read Guiseppe di Lampedusa's 1958 classic novel partly by Susan Green, and partly by watching the sumptuous Netflix series based on the book.

Watching the series, I marvelled that I'd forgotten so much of the story -- well, it's not that surprising, because the script writer fleshed out some episodes with invented scenes. But in fact there was quite a bit that I'd genuinely forgotten. I remember how much I adored The Leopard, but what I mostly retained was the atmosphere of languid, lush sensuality, mingled violence and torpor that gave me my first impression of Sicily. My most vivid recollection, skimmed over in the adaptation, was of young lovers Tancredi and Angelica exploring the long-neglected corners of the family's immense villa, trembling on the dangerous edge of desire but never quite giving in -- it was the sexiest thing I'd ever read!

Now I'm old and grey, it's Prince Fabrizio's musings on aging and regret that speak to me most powerfully. There really isn't much plot in The Leopard, but it's still amazingly atmospheric, and the Netflix version succeeded in bringing that atmosphere to life; also, Kim Rossi Stuart is superb as the Prince. At seventeen, I had a huge crush on Tancredi, but now I find him merely irritating. The Leopard was well worth a re-visit.
 

An Expert in Murder

Regular readers will know that I'm cautious about novels using real people as characters -- it can be quite poorly done. But I was intrigued by the idea of using a mystery writer as a protagonist, so I thought I'd at least check out the first volume of Nicola Upson's Josephine Tey series, and I'm relieved to say that I enjoyed it very much indeed.

Set in 1934, An Expert in Murder centres on Tey's hugely successful play, Richard of Bordeaux, which catapulted John Gielgud to stardom. The novel features a young super-fan of the play (some patrons returned thirty or forty times), and many participants in the theatrical world, some of whom are based on real people (like stage designers, the 'Motley' sisters), and theatre manager Bernard Aubrey (based on Bronson Albery). I had no idea that Josephine Tey (real name Elizabeth Mackintosh, though she wrote her plays under the name Gordon Daviot) had even written for the stage, let alone had a massive hit -- plays don't seem to have the longevity of even half-forgotten novels.

Upson said that after discovering Tey's novels for herself and deciding they were criminally overlooked (not by all of us!), she became fascinated with the theatre and literature of her times. It was a strange experience to find myself half-recognising people and places from Dodie Smith's theatrical career at much the same time, like the New and Wyndham theatres, and the leading lady based on Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, who also starred in some of Smith's plays. I wasn't expecting to be plunged back into this semi-familiar world, but it was a pleasant surprise, and I suspect I'll be back for more of Upson's work.

A Song For Summer

Another lovely Eva Ibbotson novel, this one from 1997 (she kept writing almost up until her death in 2010). A Song For Summer is set at an eccentric artsy school in Austria, just before the outbreak of the Second World War. Our heroine is Ellen, who despite being the child of a famous suffragette, has turned her talents to the housewifely arts and is working as a cook. Our hero is Marek, who despite being a world-renowned composer, is working as a groundsman and handyman in the same establishment (he's secretly rescuing Jews from the Nazis). This time there are three ill-matched couples who need to be disentangled and reassorted, and the obstacles in their way are even more dramatic than usual, including an actual marriage, a terrible fire, and of course the war.

By now I know exactly what I'm going to get from an Eva Ibbotson novel, and if some of her notions are a little old-fashioned, she's also refreshingly candid about sex, and values kindness above all other virtues. There will probably be a big old neglected house somewhere in the mix, a lake or a river and some animals, a precocious child, and music, as well as our star-crossed lovers. My only quibble was an anachronistic mention of Bletchley Park at a time when its very existence was top secret, but I can overlook that. I'm so glad to have discovered Eva Ibbotson.
 

Upheaval

I've read almost all of Jared Diamond's comparative history books, starting with Guns, Germs and Steel, which had a profound effect on the way I saw the world, but also Collapse, The World Until Yesterday, and The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee. In Upheaval, which was actually published in 2019, Diamond takes seven case studies of nations that have faced various crises (military coups, invasion, sudden contact with the outside world) and compares how successfully (in his view) they have handled them. Interestingly, one of his case studies is Australia, and the slowly unfolding challenge this country has faced in separating our identity from Great Britain (and re-attaching ourselves to the US instead, which is not looking like a great idea at the moment). He also examines the histories of Indonesia, Finland, Chile, Japan and Germany.

The last part of the book was most interesting, because Diamond turned his critical lens on his home country, the United States, and wondered how well his own nation might handle a crisis. Upheaval was written before the Covid pandemic (which the US handled badly), and before Trump's second presidency (though during his first). Diamond pointed to the biggest problem, in his opinion, in the US being the growing polarisation of political opinion, and the loss of the ability to compromise -- it's hard to disagree that this situation has indeed led to catastrophe, just a few years after Upheaval was published. I'm sure Diamond feels no satisfaction in seeing his predictions come to pass, but his observations were so astute that I feel a new respect for his insights on other matters, too -- even Australia.
 

Can Any Mother Help Me?

 

Can Any Mother Help Me? was such a fascinating book! In the 1930s, an anonymous, lonely mother wrote a letter to a UK parenting magazine, which resulted in a group of women in similar situations beginning a correspondence club that lasted until 1990.

The way it worked was that the women would write 'articles' or letters to the group in general, which the editor would bind up in a lovely embroidered linen cover and post off to the first name on the list, who could then add her own comments or notes if she wished, and post it to the next person. New volumes were sent off fortnightly, so there were always various editions in circulation. In a way it functioned like an early kind of community internet forum, without the immediacy of response, of course, but bonds of lively interest, sympathy and friendship grew between these women who came from all backgrounds and different parts of the country. Most, however, were well-educated, intelligent women who were denied careers by the demands of family, and consequently felt frustrated.

The author, Jenna Bailey, discovered an archive of the letters and has compiled these extracts into a thoroughly absorbing book, covering the years of World War II and after, through domestic heartbreak, career success, worries about children and money, and everyday experiences. One episode is especially striking -- one member who developed a romantic crush on her doctor, which seemed to be reciprocated, though nothing ever happened beyond meaningful glances. She finally, after much inner torment, told him it would be better if they didn't see each other again, whereupon the doctor called her husband and Told All (not that there was much to tell...) The woman relayed this whole saga, in installments, years afterwards, and it reads like part of a novel.

It might not be everyone's cup of tea but I was completely gripped by this book, part memoir, part diary, part potted biographies of a host of everyday women. One woman, known to the club as Angharad, wrote successful TV screenplays and also several books on the 'aquatic ape' theory of human evolution. And I was amused that Heal's furniture store made another appearance -- one woman's husband made bookends for them (which seems like a very niche way to make a living).

Life Below Stairs

Regular readers of this blog will already know that I am fascinated by servants, probably because in another life I almost certainly would have been one. So how could I resist Alison Maloney's Life Below Stairs: True Lives of Edwardian Servants?

When it arrived, Life Below Stairs proved to be a slim little volume, under 200 pages, and doubtless published to cash in on the popularity of Downton Abbey (Julian Fellowes, its creator, is even quoted a few times). It is, however, a really solid informative little source book for useful information about the exact hierarchy of roles and duties inside a house, wages and uniforms, etiquette and rules of behaviour. If I were writing a novel set in an Edwardian grand house, this would not be a bad place to start. For one thing, it would have cleared up Anna's confusion about whether or not she was a 'tweeny' in Countess Below Stairs.

To my amusement, I found quotes from other books about domestic service that I've already read, but I did find out some information I didn't know before -- like the fact that young girls hoping to secure a job as a maid had first to work and save up (maybe for a couple of years) to afford to buy the dresses and aprons they'd be expected to wear on the job! However, footmen, despite being paid more, had thier uniforms supplied. And did you know that a 'servant's bed' measured only 2 foot 6 across, compared with a standard single bed, which was 3 feet in width? (I was chuffed to see an advertisement for such furniture from Heal's, where Dodie Smith worked.)

I was really hoping for more in the way of personal stories and experiences, but I'm sure I'll find those elsewhere.
 

We Are the Beaker Girls & Hetty Feather's Christmas

 I've been aware of Jacqueline Wilson for a long time, but it took a chapter of The Haunted Wood to prompt me to actually read a couple of her (many, many) books. They are aimed a bit younger than I would usually go for, and they are a very attractive package -- big print, nice short chapters, interspersed with charming illustrations by Nick Sharratt. 

Bolshie child-in-care Tracy Beaker has become a classic in the UK, and We Are the Beaker Girls features Tracy all grown up and with a daughter of her own, but still as bold and fiery as ever, and still involved in the care system, this time as a prospective foster parent herself. I really enjoyed the way Tracy and Jess gather a family around them in their new home, and the way Tracy, though she's an adult, is shown to be still growing and learning.

Hetty Feather's Christmas seems to be a kind of bonus story, a Christmas special, in a series about Hetty's life as a Victorian era foundling -- not an orphan, not abandoned, but a victim of a society that wouldn't allow her and her mother to be together. The cruel matron of the foundling hospital is contrasted with kind benefactress Miss Smith, who whisks Hetty away for a magical Christmas day with the artistic Rivers family. At least, it's fairly magical, but issues of class, gender and neuro-diversity are gently present to give the reader food for thought.

I can see why Jacqueline Wilson's books are so popular. They are effortlessly engaging, lively and very relatable, with ordinary kids who act up, are sometimes kind and sometimes thoughtless, lots of humour and a bit of action. It's a fabulous formula. They probably wouldn't have appealed to child-me -- I liked a bit of magic or some history in my reading, in fact I tended to shy away from 'modern' books (books I now read as historic fiction, ha), but Wilson's massive popularity speaks for itself.

The Haunted Wood

First non-fiction blockbuster read of 2025! After a review from the reluctant dragon, I arranged to receive Sam Leith's 'history of childhood reading,' The Haunted Wood, as a Christmas present. At 550 pages, this one is a blockbuster in the physical sense as well as in terms of enjoyment.

I admit I was slightly daunted to open the list of contents and see a number of chapters devoted to early childhood reading (that is, early in history) -- fairy tales, Aesop's fables, improving tales -- but Leith keeps this section short and sweet before plunging into my real area of interest: the books I've read myself.

The classics are well covered: Alice in Wonderland, Treasure Island, Beatrix Potter. But Leith really hits his stride with what I suspect were the favourite books of his own UK childhood, as well as my own, focusing on twentieth century writers. I did have one quibble when he described Noel Streatfeild as churning out a whole series of 'Shoes' books after the success of Ballet Shoes, though in fact only Tennis Shoes really followed that template. Several of her books were rebranded later by publishers to capitalise on Ballet Shoes -- for example, Curtain Up became Theatre Shoes. But that's being very pedantic.

Most of my favourite authors are discussed here: Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, Philippa Pearce, CS Lewis, Lucy M Boston. Even Elizabeth Goudge gets a mention, albeit in a quote from JK Rowling (there's a level-headed and insightful chapter on Harry Potter). Leith rounds out the book with a quick survey of some of the best picture books. 

Even at 500+ pages, this can only be a partial overview, but I thoroughly enjoyed Leith's balance of discussing stories, authors, and broader social context. It's sent me scurrying to the library to hunt out some authors who had passed me by (like Jacqueline Wilson). The Haunted Forest is a gorgeous brick of delights. I can't wait to lend it around to my kidlit friends.
 

The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny

Well, this was a strange book. First published in 1972, reissued in 1985, The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny is a not very scholarly, highly anecdotal, frankly psychoanalytical account of the history of nannies and nannying. I have a fascination with the British servant class (I wouldn't be at all surprised if my ancestors were 'in service') so I couldn't resist this one.

Gathorne-Hardy writes very much from the perspective of the nannied, despite having interviewed dozens of nannies -- as he rightly points out, the last generation of Victorian and Edwardian nannies who raised whole generations of upper and middle class children. He is very interesting on the probable effects of this phenomenon of entire classes of children being raised by people who were not their parents: the split in affection and authority between the nanny and the parents; the resulting attitude to women (he argues that many nanny-raised men became sexually fixated with 'lower class' women like their nannies); the opportunities for cruelty and abuse; the idealised, distant mother; the sense of betrayal and insecurity when a nanny left the family, and much more. He traces the famous English emotional repression and stiff upper lip to the often 'over-strict' and 'depriving' regime of the Nanny, where any pleasure for its own sake was suspect. It's an interesting theory but in Gathorne-Hardy's account, entirely without actual evidence.

The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny is packed with intriguing stories, bizarre facts, wild speculation and peculiar digressions (there is a whole half chapter on the nanny-related murder which was the subject of Kate Summerscale's book, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher). But one subject on which it's strangely silent is Mr Gathorne-Hardy's own personal experience of being brought up by a Nanny. We know he was, he mentions it in passing, but by the end of the book, I was dying to know how much of his sexual and psychological theories were informed by his own life.

My copy came with an inscription:

To my wife, Margaret,

Who, on balance, is a more pleasant person than the Nannies and Matrons of my experience.

Love from Peter

York, Christmas 1985

Questions upon questions!

Song For a Dark Queen

I read quite a lot of Rosemary Sutcliff in high school, and I vividly remember the 1977 TV series of The Eagle of the Ninth. Sutcliff's books usually portray Roman Britain from the Roman point of view, but Song for a Dark Queen for once shows events from the other side. Song For a Dark Queen is told by Cadwan, who is Boudicca's Harper and therefore close by her side throughout.

This is a slim novel (I found it in a street library), less than 200 pages long, but it's grim, poetic and intense. Sutcliff adopts the theory that the Iceni tribe was matrilineal, the Queen and her daughters sacred to the Mother Goddess, and her consort the King chosen as a warrior. Of course this would have been completely foreign to the patriarchal Romans, who decreed that after Boudicca's husband was killed, leaving no son behind, that was the end of the royal line, and the lands of the Iceni could be absorbed into Roman governorship.

The horrors of the treatment of Boudicca and her daughters is not explicitly dwelt upon, but it's not shied away from either. Song for a Dark Queen contains rape, slaughter, ritual execution and descriptions of hand to hand battle. I don't know if I'd recommend it to children, though it was chosen as a Children's Book of the Year in 1978! These days it would definitely fall into the YA category, but even for YA, it's pretty dark, and there is no happy ending here.
 

There Are Rivers in the Sky

I borrowed this from a book club friend and I've taken my time meandering through it (did you know the word 'meander' derives from the name of a river?) Written by acclaimed Turkish-British author Elif Shafak, There Are Rivers in the Sky weaves together a complex collection of themes: ancient Ninevah; the Yazidi people, persecuted as 'devil worshippers'; the translation of cuneiform text in the nineteenth century; heartbreak in contemporary London; the study of water; floods and drought; climate change; poetry.

There Are Rivers in the Sky is constructed like a beautifully made mosaic, each piece precisely placed and designed to highlight or contrast with the rest. It definitely made me think of water in a different way, and it felt very timely to be reading a book set partly in the Middle East, during the events in Syria and Lebanon. It's a part of the world that I'm shamefully ignorant and confused about, but both this book and Rory Stewart's The Places Between have begun to place images in my mind that might help to anchor the geography and history in my brain.

There are three main strands to the narrative, two set in the 2010s and one in the mid-nineteenth century, but all three end up twining together in a sad but satisfying way. It was difficult to read about the treatment of the Yazidi under ISIS, and a story I knew nothing about, and it's heart breaking to reflect that we humans still seem incapable of living together in peace.

Look Back With Astonishment

This third volume of Dodie Smith's autobiography, Look Back With Astonishment, picks up exactly where volume two left off, with Smith walking through the doors of Heal's furniture store (still going strong today) to take up a position as a shop girl, running the Little Gallery (toys and pictures), a job she would keep for the next decade after giving up on her acting career. She did not, however, give up on the theatre, because this book also covers her years as a tremendously successful playwright.

Anyone who has worked a day job while simultaneously pursuing a creative life will bristle at the headlines Smith attracted with her first successful script: 'Shop Girl Writes Play' -- as if she were a monkey playing with a typewriter! Gradually Smith's hours at Heal's taper off as she devotes more time to writing. She is very coy about her affair with 'Oliver,' who the attentive reader will immediately guess was in fact Ambrose Heal, her boss, but this affair seems to taper off in similar fashion as she grows more attached to Alec Beesley, her eventual husband. I had no idea that Smith had such a stellar playwriting career, extremely commercially successful and fortunately for her, extremely lucrative.

Look Back With Astonishment ends as war is about to break out, with Smith and Beesley embarking for America, ostensibly to help cast one of her plays in New York, but with an eye to the safety of Beesley, an avowed pacifist (in fact, as a conscientious objector, he probably would have been fine).

The Athenaeum Library doesn't have the fourth volume, Look Back With Gratitude -- to judge from the state of the other three books, it probably fell apart -- but I have ordered it for myself for Christmas. A fifth volume was apparently planned, but never finished, which is a shame. LBWG I think will cover their seven years in the US and the writing of I Capture the Castle, so I'm looking forward to that.

Inspector Thanet Omnibus 2

I hadn't intended to return to the Inspector Thanet well so soon, but the book I wanted to borrow from the Athenaeum wasn't there, so I grabbed this instead. We are now well into the mid-80s, though the timeline seems to move more swiftly within the novels -- Thanet's daughter has aged ten years by the end of Dead On Arrival, despite only five years passing in publication time (Simpson could really churn them out! Kudos).

Again, though I do enjoy the mysteries themselves, the real appeal is in the social detail. Close Her Eyes (1984) features a fifteen year old victim, and it would be a brave author today who would describe an abused teenager as 'pure evil.' Last Seen Alive (1985) opens with a visit to the town by Princess Diana, at the peak of her popularity and before her marriage to Charles broke down. It also, rather yuckily, features incest, and the social panic de jour, children sniffing glue. Dead On Arrival (1986) (a title which, by the way, has nothing to do with the plot) breaks one of the Golden Age detective rules by centring on identical twins, though perhaps it doesn't strictly break the rule as we know about the existence of both twins from the beginning. Thanet's daughter enters a competition akin to Junior Masterchef, with the gorgeously eighties menu of Pork Chops With Mint and Lemon Flummery.

Looking forward to volume three! But perhaps not quite yet.