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The Sensation of Crossing the Street

The Sensation of Crossing the Street

Greetings from Hoxton Square, where the office is all a flurry with orders following the release of the summer issue of Slightly Foxed and our summer SF Edition, Toast. Beyond the controlled chaos of the first floor here at No. 53, the square and surrounding streets have come alive to the beat of summer at last. The trees have unfurled their leaves, people are walking their dogs or enjoying the sunshine (between showers) at street café tables and pub gardens have become host to a gaggle of watering-hole seekers. While many an author has made London the beating heart of their work, this year marks 100 years since the publication of Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf’s beloved novel set over the course of a single day in June.
The Very Bottom of Time | ‘Whatever power of thought or memory I held was bound up in the war . . .’

The Very Bottom of Time | ‘Whatever power of thought or memory I held was bound up in the war . . .’

It is three o’clock in the morning, ‘the very bottom of time’ as Pamela Bright describes it, and her ward is filled with wounded men. So overstretched is she that she barely knows where she is, but as her gut-wrenchingly vivid account progresses, we begin to understand that she is in a Casualty Clearing Station attached to the British Second Army in Normandy, which had landed a week after D-Day in June 1944. Pamela is one of the young nurses working heroically to tend to the wounded in impossible conditions a few miles from the front line.
Extract from Life in Our Hands | Chapter 2: Relief and Reflection

Extract from Life in Our Hands | Chapter 2: Relief and Reflection

It was good to lie in bed stretching my legs against the rough blankets, aloof from the rattle and prattle of the unit beginning a new day. I watched Tait washing a pair of socks in the portable washbasin. Scottie was already asleep, her two dark plaits falling over the edge of the low camp bed on to some crushed yellow trefoil and her underclothes lying like a pool on the grass floor of the tent. Her shirt and trousers were carelessly thrown on to the only canvas stool where lay a copy of the unit’s ‘daily orders’ and unopened letters.
At England’s Edge

At England’s Edge

As A. E. Housman had it, ‘Clunton and Clunbury/ Clungunford and Clun/ Are the quietest places/ Under the sun.’ The villages are dotted along the valley of the River Clun, down in the south-west corner of Shropshire and nestled up against the border with Wales. Like many Midlanders, I find my weekends often turn westward, along the A5 through Shrewsbury and up into the hills that look across to Wales. Walking guides and maps will take you so far, but it was a joy to discover an overlooked little book which digs so much deeper into this country at the edge of England.
SF magazine subscribers only
‘Credendo Vides’

‘Credendo Vides’

Books should be officially declared an invasive species. They have been accumulating in our present home for forty years now, adding to those which had gathered over the previous forty. They tend to group themselves into sub-species; basically by subject or author, but without the pernickety precision of Dewey or the Library of Congress – they have their own priorities. For example, many years ago I inherited some little leather-bound volumes from my grandmother, and Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas and Arthur Conan Doyle still share a shelf as old friends. On the bookcase beside my bed is another self-selected settlement: an eclectic collection of books I pick up when I am tired and want to read a chapter or so before falling asleep, including Elizabeth Goudge, Rudyard Kipling and Vladimir Nabokov. I wonder what they talk about among themselves?
SF magazine subscribers only
The Glory that Rome Wasn’t

The Glory that Rome Wasn’t

I once found a library that no one else ever seemed to visit. It was devoted to Scottish Literature and works of reference, unstaffed and on the first floor of a terraced house belonging to the University of Glasgow. I’d gone there initially to look up some words in a rare dictionary of medieval Scots and was so taken with the place that it became a favourite haunt. During my subsequent visits – long afternoons of essay writing, dozing and dreaming – I never encountered another soul.
SF magazine subscribers only
Death and the Journalist

Death and the Journalist

Those of us who belong to a book group do so, no doubt, for a variety of reasons. For some it’s enlightenment, for others it’s the prompting to read something outside one’s comfort zone, the companionship or the quality of the cake. These need not be mutually exclusive. My own book group consists of seven friends who enjoy one another’s company, and each of us brings something different. One likes books about paths. Another maintains we should only choose books that provoke a debate. While a third, who has stronger connections to continental Europe than the rest of us – her mother escaped Berlin on the Kindertransport and she still has close relatives in Germany – has introduced us to writers we insular British might not otherwise have discovered. Joseph Roth is one, and Antonio Tabucchi is another.
SF magazine subscribers only
Italian Hours

Italian Hours

I discovered Nathaniel Hawthorne’s luminous novel The Marble Faun (1860) after a self-imposed delay of over sixty years. When I was reading English at Cambridge in the late 1950s, the only Hawthorne on the syllabus was The Scarlet Letter (see SF no.60). It had a powerful and lowering effect on me, and I don’t think I ever reread it, though I alluded to it in my third novel, The Millstone, where the narrator Rosamund at one point states that she ‘walked around with a scarlet letter embroidered upon [her] bosom . . . but the A stood for Abstinence, not for Adultery . . .’
SF magazine subscribers only

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