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When I Was a Little Boy | A Child’s Troubles

When I Was a Little Boy | A Child’s Troubles

Only once in every year did I ardently wish to have brothers and sisters – on Christmas Eve. For all I would have cared they could have packed up and flown away again on Christmas Day after the roast goose and dumplings, the red cabbage and the celery salad. I would gladly have given up my own helping of goose and eaten giblets instead if only I did not have to be alone on the evening of the twenty-fourth of December. They could have had half my presents. And what truly glorious presents they were!
Memory and recollection are mysterious powers | When I Was a Little Boy Extract

Memory and recollection are mysterious powers | When I Was a Little Boy Extract

Memory and recollection are mysterious powers, and recollection is the more mysterious and puzzling of the two. For the memory has only to do with our heads. How much is seven times fifteen? And little Paul shouts promptly, ‘A hundred and five!’ He has learned it and his head has retained it. Or it has forgotten it, in which case little Paul cries, ‘A hundred and fifteen!’ Whether we know this or that correctly or incorrectly, or whether we have forgotten it and must reckon up anew, good memory and bad memory reside in our heads. The pigeon-holes for all the things we have ever learned are there. I imagine they are like the drawers in a cupboard or a chest of drawers. They often stick when you try to pull them out. Sometimes there’s nothing in them, and sometimes there’s the wrong thing. And sometimes they won’t pull out at all. Then they and we are ‘as if nailed down’, as the saying goes. Our memories are either large or small chests of drawers. In my own head, for instance, the chest of drawers is rather small. The drawers are only half full, but they’re fairly tidy. When I was a little boy my chest of drawers looked quite different. In those days my little top storey was a real lumber room.
Sprouts and Parsnip Wine | ‘Early one morning, late in July, the villagers of ‘crack-brained Brensham’ woke to a remarkable spectacle . . .’

Sprouts and Parsnip Wine | ‘Early one morning, late in July, the villagers of ‘crack-brained Brensham’ woke to a remarkable spectacle . . .’

Early one morning, late in July, the villagers of ‘crack-brained Brensham’ woke to a remarkable spectacle. There amid the customary colours of furze and wheat was a seven-acre field that ‘had suddenly become tinctured with the colour of Mediterranean skies’. Nothing like it had ever happened before, so that the villagers caught their breath at the sight of this miracle: a great, vivid patch of cerulean ‘so clear and pure that it made one think of eyes or skies’.
‘A Utopia of tea-parties, dinner-parties . . .’ | Period Piece

‘A Utopia of tea-parties, dinner-parties . . .’ | Period Piece

Greetings from somewhere between Hoxton and Cromer as we journey to East Anglia for our summer soirée at The Holt Bookshop in Norfolk this evening. For this week’s news we thought we’d make a stop in Cambridge along the way, and transport you to Gwen Raverat’s childhood home in an old mill house on the Backs along the river Cam where ‘there was plenty to see; nearly all the life of Cambridge flowed backwards and forwards over our bridge, and before our house’.
Muriel was at a crossroads | The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley Extract

Muriel was at a crossroads | The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley Extract

Muriel was at a crossroads. Something would have to be done, but what? Roger had urged her to ‘let things slide a little longer’. Since then things had indeed slid. She was ill throughout all her pregnancies, worried almost beyond endurance, deeply ashamed, sick and perpetually tired. The longed-for escape from her past that Roger had brought about had simply landed her in a prison of domesticity that every fibre of her being cried out was wrong for her. Instinct told her that she wasn’t meant for this. Before she found Roger she had been fortified in the belief that one day ‘something’ would happen to save her. And something had happened. But instead of walking out into a paradise of freedom she’d walked straight into a trap. She might just as well have gone into a prison cell and closed the door behind her.
Period Piece Extract | ‘It was a Utopia of tea-parties, dinner-parties, boat-races, lawn-tennis, antique shops, picnics . . .’

Period Piece Extract | ‘It was a Utopia of tea-parties, dinner-parties, boat-races, lawn-tennis, antique shops, picnics . . .’

In the spring of 1883 my mother, Maud Du Puy, came from America to spend the summer in Cambridge with her aunt, Mrs Jebb. She was nearly twenty-two, and had never been abroad before; pretty, affectionate, self-willed, and sociable; but not at all a flirt. Indeed her sisters considered her rather stiff with young men. She was very fresh and innocent, something of a Puritan, and with her strong character, was clearly destined for matriarchy.

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