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1st March 2007

Slightly Foxed Issue 13: From the Editors

Emerging from the miasma of winter colds and flu that hung over the office – even Pugwash was under the weather – we were immensely cheered by the splendid selection of Christmas cards you sent us, many of them fox-related. We enjoy all your letters and postcards too. Thank you so much. We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: our contact with you, our subscribers, is one of the great pleasures of life at Slightly Foxed.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
A Prisoner of Her Time

A Prisoner of Her Time

Why wasn’t Charles Dickens knighted, assuming he wasn’t offered the honour and declined it, as some authorities believe? Would it have been because he spilled so much ink lambasting the establishment? I think not. He was too colossal a figure for that to be an obstacle, even in Victorian England. Was it – as you will discover if you read Claire Tomalin’s masterly biography The Invisible Woman – because he kept a mistress, the actress Ellen (Nelly) Ternan? Highly unlikely, since, as you will also discover, he handled that business with the combination of psychotic secretiveness and extreme canniness that one would expect from such a man.
SF magazine subscribers only

The King’s Spaniel

I have no idea on what my father based this and I’m sure he was genuinely trying to console, but for years afterwards I avoided novels that mixed politics and facts, particularly historical novels. Writers should just make it up, I thought. Feelings were what counted: feelings, ideas, characters and story. But then, thankfully, I was given Rose Tremain’s best-selling and Booker short-listed novel Restoration, and, plunging in against my better judgement, was immediately hooked.
SF magazine subscribers only

Scourge of the Suburbs

‘Rice Mould’ is a story written in 1919 for Home Magazine, a periodical aimed at women of the suburban middle class. A party is in progress at the Browns’ villa somewhere to the south of London. While the grown-ups get ready to dance to the gramophone in the library, the youngest child, William, a spirited, muddy-kneed, tufty-haired 11-year-old, is trying to smuggle one of Cook’s best cream blancmanges in a dirty soap-dish to the girl next door. It does not go well.
SF magazine subscribers only
When the Clock Struck Thirteen

When the Clock Struck Thirteen

A lot of the stories I loved most as a child involved doors. Aged about 4, I suppose, I passed through the small, latched door in the hillside, into Mrs Tiggywinkle’s flagged kitchen, filled with the ‘nice, hot, singey smell’ of ironing, busy and reassuring. A few years later came the doors into Narnia, the Secret Garden and Wonderland, Bilbo Baggins’s ‘perfectly round’ green door with its shiny yellow brass knob ‘in the exact middle’, the door into the Yellow Dwarf ’s home in the orange tree, and the dark door into Bluebeard’s bloody chamber . . . But reading to my own children, the door I’ve been happiest to pass through again is the door into Tom’s Midnight Garden – a door one can only imagine because, unlike most of the others, it is never described.
SF magazine subscribers only

Feeling A Little Wembley

In the 1960s, at a time when I took myself more seriously, I went to work for the Observer in what I mistakenly believed was a rather important position. One afternoon, soon after my arrival, a stranger walked into the office I shared with two other people. He was neat, quite short and stocky, and, I seem to remember, he wore a pale tweed jacket. He had a pleasant light tenor voice and the air, perhaps, of a popular geography master at a prep school.
SF magazine subscribers only
Vanishing Point

Vanishing Point

Think of an Edward Hopper picture, Main Street, Anywheresville, USA, a warm summer’s evening. Geometric buildings, neat and desolate. Give them names: Northfork Drug; The Hub Men’s Clothing; First Clark National Bank; Dr J. P. Wade, Physician, Walk In. Remove Hopper’s colours, see it in black-and-white. In an open window a table-lamp illumines a man’s face. He’s the only human visible. The scene is empty, and you might be hearing utter silence if it weren’t for a huge steam locomotive dragging a freight train down the track that runs along the middle of the street. The locomotive’s as tall as a house, its headlight and its white smoke piercing the dark. No engineer, no fireman visible. A ghost train driving itself.
SF magazine subscribers only

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