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Joining the Grown-ups

Joining the Grown-ups

I’ve been reading The Borrowers books with my daughter. I loved them when I was her age, and it’s been a joy to rediscover Mary Norton’s tales of these tiny people who live alongside humans. Their miniature world is described in glorious detail – they are small enough to take up residence in a boot, make a roaring fire from matchsticks, or feast for days on a single roasted chestnut. We’ve been thrilled as they are menaced by ferrets, scooped up into pockets or swept downstream in a tea kettle.
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From World to World

From World to World

We are observing a group of people trying to find a log. The log is not where they left it. They have been away for some time. Now it is not where it was, and they are perturbed. It is, we gather, a long log. They need it in order to cross a marsh. Finally one of them – he is called Lok – has the bright idea of finding another log, and putting it where the old one was. His companions are deeply impressed by this. A new log is located and moved by communal effort. Now they can cross the marsh to get to where they want to go. They take it in turns to walk along the log, but one of them, an old man, falls into the water. They pull him out, but he is wet and cold, and starts shivering. This seems to trouble them much more than we might expect. We infer that being cold represents a mortal threat.
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So Far Yet So Near

So Far Yet So Near

You do not have to be a paid-up member of the Janeite club to find yourself returning repeatedly to her novels. The urge to idolize Jane Austen is understandable but (in the spirit of the author herself) careful observation from a distance may serve us better. What is remarkable about her writing is not merely the vividness of her creations but the skill with which she inclines us to enter worlds whose manners and morals are in so many respects alien to our own. I cannot be the only reader who has found himself nodding in agreement with actions and expressions of opinion which would cause ructions in today’s world. Which is no more than to say that she is a past master at getting us to suspend our disbelief – or, to put it another way, to persuade us that her world is somehow ours.
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Small Crimes, Big Consequences

Small Crimes, Big Consequences

Even the most beloved authors are not necessarily remembered for the works they themselves considered their best. Famously, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote his Sherlock Holmes stories begrudgingly, and was instead devoted to his historical fiction, in particular The White Company, a charming but somewhat mannered tale of knights in the Hundred Years’ War. Similarly, C. S. Lewis considered his little-known novel Till We Have Faces his best work. A retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth, it’s a dark and foreboding tale, a far cry from his Narnia stories or even his popular theology.
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A Shameless Old Reprobate

A Shameless Old Reprobate

In 1977 I interviewed Christopher Isherwood about his memoir, Christopher and His Kind. During the interview he said how much he regretted burning the diaries he had kept while living in Berlin in the early 1930s. Why? Because, he told me, they gave a much truer picture of his past than the two novels he based upon them. Instead of being an observer, in the diaries he appeared as a participant, cruising bars in search of ‘boys’, which was why he’d gone to Berlin in the first place. It was okay to admit this now, but in those days you simply couldn’t risk such compromising material falling into the wrong hands. So up in smoke they went.
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The Getting of Wisdom

‘If only people knew about Dorothy Whipple, I feel their lives would be so enriched,’ I remember the founder of Persephone Books remarking thoughtfully when I interviewed her for a profile of the firm for the very first issue of Slightly Foxed. And how right she was. It took me a long time – almost twenty years in fact – to catch up with Dorothy Whipple, and although I have enjoyed her fiction, which is compulsively readable, it is her childhood memoir, The Other Day (1936), that has touched and entertained me most.
Benefit of Clergy

Benefit of Clergy

Recently we were invited to dinner with friends in their lovely old vicarage. It was a cold night but there was a cosiness about the place, echoed by the warmth of our French hostess as she welcomed us through its imposing Georgian portal. This was not to last. Luckily, we hadn’t even taken off our coats before her husband stormed in from the back door, upbraiding her for switching on the heating: ‘You simply don’t understand! Vicarages are supposed to be cold!’ He was not himself the vicar, who now lived elsewhere, but his father had been, and our friend had bought back his childhood home. He knew whereof he spoke.
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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’.

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