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Issue 19

1st September 2008

Slightly Foxed Issue 19: From the Editors

For some months now, at our regular get-togethers, the five of us have been sitting round the table, chewing our pens and agonizing over the question: Is it time to put the price of Slightly Foxed up? We’ve held it for nearly five years – since we started in fact – and during that time the cost of postage has risen four times and the price of paper has risen twice, not to mention all the usual running costs of the office. (Even Pugwash’s running costs have risen steeply as he’s a very wobbly old dog now, rather like Thurber’s dog Muggs, who would wander unnervingly about ‘like Hamlet following his father’s ghost’.) Needless to say, we’ve done everything we can to keep costs down – including no staff pay-rises – but those who advise us on our finances have been murmuring with ever-growing insistence about the need to increase our price and urging us to do so.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors

Recognizing an Imagination Need

During Stalin’s purges in Russia, millions of people were sent to work in Siberian labour camps, and many died from lack of food, brutal punishments, overwork or the bitter cold. There were, however, some remarkable instances of survival. In the introduction to his novel The Forbidden Forest, the philosopher Mircea Eliade tells how some prisoners in one camp survived their ordeal. While those in other dormitories died at the rate of up to twelve a week, the prisoners of one dormitory stayed alive because they listened every night to an old woman telling fairy tales. Each prisoner gave up a precious portion of his daily bread ration in order to help feed the old woman so she could save her strength for the nightly storytelling sessions.
SF magazine subscribers only

Brother Juniper’s Inquisition

Sometimes, confessing to a favourite book can bring a flush of embarrassment to the cheeks. We tend to make such selections at a susceptible age and they don’t necessarily stand up to the test of time. ‘Isn’t that a bit . . . well . . . teenaged?’ some inquirer will ask with a shrivelling look. I am only too aware of this snooty equivalent of the lifted lorgnette as I admit to a long-standing love of Thornton Wilder’s little slip of a book: The Bridge of San Luis Rey.
SF magazine subscribers only
Great Escapes

Great Escapes

At various times in my life, from my twenties to my fifties, I planned to travel through France by boat. As real life gradually rendered the achievement of this ambition ever more unlikely, I took to reading in a random way books by people who had done it. About twenty years ago I came across a large paperback called Isabel and the Sea. I knew nothing about it or its author George Millar, but I consumed it greedily, loving every word. It was the classic ‘through France and across the Mediterranean by boat’ book. Later, I tracked down and consumed equally greedily all the other books that George Millar had written, most of which were then out of print.
SF magazine subscribers only

Tutu Wonderful

Noel Streatfeild’s children’s classic Ballet Shoes, published in 1936, remains a favourite for anybody interested in theatre. Whenever one mentions a first-class book of this kind, if the adult addressed knows it, their face will light up, and they’ll look exactly as they must have done as a child. This is true of either sex. E. Nesbit’s name gets many nods and smiles, particularly from elderly gentlemen who remember the Psammead: ‘a little beast’, said one. Mention of Narnia produces endless discussions on the merits of the seven books. And every woman who discovered I was writing about Ballet Shoes responded in exactly the same way. A sharp intake of breath was followed by, ‘Oh! My favourite book!’
SF magazine subscribers only
An Eagle in the Attic

An Eagle in the Attic

The epigraph to Querencia, by my friend Stephen Bodio, explains that the title is a term taken from the bullring, denoting the imagined, and illusory, sanctuary sought by a bull entering the ring, where he feels secure, temporarily sheltered in a magical space. A nearly untranslatable word is a good title for an almost unclassifiable book: an autobiographical fragment, evoking a place and a time, and two similarly unclassifiable people, Steve and Betsy.
SF magazine subscribers only
Inside the Aunt Heap

Inside the Aunt Heap

Aunts up the Cross begins and ends with the death of the author’s great-aunt Juliet, aged 85 and frankly pretty eccentric if not down-right mad. She was run over by a bus which was travelling slowly in the right direction while the old lady was going pretty fast in the opposite, wrong direction. Her progress was made all the more haphazard by the dark glasses which she wore throughout the year. ‘Her untimely end might have been dramatic in a family more given over to quieter leave taking,’ wrote her great-niece, Robin Eakin. ‘But, in ours, it just seemed natural.’
SF magazine subscribers only
The Tricks War Plays

The Tricks War Plays

One day early in the First World War, an inexperienced young doctor serving with the Royal Fusiliers examined a sergeant who was ‘out of sorts’. The man had a reputation for being imperturbable on patrol, but now he sat in a billet in Armentières staring at the fire, unshaven, slovenly dressed and silent. The doctor could find nothing physically wrong but gave him permission to rest. The following day, when everyone else had gone up the line, the sergeant blew his head off. ‘I thought little of this at the time,’ the doctor wrote later. ‘It seemed a silly thing to do.’
SF magazine subscribers only

The Man from Department K

I might never have discovered James Munro’s John Craig thrillers had I not seen the film of the last of them, The Innocent Bystanders, in early 1973. Christina Foyle remarked at the time of Craig’s first appearance in The Man Who Sold Death (1964) that his creator wrote like a cross between Ian Fleming and John le Carré, but although the book and its successors were well-received, Munro never found the same fame. The film sank without trace, despite an excellent cast headed by Stanley Baker, but it did inspire me to seek out the Craig books. I loved them.
SF magazine subscribers only

Strolling with Dickens

When I was a child in the late 1940s and early 1950s I believed that my father was a close personal friend of Charles Dickens. They must, I thought, have met at various inns in London and shared jokes and stories and enormous slap-up breakfasts with baked meats and ale. Samuel Pickwick would often be there, too, and Dickens would address my father as ‘VSP’, as all his friends did. We lived in the country for much of that time, in a house which I imagined was just like Dickens’s Dingley Dell. There was a walled garden, with a little summer-house, and I half expected the Fat Boy to pop up from behind the rhubarb and make my flesh creep.
SF magazine subscribers only
The Eyesight of Wasps

The Eyesight of Wasps

I discovered Niko Tinbergen’s Curious Naturalists as a student. I was reading psychology and the course had just begun with a look at animal behaviour, which involved a grasp of scientific method and thus a lot of headache-inducing maths. In a bookshop, glumly casting round for some background reading with a lighter touch than the papers I’d been given, I happened on this remarkable book, published surprisingly by Country Life. It was about seagulls, savage wasps, camouflage and other matters now suddenly on my agenda but, because it was for ordinary readers rather than specialists, the ordeals of theory, statistical bafflement and so forth were wonderfully absent.
SF magazine subscribers only
A Lonely Furrow

A Lonely Furrow

John Stewart Collis hated to be referred to as ‘a neglected writer’. He said that if people read that a writer is neglected their natural response is to say, ‘Well, let’s neglect him some more.’ All the same it is hard to avoid saying that Collis was, and is now, a neglected writer, this despite his having written at least one book, While Following the Plough, which deserves to be treated as one of the classic books about farming, nature and country life, on a level with those of Richard Jefferies or W. H. Hudson.
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