Issue 86

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
Always the Same River

Always the Same River

At my twenty-first birthday party, in a cheap north London pasta restaurant, a friend gave me a copy of Graham Swift’s Waterland, telling me that everyone who studied History should read it. Studying was perhaps a grand word for my efforts at university, but I was intrigued. My choice of subject meant I’d read very little fiction; I was busy reading historians who had initials instead of forenames – C. V. Wedgwood, E. H. Carr, A. J. P. Taylor and my patient tutor, H. R. Loyn – and had found time only to read a smattering of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels. To be given a contemporary novel was thrilling.
SF magazine subscribers only
Terror among the Wheatfields

Terror among the Wheatfields

When the BBC asked me to make a radio programme about Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966), I had not yet read it, and didn’t want to. I’d mentally filed it in the same category as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and American Psycho: books that I might have liked in my teens and twenties but that now seemed insufferably macho. I’d not that long ago had a baby and I had no interest in reading about a family being murdered in their beds.
SF magazine subscribers only
How the World Works

How the World Works

When I was a child, my father – who was a materials scientist, and used sometimes to make gunpowder in the back garden – told me that the study of physics was simply the study of how the world works. Optics and glass were his particular field. Occasionally he’d stand at the kitchen sink attempting to hand-grind a lens for a telescope or fetch a microscope and persuade my mother to supply a drop of blood for a slide. Observing the moon, or the bloody smear we could never quite resolve into cells, he’d be as fascinated by the means of procuring these images as by the images themselves and would try to teach me the principles of focal length.
SF magazine subscribers only
Hungry for Love

Hungry for Love

The past is a foreign country: they eat things differently there. At a picnic, for example, they might decant a tin of slimy boiled ham on to a dinner plate and eat it with a knife and fork, along with Heinz Salad Cream served in a sauce boat. They consume jelly with evaporated milk, cucumber slices in vinegar, plates of reformed cow’s tongue – and on special occasions they might serve them all at once on a wheeled trolley. Instead of vegetables they buy instant dried peas in cardboard boxes. They grill grapefruits. They’ve never heard of hummus.

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