Issue 89

Terror from Outer Space

Terror from Outer Space

I was 6,500 feet above sea level in the mountains of Inyanga in what was then known as Southern Rhodesia, lying on my back on the grass and looking up at the stars. They were always unbelievably clear and bright up there, and the first rains of the season had rinsed the dust and the smoke of bush fires from the sky. As always the Southern Cross and Orion’s shimmering sword belt dominated the heavens, but tonight I was looking for something else – something no one had ever seen before. Eventually I saw it – a tiny speck of light, smaller than many of the stars, travelling across the midnight sky. It was October 1957, and the Russians had just successfully launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite.
SF magazine subscribers only
An Unlikely Librarian

An Unlikely Librarian

In his 1928 hit, the American singer Harry McClintock conjured a vision of hobo utopia. ‘In the Big Rock Candy Mountains/ All the cops have wooden legs/ And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth/ And the hens lay soft-boiled eggs.’ The song recounts the fantasies of a picaresque American tramp, but its original version presented something darker. Before sanitization for radio, amid the delights of ‘cigarette trees’ and alcohol ‘trickling down the rocks’, it ended with the lines: ‘I’ve hiked and hiked till my feet are sore/ I’ll be god damned if I hike anymore/ To be buggered sore like a hobo’s whore/ On the Big Rock Candy Mountains.’ This fantasy song describes a young man’s initiation into the often brutal reality of the hobo underground.
SF magazine subscribers only
Lockdown with Linda

Lockdown with Linda

‘Now would be a great time to read Linda Kelly.’ The suggestion came from a member of my reading group; the March 2020 lock down had started, and with the group’s discussions banished to Zoom and feelings of isolation setting in, she and I had taken to calling each other regularly for literary chat and book recommendations. In lock down the outside world had become echoingly quiet. Books were needed more than ever to people the inner one and, as my friend had predicted, Linda Kelly’s turned out to be perfect for the task.
SF magazine subscribers only
The Watershed

The Watershed

Sometimes, on the borders of sleep, I remember the walk down from Hay Bluff to the Vale of Ewyas. Along the Brecon escarpments. Across the watershed into Nant Bwch, a ravine with a stream far below. Past a group of buildings where, in Victorian times, there was a monastic retreat, and where in the 1920s an artistic commune flourished for a time. If I have not drifted off, I pause at the church at Capel-y-Ffin, with its stumpy chimney like the tail of a perching wren; and before turning down the valley towards the ruins of Llanthony Priory I lift my drowsy mind’s eye to the ‘Vision’ farm, high on the fern-covered flank of a hill in the heart of the Black Mountains. In my mind’s ear there is the rushing sound of the River Honddu, the voice of the Vale of Ewyas.
SF magazine subscribers only
A Cook to Cook with

A Cook to Cook with

There are two types of people in this world: those who think Margaret Costa is one of the most influential food writers of the twentieth century, and those who haven’t yet read her. There’s a good chance that, if you fall into the latter camp, you haven’t even heard of her. Costa didn’t enjoy the of-her-own-time influence of Elizabeth David, Claudia Roden or Jane Grigson, or the revival or rediscovery that we’ve seen for Patience Grey, Arabella Boxer or Dorothy Hartley. But for those in the know, it’s impossible not to mention Margaret Costa in the same breath. She is, in many ways, the cookery writer’s cookery writer. Delia Smith describes her as ‘the best-kept culinary secret in the entire history of British cooking’. Indeed, when Simon Hopkinson couldn’t lay his hands on a copy of her then out-of-print cookbook, Delia gave him hers. He thought calling it a classic was ‘almost an understatement’, while Nigel Slater has said, ‘If I had to choose only one book to cook from for the rest of my life it would be this one.’
SF magazine subscribers only
Source of Pleasure

Source of Pleasure

To those of us whose love of books is tactile – cherishing their feel, texture, smell – picking up a book with the stamp ‘Book Production War Economy Standard’ ought to come as a sharp disappointment. But Robert Gibbings’s Coming Down the Wye, published in the first year of those authorized economy standards agreed between the Publishers Association and the Ministry of Supply in January 1942, seems only lightly scathed by the official restrictions (on such things as type-to-page ratio, maximum type size and minimum words per page).
SF magazine subscribers only
The Impression of the Moment

The Impression of the Moment

In 1916 a book appeared, in two volumes running to more than 1,100 pages, with the not very snappy title of Lord Granville Leveson Gower, Private Correspondence 1781 to 1821. This was misleading, since between two-thirds and three-quarters of the letters included were not by Earl Granville, but to him, from his lover for seventeen years, Harriet, Countess of Bessborough. This ancient scandal is hardly reason enough to go in search of Harriet, but there are many other elements of her story that should encourage us to learn more about her, not least the outstanding quality of her letters.
SF magazine subscribers only
Wonderfully Down-to-Earth

Wonderfully Down-to-Earth

Like most keen readers, I imagine, I collect the works of particular authors, placing the books in satisfying runs along my bookshelves. These runs are not alphabetical or chronological, since I am not sufficiently organized for that, but at least they come easily to hand. Among these are: the fiction of Jane Austen and John Buchan, the Regency novels of Georgette Heyer, the collections of poetry by John Clare and John Betjeman – and the popular horticultural science books of Ken Thompson. The last may not be a familiar name to you, but he is to me one of the most original and readable of garden writers, ever. Those two virtues, originality and readability, have become scarce commodities in garden writing in recent years, superseded very often by desperately ordinary blogs, vlogs and social media posts, many of which contain questionable or outdated information, delivered in a tone of deadening earnestness.
SF magazine subscribers only
Against the Tide

Against the Tide

On the boat, I woke to the play of light on the ceiling, reflecting off the river through the portholes behind my bed. I slept under five duvets and better than I ever had, with the water rocking me to sleep. Sometimes I was woken by the dawn chorus which the river seemed to amplify. Sound works strangely by water, and I could hear each word of the intimate conversations on the opposite bank, in The Kidneys, where students came for break-ups and boat people gathered for parties at full moon. At dusk, a flotilla of geese came honking down to the jetty where they slept, followed after sunset by party boats blasting Noughties hits which disappeared mid-lyric around the riverbend.
SF magazine subscribers only
Low Life, High Art

Low Life, High Art

For most of the last fifty years, the correct way to read the Spectator was to open it at the back, flip over a few pages and find out what on earth old Low Life had been up to that week. Had he woken up in a hedge with no memory of the previous twenty-four hours, perhaps? Had he had a brush with the law, or suffered an embarrassing bodily malfunction in a public place? Had he outraged the prevailing middle-class morals of the day in some farcical manner? The purpose of the Low Life column was to give Spectator readers a weekly glimpse of the gutter; a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God insight into the life of the bohemian drop out; a sense of what happens when a man looks at polite society’s prescriptions and says, ‘Not for me, thank you.’ And a proper belly-laugh into the bargain. Two men have been Low Life’s custodians. Both are now dead. The first, Jeffrey Bernard, was the archetypal Soho barfly: cynical, self-pitying, permanently sozzled, spitting out formless but funny poison-pen letters until the booze killed him, aged 65, in 1997. He has become a figure of legend, immortalized in a stage play named after the Spectator’s frequent one-line apology when he failed to file copy: Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell.
SF magazine subscribers only
A Life Well Lived

A Life Well Lived

Historians of children’s literature sometimes speak of a First and a Second Golden Age. The First was the Victorian/Edwardian period, when many of the most enduring classics were written – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Black Beauty, Treasure Island, Little Women, Peter Pan, The Wind in the Willows – and the main genres of children’s literature (fantasy, adventure, animal stories, school stories, family sagas) were established. This period is generally thought to have come to an end around the outbreak of the First World War. For whatever reasons, the interwar period produced rather less memorable children’s literature.
SF magazine subscribers only
A Consummate Professional

A Consummate Professional

I came to Cecil Beaton through Roy Strong, and Strong’s vastly entertaining diaries owe much to Cecil Beaton. In 1967, five months after he was appointed the youngest ever Director of the National Portrait Gallery, Strong made ‘juvenile jottings’ on some of the remarkable people he was meeting. The jottings became, a year later, something much more substantial. ‘Beaton’s diaries were in the process of being published at the time,’ Strong wrote, ‘and I was hypnotized by his ability to conjure up characters or a scene. His diaries were not daily, but occasional, made up of set pieces describing particular events or people . . . They were concerned, too, with a social panorama . . . It was that type of diary that I resolved to keep.’
SF magazine subscribers only

Sign up to our e-newsletter

Sign up for dispatches about new issues, books and podcast episodes, highlights from the archive, events, special offers and giveaways.