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Articles & Extracts

Along the Old Ways

Along the Old Ways

For many years of my life, I was fascinated by mountains and their tops: drawn upwards by what Joe Simpson nicely calls ‘the inverted gravity’ that peaks exert upon certain people. I climbed and mountaineered – ineptly but passionately – in ranges around the world: Snowdonia, the Lake District, the Cuillins, the Cairngorms, the Alps, the Rockies, the Tian Shan, the Himalayas. All of these expeditions, from half-day to multi month, were centred upon summits. My companions and I would scry our maps, mark the tops we wished to reach, then plan our journeys around those high points. It did not occur to me to explore a mountain without reference to its peak.

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The Making of a Writer

The Making of a Writer

Something half-remembered involving a writer locked in a tower, and a conviction that my first encounter – literary or otherwise – with the drink crème de menthe took place within its pages: these, until recently, were my hazy but fond memories of Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle. But within seconds of opening the novel again, I was reminded of why I had once loved it enough to read it several times a year.

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Not Swinging, Just Dancing

Not Swinging, Just Dancing

With my first wage, earned by selling toys in a department store, I bought myself a pair of black stockings, a bottle of frosted pink nail varnish, and a copy of Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls. My family believed books were ‘good for you’ and I’d gobbled up the classics: Dickens, the Brontës, Thackeray, Gaskell and Defoe, coping happily with long convoluted sentences and dutifully deploying them in my school essays. O’Brien’s brilliantly concise sentences were a revelation, her voice fresh and direct.

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Living in Interesting Times

I don’t suppose anyone really understands why some novelists, widely read, even celebrated, are eclipsed when they die. Why is R. C. Hutchinson (1907–75) now almost forgotten? The Unforgotten Prisoner (1933), his third novel and first success, sold 150,000 copies in the month of publication. Rising, his last novel, the final chapter unfinished when he died, was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1975. It isn’t that publishers haven’t tried. Allison & Busby republished several of the novels as ‘modern classics’ in the 1980s and 1990s. Testament (1938) and The Unforgotten Prisoner were reissued as King Penguins in 1981 and 1983. And now Faber have reissued five of the novels as Faber Finds: The Unforgotten Prisoner, Testament, Recollection of a Journey (1952), A Child Possessed (1964) and Rising.

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The Art of Browsing

The Art of Browsing

It is time to reclaim the verb ‘to browse’. Its proper meaning is ‘to linger in a bookshop, sampling the volumes on display’. These days the word is too often appropriated by Internet addicts and goats. When we sit at our keyboards and trawl through websites the correct verb should be ‘to gawp’. And when goats, with their insolent expressions, tear at sparse vegetation in scrubland, they are simply chomping. Browsing in a bookshop is an art, and therefore involves certain rules, which I am now going to explain.

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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!’

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The Black Isle and the Miss Boyds

The Black Isle and the Miss Boyds

Reachfar is a ruin now. Approach, as we did, from the north, across rough, boulder-strewn fields, and it has a blind, sad look, just one small window in its long stone front. Go round to the other side and the mood changes. You are greeted by a blaze of gorse and a yard that has reverted riotously to moorland. Only a stone trough remains. But, for all its decay, the croft has a companionable air, although parlour, kitchen and attics are now all one and ivy pushes its way in over crumbling sills.

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Considerable Indiscretions

Considerable Indiscretions

The huge literature on Winston Churchill can seem impenetrable to the casual reader. Churchill’s own writings, with their stentorian prose, do not always appeal (though My Early Life scores through its pell-mell pace of events). Martin Gilbert’s official biography marshals the main themes superbly but cannot convey the everyday feel of Churchillian life. A host of Churchill’s contemporaries have gone into print, reporting their dealings with the great man and basking in the light of his genius. Among them is Lady Violet Bonham-Carter, whose Winston Churchill as I Knew Him describes with beguiling insight her friend’s life up to the year 1916. In the preface Bonham-Carter quotes Gray’s remark to Horace Walpole: ‘Any fool may write a most valuable book by chance, if he will only tell us what he heard and saw with veracity.’ Such a man – though certainly no fool – was John (or Jock) Colville, one of the private secretaries to Churchill in both his spells as Prime Minister. During those periods Colville kept detailed diaries of events, which were published in 1985, two years before their author’s death, as The Fringes of Power:Downing Street Diaries, 1939–1955.

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An Observer Observed

An Observer Observed

The trouble with memoirs is that too often they are written by people whose idea of what’s interesting is not the same as the reader’s. They are either grossly self-serving, like most political memoirs, or a good story spoiled by bad writing. Autobiography is not easy: it calls for literary talent, professional detachment and moral courage. Alan Moorehead had all three. Not only was he a rare example of a high-profile newspaper reporter who turned himself into a bestselling author, but he also had the vital extra ingredient of critical self-awareness. The result is an unusually good autobiography.

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A Cat’s Life

If you were a bookworm as a child, your memories are measured not only in family and school and public events, but also in the stories you read. You remember vividly the smell, the touch, the sight of certain books. You clearly recall picking them up from the shelf – an ordinary act – and then the extraordinary happening, as you open the book and fall straight into another world. For me, who loved fairytales and fantasy, who longed to go through the looking-glass, the wardrobe, into another world where anything might happen, it was also a blessed escape from the confusing, disturbing and tumultuous family dramas that dominated my childhood. In those stories of other worlds, I found pleasure and consolation, transformation and possibility.

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Ad Hoc through Afghanistan

Ad Hoc through Afghanistan

Which century are we in? Which country? Nicolas Bouvier’s vignette in The Way of the World won’t puzzle those of us (a rapidly dwindling cohort) who can remember Afghanistan during the reign of King Mohammad Zahir. And Nicolas’s response to the people and landscapes of that sternly beautiful country – undeveloped in the mid-twentieth century, but neither impoverished nor blood-soaked – made this reader’s heart ache.

A Child in Africa

A Child in Africa

Most people have some memories of early childhood that remain vividly with them through life. Sometimes they are impossible to describe, being chiefly a quite indefinable feeling prompted by opening a particular book, or an atmosphere conjured by hearing a certain piece of music. Others are more easily converted into words: the details of a flower found in a lawn, the pattern on a hall floor, the smell of a great-aunt’s sitting-room.

Feudal Afterglow

It is peculiarly exciting to turn a page and find a strong personal emotion exactly distilled – an emotion hitherto believed to be one’s private idiosyncrasy. Around the age of 13 most bookish children break into verse (the literary equivalent of acne) and I then wrote a ‘poem’ about corncrakes – specifically, what their crake did to me (and continued to do until farming became agribusiness and the crake was heard no more.) On p. 282 of Woodbrook David Thomson says in a few words what I failed to say in several feverishly florid verses.

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Dog Days

‘In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk.’ My copy of W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn – of which these are the opening words – is a first edition of the English translation from 1998. In fine condition these now fetch high prices, something that was pointed out to me as I stashed it in a knapsack last summer, and set off with two friends to retrace part of Sebald’s route along the Suffolk coast.

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Laura, Louisa and Me

Laura, Louisa and Me

The Child that Books Built is the title of a memoir by Francis Spufford which explores the impact of books read in childhood by interspersing an account of Spufford’s own reading with excursions into history, philosophy and psychology. It beautifully articulates the formative nature of childhood literary exploration. ‘The words we take into ourselves help to shape us,’ Spufford writes. ‘They help form the questions we think are worth asking; they shift around the boundaries of the sayable inside us . . . They build and stretch and build again the chambers of our imagination.’

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The Sensation of Crossing the Street

I remember thinking clearly: what a momentous day this is, and here I am, reading a novel set in London on a single day. What a chime, what an echo! These were not the words I used to myself, as I walked in the dazzling sun, but I now think they should have been, resonating as they do with the famous opening lines of Virginia Woolf ’s novel, when Clarissa Dalloway sets forth on a perfect June morning to buy the flowers for her party: ‘What a lark! What a plunge!’

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