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Articles & Extracts

When the Hating Had to Stop

When the Hating Had to Stop

I was slow to appreciate that adults in my childish world had per formed and endured the extraordinary. I knew they had taken part in something called ‘the war’. But that a familiar face dispensing bacon at the grocer’s may have fought his way up Italy from Anzio, dodged flak in the skies above Germany or braved U-boats in the Atlantic wastes never entered my head.

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Sailing On

Sailing On

I chose a few sentences from the first chapter of Arthur Ransome’s Peter Duck (1932) for my mother’s funeral. I often read his books to her when she was old, demented and dying in a care home. When she couldn’t remember what had happened on the page or even the paragraph before, I whittled my reading down to selections from chapters I knew to be her favourites and which I loved myself. The opening of Peter Duck was one of them. Imagine an old seafarer, long retired, sitting on a bollard in Lowestoft’s inner harbour, watching the crew of a little green schooner preparing for a voyage.

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Slightly Foxed Issue 90: From the Editors

Henry James famously said that for him ‘summer afternoon’ were the two most beautiful words in the English language and for many of us no doubt, however unpredictable the weather, the idea of summer still conjures up hopeful and romantic pictures of warm afternoons and scented evenings, cricket games, al fresco meals and beach picnics. Wherever you’ll be this summer the right book for the right place is of course essential, and we hope you’ll enjoy the suggestions in this issue, from sailing with Arthur Ransome to wandering the unspoiled English countryside with the Victorian nature-writer Richard Jefferies or following Julius Caesar during the last year of his life with Thornton Wilder’s The Ides of March – a scuffed grey copy of which was serendipitously spotted in a card board box of discarded holiday thrillers in a Greek seaside café and greatly enjoyed by Noonie Minogue (see p. 76).

- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

From the editors

The Merry Month | A Countryman’s Spring Notebook

The Merry Month | A Countryman’s Spring Notebook

The chestnut is the first tree to cast a green shade. For the first time for eight months I experienced a desire to move into that shade . . .

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.

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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.

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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.

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Wine, Women and Words

Wine, Women and Words

In 2012, three years before he died at the age of 90, the American writer James Salter received the PEN/Malamud Award. His works, said the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, showed readers ‘how to work with fire, flame, the laser, all the forces of life at the service of creating sentences that spark and make stories burn’.

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A Midsummer Enchantment

A Midsummer Enchantment

In the great downsizing of 2020, thinking I was leaving Suffolk, I halved my personal library. In the event I didn’t move, but the exercise was cathartic. Shelves were cleared, spiders ejected, grumbling, from their webs. But in the manner of the dog that didn’t bark in the night, my greatest surprise was discovering what I couldn’t part with.

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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.

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Size Matters

Size Matters

Patapoufs et Filifers . . . until recently, that onomatopoeic title was all I remembered of a book my parents brought back from Paris the spring I turned 9. Over a succession of bedtimes, its twelve chapters were read aloud to my little sister, my brother and me by our father, unusually, not our mother. The story it tells had particular significance for him, something we three didn’t discover until years later.

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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.’

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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