Articles & Extracts

The Getting of Wisdom

The Getting of Wisdom

‘If only people knew about Dorothy Whipple, I feel their lives would be so enriched,’ I remember the founder of Persephone Books remarking thoughtfully when I interviewed her for a profile of the firm for the very first issue of Slightly Foxed. And how right she was. It took me a long time – almost twenty years in fact – to catch up with Dorothy Whipple, and although I have enjoyed her fiction, which is compulsively readable, it is her childhood memoir, The Other Day (1936), that has touched and entertained me most.
Benefit of Clergy

Benefit of Clergy

Recently we were invited to dinner with friends in their lovely old vicarage. It was a cold night but there was a cosiness about the place, echoed by the warmth of our French hostess as she welcomed us through its imposing Georgian portal. This was not to last. Luckily, we hadn’t even taken off our coats before her husband stormed in from the back door, upbraiding her for switching on the heating: ‘You simply don’t understand! Vicarages are supposed to be cold!’ He was not himself the vicar, who now lived elsewhere, but his father had been, and our friend had bought back his childhood home. He knew whereof he spoke.
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Memory and recollection are mysterious powers | When I Was a Little Boy Extract

Memory and recollection are mysterious powers | When I Was a Little Boy Extract

Memory and recollection are mysterious powers, and recollection is the more mysterious and puzzling of the two. For the memory has only to do with our heads. How much is seven times fifteen? And little Paul shouts promptly, ‘A hundred and five!’ He has learned it and his head has retained it. Or it has forgotten it, in which case little Paul cries, ‘A hundred and fifteen!’ Whether we know this or that correctly or incorrectly, or whether we have forgotten it and must reckon up anew, good memory and bad memory reside in our heads. The pigeon-holes for all the things we have ever learned are there. I imagine they are like the drawers in a cupboard or a chest of drawers. They often stick when you try to pull them out. Sometimes there’s nothing in them, and sometimes there’s the wrong thing. And sometimes they won’t pull out at all. Then they and we are ‘as if nailed down’, as the saying goes. Our memories are either large or small chests of drawers. In my own head, for instance, the chest of drawers is rather small. The drawers are only half full, but they’re fairly tidy. When I was a little boy my chest of drawers looked quite different. In those days my little top storey was a real lumber room.
Muriel was at a crossroads | The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley Extract

Muriel was at a crossroads | The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley Extract

Muriel was at a crossroads. Something would have to be done, but what? Roger had urged her to ‘let things slide a little longer’. Since then things had indeed slid. She was ill throughout all her pregnancies, worried almost beyond endurance, deeply ashamed, sick and perpetually tired. The longed-for escape from her past that Roger had brought about had simply landed her in a prison of domesticity that every fibre of her being cried out was wrong for her. Instinct told her that she wasn’t meant for this. Before she found Roger she had been fortified in the belief that one day ‘something’ would happen to save her. And something had happened. But instead of walking out into a paradise of freedom she’d walked straight into a trap. She might just as well have gone into a prison cell and closed the door behind her.
Period Piece Extract | ‘It was a Utopia of tea-parties, dinner-parties, boat-races, lawn-tennis, antique shops, picnics . . .’

Period Piece Extract | ‘It was a Utopia of tea-parties, dinner-parties, boat-races, lawn-tennis, antique shops, picnics . . .’

In the spring of 1883 my mother, Maud Du Puy, came from America to spend the summer in Cambridge with her aunt, Mrs Jebb. She was nearly twenty-two, and had never been abroad before; pretty, affectionate, self-willed, and sociable; but not at all a flirt. Indeed her sisters considered her rather stiff with young men. She was very fresh and innocent, something of a Puritan, and with her strong character, was clearly destined for matriarchy.
During that August‒September period we were always so outnumbered . . .

During that August‒September period we were always so outnumbered . . .

During that August‒September period we were always so outnumbered that it was practically impossible, unless we were lucky enough to have the advantage of height, to deliver more than one squadron attack. After a few seconds we always broke up, and the sky was a smoke trail of individual dogfights. The result was that the squadron would come home individually, machines landing one after the other at intervals of about two minutes. After an hour, Uncle George would make a check-up on who was missing. Often there would be a telephone-call from some pilot to say that he had made a forced landing at some other aerodrome or in a field. But the telephone wasn’t always so welcome. It could be a rescue squad announcing the number of a crashed machine; then Uncle George would check it and cross another name off the list. At that time, the losing of pilots was somehow extremely impersonal; nobody, I think, felt any great emotion – there simply wasn’t time for it.
Love at First Flight

Love at First Flight

I came across Frances Hodgson Burnett’s My Robin (1912) while doing research for a book I was writing about my grandfather. I had discovered, on reading through my father’s papers, that the family tales of connections to Frances and The Secret Garden were true. (Perhaps I’m still not convinced that Frances presented a pram with her initials emblazoned on it at the birth of my Aunt Gert, and yet it is consistent with her character.) My grandfather was gardener to Frances at Maytham Hall in Kent, and he was the inspiration for the book’s more interestingly named character, Ben Weatherstaff.
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Gloriously Over-the-top

Gloriously Over-the-top

Jan Morris loved to provoke. Though she wrote elsewhere of nationalities as a ‘cruel pretence’, she was not above outrageous generalization or outrageous distinction – in this case, between the sexes. Of all Venice’s visitors, she observes, ‘the British seem to me to provide the best of the men (often distinguished, frequently spare, sometimes agreeably individualist) and the worst of the women (ill tempered, hair unwashed, clothes ill fitting, snobby or embarrassingly flirtatious)’.
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Choosing Life

Choosing Life

I remember exactly how I first came across The Other Side of You. It was about fifteen years ago. Yet another relationship had hit the buffers and I was consoling myself with a mini-break. Browsing in the airport bookshop, I spotted a new book by Salley Vickers. I was aware of the author’s psychoanalytic background, and when the blurb told me this was a tale of lost love, it drew me like a magnet. Even as I was putting the book in my bag I could feel its intensity, but I had no idea it would become the main event of my weekend.
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Birth of a Nation

Birth of a Nation

It is 3 a.m. I have risen, as men of a certain age are wont to do, to answer a call of nature. Emerging from the smallest room, torch in hand, for I am staying with friends and the way is unfamiliar, I pass one of the innumerable bookcases which adorn every wall of every room. Each shelf is packed to bursting with an embarrassment of riches. I stop to look through them, as one does at 3 a.m., and notice on the bottom shelf a slim, grubby volume, its spine illegible. Curiosity creeps into my fingertips. Crouching silently, I prise it from its neighbours and fancy, as I blow several years of dust from its pages, that I can almost hear this little book sigh with liberation.
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Meet the Plantagenets

Meet the Plantagenets

I was 6 when I was given the new Puffin edition of Rumer Godden’s The Dolls’ House (1947). ‘This is a novel written about dolls in a dolls’ house,’ it begins. It was the first novel I’d ever read, arriving just at the point where I’d cracked the secret pleasure of reading to myself. We lived in Newcastle then, by the railway line. By that time, I had three younger siblings. It must have been one afternoon, when the others were downstairs, that I went up to the bedroom with my book to be alone. As the eldest I carried a certain weight: I was expected to set an example, to be grown-up, responsible. But I also got to do the first things first: first, most memorably, to read a book on my own, to make the leap, unaccompanied and unmediated, into that pocket of time and space, that dream-concoction of light and heat and air, which was – though it rose inexplicably from inside me – an entry to another world.
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The Art of Hiding Art

The Art of Hiding Art

Blanquette is as pretty as a picture, prettier than any of Monsieur Seguin’s previous goats. Her eyes are as soft as a doe’s and her beard resembles that of an army corporal. Her hooves are black and glossy, her horns are beautifully striped, her fleece is as white as mountain snow. She lets Monsieur Seguin milk her without making any fuss. She is adorable, but she is not happy. She does not wish to spend her life tethered to a stake in a paddock. When she tells Monsieur Seguin of her yearning to be set free and to go gambolling in the mountains, he claps his hand to his forehead and says, ‘Oh no, Blanquette, not you as well! Don’t you know there’s a wolf up there who’ll eat you like all my goats before?’
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