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Social Climbing is Risky

Social Climbing is Risky

The Eustace and Hilda trilogy is a comedy of manners, an illustration of how the middle classes are lost in the upper-class world of great houses and Venetian palazzi, and puzzled by men called Dick who do not share their bourgeois morality. But like all good comedy, it has an underlying seriousness. The world Eustace finds himself in is mysterious to him; for his sister, who is more perspicacious, it is frightening. And how true this still rings, several decades later: some of us find life socially awkward, or are not quite at ease in our own skins sexually – or both.

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The Importance of Being Decent

In January 1939, as Europe was convulsing to the rhythms of what George Orwell would call ‘the tom-tom beat of a latter-day tribalism’, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and E. M. Forster were gathered at Waterloo Station. It was a solemn occasion. Auden and Isherwood were about to leave the country of their birth for the United States, where, several months later, Auden would compose ‘September 1, 1939’, the ominous poem in which he would look back on ‘the low dishonest decade’ he had just lived through, and tremble at the one to come. Auden and Isherwood attracted much criticism for their decision to leave England at so crucial an hour, yet Forster refused to abandon his friends. As he bade them farewell at Waterloo, he told them that it was now their duty to ‘keep away’ and ‘see us sink from a distance’. It would be his duty, he continued, ‘to face a world which is tragic without becoming tragic myself ’.

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Educating Ulyth

Educating Ulyth

I hardly need tell you that ‘Brazil’ is supposed to be pronounced ‘Brazzle’, although I still find it hard not to pronounce it as it looks. Unmarried, childless, but busy and fulfilled, Angela Brazil (1869–1947) lived in Coventry (a place to which some of her characters are metaphorically and unwillingly sent), and most of her romantic inclinations, it seems, were channelled into celebrating the romance of life in a girls’ boarding-school, which she distilled into 59 novels. Unlike Elinor Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School and Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers books, Brazil created a totally fresh school for each novel: The Dower House, The Manor House, The Woodlands, Aireholme, Brackenfield, Silverside, Birkwood Grange and so on.

Monkey Business

Monkey Business

Television in the 1970s and 1980s was educational. Bergerac taught us that Jersey was a seething cauldron of crime; Grange Hill introduced a generation of children to sausages and heroin. And Monkey? Monkey taught us all about the frenzied delights of classical Chinese literature, even if it took some of us a while to realize it.

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Small is Beautiful

Small is Beautiful

Recently, ailing and housebound, I looked for succour in a book by a contemporary French novelist, one I remembered hugely enjoying when it first appeared. A good read has to be high on the list of restoratives, and I reckoned that Philippe Delerm’s La Première gorgée de bière (The First Swig of Beer) might be just the ticket. Not because it’s all about beer – in fact the title is rather randomly lifted from one of the book’s thirty-four essays – but because I recalled it included some cheering pages on illness.

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With an Ear to the Earth

With an Ear to the Earth

Koch’s Memoirs of a Birdman opens in 1889 when, at the age of 8, he made the world’s first ever recording of an animal, and closes in 1953 when he fulfilled a lifelong ambition to visit Iceland and record the mournful calls of the Great Northern Diver. This collection of anecdotes, reflections and regrets opens a window on the past, and allows us a glimpse of the character of this remarkable man.

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174517

Is a sequel ever as good as its original? Primo Levi’s autobiographical account of Auschwitz (If This Is a Man) is a celebrated book while its follow-up (The Truce) remains less well known. But that does not tell the whole story.

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Winning Their Spurs

I never read Ronald Welch as a child – he was writing a bit too late for me – but his historical adventure stories have a very familiar ring. In Bowman of Crécy and The Hawk I recognized with nostalgia the dashing heroes of my youth, the dastardly villains, the beautiful but distant women, the chivalry and high moral tone.

Written on the Heart

Written on the Heart

My mother used to read to us on the battered old couch. As the light faded, we would snuggle up and read along with her pointing finger. It was magic; it was spells; it was home. Her glasses slightly askew on her thin, eager face, ‘Come hither,’ she would urge. Come Hither was the title of the orange-covered anthology from which she read. Sometimes she might break off to impress on us: ‘A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master-spirit. Milton.’ We always got quotations in that form. ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day. Shakespeare,’ she would pronounce, crossly plugging in the Hoover. Or ‘If at first you don’t succeed, Try, try again. Proverb’ – tartly, when we complained about homework.

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Marvellous Therapy

Marvellous Therapy

I first met Beryl Bainbridge in 1982, when I went to interview her friend and editor Anna Haycraft for Books & Bookmen. I was later to discover that Beryl practically lived at the Haycrafts’ house in Gloucester Crescent, North London. I remember her wandering into the kitchen and, without preamble, pouring herself a glass of red wine from a two-litre bottle of Valpolicella.

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He Did His Duty

I have read most of C. S. Forester’s books, but had never come across The General until I found a copy last year in a second-hand shop. It nestled next to a biography of Winston Churchill written in 1940 (which was also fascinating). This was something of a coincidence, because in 1941, as he crossed the Atlantic in the battleship Prince of Wales for his first meeting with Roosevelt, Churchill read three of Forester’s Hornblower novels. Hornblower – hardworking, audacious, full of initiative, demanding but careful of his men – would have been for Churchill the perfect model of what a military man should be.

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A Living Landscape

A Living Landscape

It began, I seem to remember, with a grown-out hedge: four huge ash trees bordering a Hampshire footpath, all with the same odd kink in their trunks. The pleasure of recognition, of being able to look at them and know that those kinks were the result of a hedge-laying technique called pleaching that had been done to the young trees several generations ago, had me hooked.

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The Flight in the Heather

The Flight in the Heather

I saw the set of books through the window of a second-hand furniture shop in Oxford a couple of years ago. Each with a dark-blue spine stamped with a gilt palm tree, they ran across the top of one of those ‘modern’ sideboards from which Nigel Patrick and Laurence Harvey used to help themselves to drinks in 1950s films. I went in at once and found a complete set of the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, in thirty-five volumes, printed in 1924, bound in soft leather and in superb condition. I bought them for money I couldn’t afford and carried them triumphantly away in a variety of wrinkled carrier bags that the owner pulled out from under his counter.

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Rhubarb!

Any student of nineteenth-century Chinese history is familiar with Commissioner Lin Zexu (1785–1850), the epitome of the upright Confucian official who, in his moral and well-meaning efforts to stem the flow of opium into China, provoked the British military interventions that started the Opium War. Appointed by the Emperor to suppress the opium trade which was threatening the health of the nation and causing a disastrous outflow of silver, he arrived in Canton in March 1839 and issued orders threatening heavy punishment of Chinese opium-smokers and traffickers. He then turned his attention to the suppliers of Indian opium and drafted a letter to Queen Victoria. Though the letter was apparently never sent, he pointed out that Chinese rhubarb, tea and silk were ‘valuable products without which foreigners could not live’ and he demanded that the Queen personally seek out and destroy the opium carried on British ships and report back to him.

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Grandma’s Footsteps

Grandma’s Footsteps

The first thing that strikes one about the Conway family is the noise. The air is filled with Father’s sudden roars of rage, the slaps he lands on his son Howard, and his two other children, the flying plates, the slamming doors. Then there’s Grandma with her noisy coos and kisses, her cries of ecstasy one moment and shrieks of woe the next. It’s no wonder Grandpa is always going off for a little lie-down. And, of course, behind all this hubbub there are family secrets.

On Man, the Human Heart and Human Life

On Man, the Human Heart and Human Life

One of my favourite novelists, now largely forgotten, is Stanley Middleton (1919–2009). He wrote 45 novels, the last published posthumously. I thought I had them all, but when reorganizing my shelves I found I was missing two, which I’ve now bought secondhand for all of £5.80. That’s probably less than I’d pay for petrol to go to the nearest library, although I shall have to deal with the usual complaint from my wife about the lack of space in our cottage.

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