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Attics with Attitude

Attics with Attitude

I am sometimes asked which writers have changed my life. Next time I shall not answer ‘Proust’ but ‘Rachel Khoo’. For five years, since the death of my husband, I had all but given up cooking and eating, all but forgotten what I had valued before my personal doomsday. Rachel Khoo has re-engaged my taste-buds and my enthusiasm. I may even convert my fantasy dinner parties into real ones. I am already making lists . . .

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Comfortable Words

To find the Book of Common Prayer among the collection was a surprise. To discover the name of Kurt Hahn – the founder of Gordonstoun and originator of Outward Bound – stamped on the inside cover, an even greater one. There was the intriguing, if minor, question of how a book of Hahn’s had found its way into Robert Weltsch’s library, but that may not have been so odd: Hahn was also part of the German-Jewish diaspora in Britain, even if not connected to the Prague circle (although he was descended from a Grand Rabbi of Prague on his mother’s side). Weltsch had been director of the Leo Baeck Institute in London, whose purpose was to recover the history of the German Jews; no doubt Kurt Hahn had been interested in its work. He probably contributed to it, perhaps providing a memoir of how he had protested against Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933, been briefly imprisoned, struggled to keep his boarding-school at Salem going through the first year of the Third Reich, and then, recognizing the impossible, left the German tyranny behind and moved to Britain to re-found his school in a new setting.

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Flouting Destiny

British publishers, we’re told, turn out around 200,000 new titles every year. That is not a trivial number. In fact, it’s so large a number that one can’t really think any useful thoughts about it. Even if cut down to manageable size by the ruthless application of Sturgeon’s Law (‘Ninety per cent of everything is garbage’), the mind still flounders.

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Summer Sunrise, Winter Twilight

Numbed with despair over the threat to the fragile beauty of the Chilterns and the villages of Buckinghamshire posed by the new high-speed rail link, I went in search of solace. I badly needed a dose of that reassuring country writing which once enjoyed such a boom, but which now seems to have slipped out of fashion. For me, the first and only choice was J. H. B. Peel.

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A Glorious Contradiction

A Glorious Contradiction

Writing one’s autobiography involves a certain audacity: the presumption that one has a story to tell, that one can tell it engagingly, that there will be publishers willing to publish, readers eager to read and, in the dark reaches of the night, benign reviewers. But a life told in five volumes when the subject is but ‘nearing fifty and the grey hairs are beginning to show’, and is generally regarded as a second-rate author? Step forward Sir Osbert Sitwell, to enthusiastic applause.

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How to Enjoy the Blackout

My father used to say that one of the most dispiriting things about his childhood during the Second World War was the boredom. The very real fear of being bombed was one thing, but being cooped up in a blacked-out room or air-raid shelter with nothing to do was quite another. Certainly in the early 1940s families were thrown upon their own resources and their own company in a most unaccustomed way.

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The Asterisk Club

I met Pamela Branch only once, at a dinner party given by the literary agent David Higham and his wife. Pamela was strikingly beautiful, with large eyes, curious as a cat’s. The talk turned to an author whose new novel was getting a lot of attention and I remarked that her husband had recently died. ‘How did she do it?’ asked Pamela with interest, ‘Poison, was it?’

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Shelf Life

‘You must be cruel to be kind,’ gardeners tell you, about pruning roses. ‘The more you cut them down, the more they love it.’ This might be true of roses but is it true of book collections? I should imagine they absolutely hate it. Or perhaps the ones that survive are so relieved that they turn a blind eye to the atrocities going on further down the shelf . . .

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Woon, Wordy-Major and Wootz

Woon, Wordy-Major and Wootz

Dictionaries, encyclopaedias and the like are best browsed at leisure; approach them with an open mind and prepare for the unexpected. The entry sought may confirm or confound one’s expectations but greater enlightenment generally lurks elsewhere on the page. As with companions of any sort, the test of a compendium lies in the extent to which it diverts.

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Mother’s Familiar

My parents had no interest in books. Having survived the Second World War, they found everything they needed in each other, and in their north London suburban home with doors they could lock, in a location free from falling bombs. For my father, it was ‘real life’ that mattered, so the daily and evening newspapers were sufficient; and my mother, as ever, deferred to him. They possessed between them a couple of telephone directories, an ancient Thorndike dictionary used by my father for his daily crossword, and the Radio Times, which my mother insisted on calling ‘the television book’, and that was it. Or so I thought.

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Muddy Boots and a Slouch Hat

Muddy Boots and a Slouch Hat

American presidential memoirs have tended to be self-serving tomes, designed to massage reputations and secure their authors a fat windfall on retirement. This was not the case with the first, written by Ulysses S. Grant, who served two terms in the White House (1869–77). Grant does not write about his presidency but about his experiences as the victorious general of the Civil War.

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Castles in the Air

Castles in the Air

What do an incarcerated minister, an old dressing-up box and a tin of blue paint have in common? They are all central to the plot of The Swish of the Curtain by Pamela Brown, a magical children’s book, first published in 1941, about a group of friends who take over a disused mission hall and transform it into a theatre.

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The Tortoise of Total War

The Tortoise of Total War

I don’t suppose anyone who buys Slightly Foxed can forget the sheer, joyful, all-absorbing intensity with which we read as adolescents; but it took a remark of T. S. Eliot’s to bring home to me the pattern of it. Young people, he observed, seldom explore a large number of authors: instead, they tend to seize on a handful of favourites, and try to read everything they ever wrote. For me, one of those authors was Evelyn Waugh: when I came across Decline and Fall in my early teens, I wanted to immerse myself for ever in his hilarious, anarchic world where the names alone were enough to bring on fits of helpless laughter. Lady Circumference and little Lord Tangent – not even Dickens could match that combination.

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Perfick Wevver

Herbert Ernest Bates was born in 1905, in Northamptonshire, the son of a cobbler, and his schooldays were spent in a brick-terraced industrial town dominated by factories where he dreaded he would one day have to work. But his Methodist childhood was lit up by visits to his grandfather’s farm, and the early chapters of his memoir The Vanished World (1969) are full of his love of the Midlands countryside.

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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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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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