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Fallowfield, Posy

Posy Fallowfield lives in Devon where she enjoys gardening and walking but wishes that made her sound more interesting.

The numbers in square brackets refer to the issue of the quarterly in which the article appears.
The unbracketed numbers refer to the starting page of the article.
For entries in multiple issues of the quarterly, the occurrences are separated by semi-colons.

articles by, [61] 29; [64] 40; [68] 76; [72] 85; [76] 73; [81] 34; [83] 25; [85] 19

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20250301100048 Posy Fallowfield on Ronald Blythe, SF Issue 85

The Sound of a Leaf

Posy Fallowfield on Ronald Blythe, Outsiders

In lateish middle age we sold our house in Devon and moved to France, planning a new project in a new place. Living in a caravan for a year while we renovated, we vastly improved our French (words for ‘beam’, ‘wheelbarrow’ and ‘high blood pressure’ proving useful) and only one of us was ever homesick. For some reason I’d taken with me Ronald Blythe’s Outsiders: A Book of Garden Friends (2008) and, although on balance I was enjoying living in France, this did make me slightly wistful. It’s a collection of his essays on gardeners, gardening, botanists, plantsmen, great gardens, garden memories, writers’ gardens, the seasons. To anyone even mildly interested in gardening it’s a collection of treasures.
20240901093057 Posy Fallowfield on Elizabeth Taylor, SF Issue 83

The Smell of Lavender Water

Posy Fallowfield on Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont

If you, dear reader, should happen to be the wrong side of 70, should perchance have lost your life partner, should occasionally in the small hours have slippery thoughts about what life might hold in store for you, if you should ever wonder, however fleetingly, ‘what next?’ or even ‘how?’ – then maybe Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (1971) by Elizabeth Taylor is not for you.
20240301093039 Posy-Fallowfield-on-Carson-McCullers,-Slightly-Foxed-81

Hanging Around in Doorways

Posy Fallowfield on Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding

I first read Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding (1946) in my twenties – a teaching colleague had recommended it – and loved it. I took it at face value: I enjoyed its plot, succumbed to its atmosphere, appreciated its descriptions and believed in its characters. I remembered it as a Good Book and sought out others by McCullers (always admiring her titles – The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Ballad of the Sad Café). But in your twenties you are robust, busy looking ahead and perhaps less inclined to dwell on the past. You don’t necessarily think sad stories apply to you. Now, rereading it several decades later, I am surprised at how moved I am by Frankie, the central character, and how much I identify with her. Which is odd, considering she is a 12-year-old on the brink of adolescence and I am 72.
20221201101824 Posy Fallowfield on Shirley Hughes, SF 76

A Friendly Looking Lot

Posy Fallowfield on the children’s stories of Shirley Hughes

When I was 6 I broke my arm and had to go to hospital to have it set in plaster of Paris. All this, both the breaking and the setting, made for an eventful day. When I got home there on the table was a book, a present to cheer me up (this was 1954 when presents for a not-birthday were perhaps rarer than they are now). The book was The Bell Family by Noel Streatfeild and I have it still. It’s the story of an impoverished vicar’s family who triumph over adversity by being, basically, nicer than their odious rich relations; there’s also a cleaning lady called Mrs Gage who has a heart of gold and drops her aitches. It seems very anachronistic now, but at 6 I was a sucker for heart-warming stories about gallant, united families. And I loved the illustrations, which were by Shirley Hughes.
20211115132829 Posy Fallowfield on Isabel Colegate, The Shooting Party, SF Issue 72

Not While It’s Running

Posy Fallowfield on Isabel Colegate, The Shooting Party

My father used to tell a story about a Frenchman (the dependable butt of Edwardian jokes) being invited to some large estate for a shoot. Seeing a cock pheasant coming into the open and running alongside a wood, he levels his gun to aim at it. At which his English host says, ‘My dear man, you can’t shoot it while it’s running!’ The Frenchman replies, ‘Certainly not, I shall wait until it stops.’ This used to make my father fall about laughing but I could never understand why.
20201114113640 Posy Fallowfield on The Story of Lucy Gault, William Trevor, copyright Mark Gerson & National Portrait Gallery, London

Just the Way It Is

Posy Fallowfield on William Trevor, The Story of Lucy Gault

I first came across William Trevor in the early nineties when my son came home from school with The Children of Dynmouth, his GCSE set text. I’ve been an ardent fan ever since, although I must admit that in one’s robust forties Trevor’s themes (sadness, loneliness, cruelty, the sheer arbitrariness of life’s awfulness) can be relished in a way that becomes increasingly difficult with age, as one’s skin thins and that arbitrariness begins to bite.
20191201131357 Posy Fallowfield on Elizabeth Bowen - Slightly Foxed Issue 64

Anguish Revisited

Posy Fallowfield on Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

At boarding school in the late Sixties we had as our English teacher a Miss J. H. B. Jones. Coaxing us self-absorbed teenagers through the A-level syllabus she was diffident, patient and unassuming, and had it not been for a brief conversation in which she suggested I read The Death of the Heart (1938) by Elizabeth Bowen, I’m sorry to say I would by now have forgotten her utterly. But I went off for the long summer holiday and took her advice; I have my Penguin copy fifty years later, and the cover illustration of a young girl wearing an anguished expression still takes me back to those inevitably anguished years.
20190301171230

In the Eye of the Storm

Posy Fallowfield on Richard Hughes, In Hazard

In Hazard is an extraordinary read. It resembles The Human Predicament in mixing fiction with fact, but here the ‘fact’ is not a devastating political movement which took years to grow, but a devastating meteorological event which took place within a week. In November 1932 the steamship Phemius was sucked into a Caribbean hurricane and tested to the limits, yet somehow she and all her crew survived. The owner of the shipping line to which Phemius belonged approached Hughes and suggested he record the dramatic story. Hughes agreed to describe the storm and its effects on the ship as accurately as he could, with the proviso that he would invent a fictitious captain and crew . . .

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