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Symes, Ruth A.

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20080901150729 Daniel Macklin illustration - Ruth Symes on Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

The Making of a Writer

Ruth Symes on Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

Something half-remembered involving a writer locked in a tower, and a conviction that my first encounter – literary or otherwise – with the drink crème de menthe took place within its pages: these, until recently, were my hazy but fond memories of Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle. But within seconds of opening the novel again, I was reminded of why I had once loved it enough to read it several times a year.
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How to Enjoy the Blackout

Ruth A. Symes on Howard Thomas and Marjorie A. Banks, Brighter Blackout Book

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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An Unsettling Read

Ruth Symes on E. M. Forster, A Passage to India

As the long flight plugged on through the night, Forster’s powerful descriptions of the scenery and climate of India beckoned me. I longed to feel the way the Asian heat ‘leapt forward’ hour by hour, to see the ‘angry orange’ sun that ‘had power without beauty,’ and to smell the toddy palms and neem trees and sweet ‘green-blossomed champak’. I wanted to feel beneath my feet what Forster describes as ‘something hostile in the soil’ and see the sky at night when ‘the stars hang like lamps from the immense vault’.

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