June, the month when London begins to empty out and then fill up again with summer visitors, on the buses, on the underground, and in the restaurants and coffee shops around Hoxton Square. It’s the time of year when, at Slightly Foxed too, we begin to think of getting out of the office to visit bookshops in other parts of the country, or to take part in the kind of small literary festivals and book club get-togethers that are a million miles away from the high-profile sales events that the bigger literary festivals have become. We’ve had some of our most heartwarming, entertaining and sometimes eccentric experiences in village halls, country churches and occasionally private houses, where we meet up with readers and get a real sense of what’s going on in the places where they live. In fact on 20 June we two will be appearing at an afternoon event for the Two Moors Festival, at St Winifred’s Church, Manaton, on the edge of Dartmoor. So if you live in, or happen to be visiting, this lovely part of the south-west, please do come along (for details visit www.twomoorsfestival.com).
Nowhere is the delicious feeling of summer in the countryside better conveyed than by one of SF’s most popular writers, Adrian Bell. ‘So, just a reminder that A Countryman’s Summer Notebook, along with the other three books in our quartet of Bell’s seasonal writings for the Eastern Daily Press, is still available. In this collection of short, jewellike pieces written between 1950 and 1980, he takes us into the summer countryside to linger in quiet churches, wander through country towns, and hear the voices of the craftsmen and women, the farmers and farm labourers, whose lives are rooted – in the Suffolk soil.
Another favourite, A House in Flanders by Michael Jenkins, evokes a different kind of summer, one spent by the author as a young boy with his extended family of aunts and grown-up cousins in a dignified old French country house on the edge of the Flanders plain. For a young boy from a cold and intellectual English home, the company, the warmth and the wide Flanders skies were like an awakening, and he fell boyishly in love not only with one of his cousins but with the whole place. Yet gradually another picture emerged, for the German Occupation had left its mark and in 1951 memories were still painful and raw. It’s a beautiful, subtle book, now available again as a Plain Foxed Edition.
And finally to this summer’s new Slightly Foxed Edition (see p.13), Toast by Nigel Slater, loved the country over for his companionable and colourfully written cookbooks and his weekly Observer column. It’s subtitled ‘The Story of a Boy’s Hunger’, and in it he describes the ingredients that combined to turn a boy desperate for love into the writer he is today. As Nigel tells it, it’s an emotionally harrowing story but sharply humorous too. His mother died when he was 9 of the asthma that had been triggered by his birth, leaving him guilt-ridden and exposed to the fearful rages of his father and the cold hostility of the woman who became his stepmother, for whom Nigel could feel nothing but scorn. Each short and easily digestible chapter has something edible as its title that takes us instantly back to the remote 1960s world of grilled grapefruit, Arctic Roll and Fray Bentos tinned steak and kidney pies. A real treat and a perfect holiday read.
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