Henrietta’s War

I was starting to feel a bit self-conscious about my reading matter – too much war before breakfast and all that – but it seems I am not alone in my interest. Thanks to all of you who commented or emailed with recommendations for more titles. I’ll keep searching for the novel written about/from the working woman’s perspective of the war, but in the meantime, it’s good to know I have so many well-loved books still to discover.

And Henrietta’s War should definitely be on that list. It seems odd somehow to describe a book about the war as ‘charming’, but that’s exactly what it is. The book unfolds as a series of letters written from Henrietta to her childhood friend, Robert, to cheer him up while he’s serving in France. The letters are quietly funny observations about how the war has changed her small community and the newcomers who have settled there to wait it out. There are, inevitably, tensions between the Londoners who have recently moved there, the evacuees, and the villagers, but the humor is always gentle and never unkind. Even the characters who are stereotypes – the blustering Colonel, the London vegetarian with her progressive ideas and string of beads, the vague Lady of the village -are sympathetically drawn.

It’s been said that Jan Struther’s Mrs. Miniver (the film rather than the book) was instrumental in drawing the Americans into the war, because it showed a family they could relate to and want to help by sending their own sons into battle. I’m not sure how true that is, but I can only imagine that Henrietta’s War would have had much the same impact, because it’s impossible not to root for characters like this:

“I was thinking to-day,” said Lady B dreamily, “that if all we useless old women lined up on the beach, each of us with a large stone in her hand, we might do a lot of damage.”

“The only time I saw you try to throw a stone, Julia, it went over your shoulder behind you,” said Mrs. Savernack.

“Then I would have to stand with my back towards the Germans,” said Lady B comfortably.

Mrs. Savernack got up. “Well, I must go,” she said with a sigh. “I’m due at the Bee. But it’s dull work just turning the handle of a sewing-machine when you’d like to be at a machine-gun.”

“What about that drink, Henrietta?” said Lady B kindly; but I shook my head.

“You’re too thin,” said Mrs. Savernack, not for the first time. “If you had some padding, your nerves would be better.”

I watched them walk away and reflected that Charles was probably right when he said that it was the old women of Britain who will break Hitler’s heart in the end.

I’ve read a few reviews of this book that criticized it for being too light, but I disagree. Life did go on, and people had flirtations, worried about their pets, did war-work that, in any other time, would seem quite odd, and continued to glory in their gardens, worry about their children, and occasionally, covet their neighbor’s rifle so they could pick off invading Germans. And more than that, they discovered a legion of women who kept the whole country going during the course of the war. There’s nothing light about that.

My one quibble with the book was that it was far, far too short. I went off googling for more Henrietta, and was absolutely delighted to find out that the good people of the Bloomsbury Group will be publishing Henrietta Sees it Through: More News from the Home Front 1942-45. Only 6 months until we know how they take the news of more rationing. Odds are Mrs. Savernack finds herself a gun.

Coming Home

I’ve had a friend visiting from the UK for a week, so between the Christmas rush and running around Dallas doing touristy things, the holidays were more than usually joyful and crowded.

My friend loves reading as much as I do, and she took the opportunity to take a break from studying ponderous books for her dissertation and exploit the exchange rate. I drove her to Barnes & Noble, to Borders, to my favorite independent bookstore, to the small used bookstore I frequent often, and the absolutely enormous warehouse-sized used bookstore I avoid on pain of bankruptcy. She went a bit mad, and I went quite a bit mad, and we both ended up with some very lovely books. And when we finally collapsed back at my place, I had to give her a bag so she could check them on the flight. (It was the least I could do since I was sending her home with stacks of books and yarn and presents for other friends…in short, turning her into an international book mule) Truly, a worthy book shopping companion.

So, after I very reluctantly took her to the airport to catch her flight, I immediately went back home to collapse on the sofa.  And I’ve been welcoming in the new year very, veeeeery slowly ever since. I chose the fattest book in my new stack and curled up with a cup of tea, a blanket, cats, and some of the Christmas pudding she smuggled on the plane for me. (Yum)

I should probably preface this review with the admission that I was always going to like Rosamunde Pilcher’s Coming Home. Scanning the back blurb pushed all my bookish buttons: “an elegant Cornwall mansion during WWII…” “young woman’s coming of age…” “British boarding school…” “privileged, madcap world of the British aristocracy….” Quite honestly, the bits about WWII and British boarding school alone would have convinced me to give it a go, but 977 pages, I’m glad it also happened to be good.

And it is absorbingly good. It follows the story of Judith Dunbar, who is an ordinary schoolgirl living with her mother and little sister in a small house in Portkerris when the novel begins. But her mother and sister, Jess, leave for Ceylon and then Singapore to join her father, and Judith begins boarding school and spends rather dull holidays with her Aunt Louise, a hearty golf fanatic. Eventually, she makes friends with Loveday Carey-Lewis, the irresponsible youngest daughter of a wealthy and glamorous family, and over time, Judith becomes absorbed into their world. She slowly blossoms as she finds a surrogate family, connects with her headmistress and plans to try for Oxford, fends off an old letch, inherits a great deal of money, and falls in love with Loveday’s older brother, Edward. And all that happens before war is declared. The second half of the novel expands out in all kinds of directions, following Judith but also observing what war does even to the most privileged and secure of families. Characters scatter, joining the forces, ending up in prison camps, taking on new responsibilities, and trying to create some kind of life and happiness in the midst of the war. Judith gets work in London as a Wren, and then later ends up in Ceylon, and finally come homes home, to Cornwall, to her own house, and to a family of her own making.

Like Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet quartet, Coming Home also touches on the changing position of women and girls during the war. This is, despite the fathers and lovers, a book about women and the communities they created, first to absorb the homeless Judith and then to support each other during the war. If I had my way, there would have been more of the wonderful Miss Catto (in the same way that there was never enough Miss Millament in the Cazalet books); or a different perspective on the war from Biddy, keeping house and waiting for Bob; from Heather, who goes from being the grocer’s daughter to her mysterious war work; or even from Phyllis or Mrs. Nettle, whose domestic work is made both easier and more difficult because of the war.

It’s interesting in that all of this, even Judith’s concern and care of her former housekeeper, works only because they are all so fabulously wealthy, a fact none of them seem remotely aware of. Which rather begs the question, where is the novel about working class women during the war? All I can think of is wealthy or comfortably middle-class women. If you know of any, please chime in.

Happy Holidays!

Best wishes for a happy, peaceful, book-filled holiday to all of you!

Grey, but not gloomy

I spent most of today at the Veterans Hospital with my mother, who was there to meet with her doctor and get set-up for an MRI. I generally have a book in my handbag at all times, but this morning I realized we would both need something cheerful, so I tucked away Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day for her and Miss Buncle’s Book for me. As soon as I pulled them from my bag, a cozy looking woman leaned over to say how much she’d loved the film of Miss Pettigrew. She’d never heard of Persephone Books before, so I went on obsessively we chatted a bit and I gave her the bookmark from my novel so she could look them up online. And, when I opened my bag to take notes during the appointment, my mother’s nurse practitioner spotted the dove grey and squeaked, “Persephone?” They’re still rare here, but I think they’re making an impact. I rather suspect the Misses Pettigrew and Buncle would sell very well in the hospital BX.

Art of the needle

About a week ago, Rachel over at Book Snob posted about patchwork quilting and the needlework skills that were handed down through generations of women, skills that not only kept their families warm but also showcased the artistry of women who may have had no other creative outlet. I’ve only recently dipped my toe into quilting, a craft form I’d always been interested in but had never really explored, and I’m enjoying the process and the geometric beauty of the patterns. But what has really moved me has been the discovery of how women have used their quilting to make a statement, to create a visual text that was both personal and useful.

And that process is an ongoing one today. The artist Jen Bervin has taken the form one step further to not just create a work of art, but to recreate a text. Using the facsimile edition of Emily Dickinson’s handwritten manuscripts published by Harvard University Press, she has attempted to literally piece together and reinstate Emily Dickinson’s own editorial system in the classification of her poems.

Emily Dickinson had begun to order her poems before she died, but editors have largely ignored her groupings, chopping up some poems and taking alternate lines from earlier versions to create the meaning that they thought she wanted/they wanted. As Bevin states:

Dickinson’s editorial legacy is complicated at best; her fascicles and fragments were dismembered, regrouped, scissored, and marked by her various editors as they changed hands and often her poems have been restructured and changed considerably for print. Even the editors of the current variorum edition of Dickinson’s work persist in defying her line breaks and remove or replace her crosses with other marks (brackets and numbers to “clarify”, i.e. change, the system that Dickinson authored). By imposing conventional views of literary authorship (as expressed by book publication) and divorcing her poems from their formal integrity and its intended specificity, the implications of an unusual, complex, pervasive system are little understood.

Using a projector, she painstakingly traced each tiny mark of the manuscripts and then embroidered them on a plain background. She quilted the background to replicate the lines of the paper Dickinson had used. And she did what so many academics had not: she looked at the patterns that emerged from the markings and tried to understand them within the context of the author’s system of organization.

I have never doubted Dickinson’s profound precision, however private, nor that the energetic relation of these marks and variants is anything but integral to her poetics. I have come to feel that specificity of the + and – marks in relation to Dickinson’s work are aligned with a larger gesture that her poems make as they exit and exceed the known world. They go vast with her poems. They risk, double, displace, fragment, unfix, and gesture to the furthest beyond—to loss, to the infinite, to “exstasy,” to extremity.

Bervin has not just honored Dickinson’s original meaning, she’s blown it up, magnified what had been overlooked so that other people can see the placement of marks and identifiers. And she’s done it through quilting, giving voice to an author who also explored the beautiful in the domestic. While there’s little chance she could ever have known what would happen to her work, or that it would even be published after her death, Dickinson understood both the personal and transformative power of creating something of her own, and the dangers of letting other people pick up her thread and needle after she was gone.

Winter rewards

I woke up to snow falling over Dallas today, a gentle steady snow that continued for about two hours. It didn’t stick, but it was lovely while it lasted. It also set the tone for the rest of the day. After some time spent on job searching, I settled in with my laptop, a quilt, a cup of tea, more holiday knitting, and a stack of Christmas cards to write.

I am rushing through my current knitting project, a set of fair isle gloves for my mother, because when I am done with one, I am finally allowed to read one of these!

These were in my mailbox, a gift from my book-twin, Bex. She lives in London, so we don’t get to see each other to talk about books as often as I’d like, but for the past two years we’ve been sending each other books we discover. When I fall in love with a book, she’s the first person I want to talk it over with. I introduced her to Diary of a Provincial Lady, and in return, she sent me the truly wonderful Greenery Street. It’s been a cross-country exchange ever since, and since Bex has flawless taste in books, I know I will love these. Must knit faster so I can get to them…!

31 days of reading

I have a newfound appreciation for book bloggers. It’s easy to read a book, but to keep up a blog discussing books in an interesting and informative way…that takes some mad skills!

I’ve been poked by a friend for neglecting this one, so I shall try harder. She’s challenged me to try to post here (and to my knitting blog) every day for the month of December. I’m going to give it a shot, but blame her if I have to resort to cute photos of my cats on books.

So, since December is the month of over-eating and indulging, I’m going to start off with Nigel Slater. He is officially my new imaginary boyfriend, and I’ve already put a copy of his Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger on hold at the library. There are quite a few people ahead of me in the queue, so I suspect Nigel to be the imaginary boyfriend of quite a few of my neighbors.

I started with Eating for England, because I wanted to take my time and go slowly through The Kitchen Diaries (that didn’t work, but more about that later…).  It was instant affinity, and despite not being British or familiar with a few of the foods mentioned, I found myself nodding in agreement with a great deal of what he said. The British DO make the best toast. I’m not quite sure how, but they do. I could happily eat toast and porridge for every meal when I visit. And, even though I grew up with cookies rather than digestives, I recognize the absolute truth behind his love letter to the nostalgia of biscuits:

It is funny how, whether you had them in your kitchen or not, the digestive always manages to taste of ‘home’. It has a unique ability to take you to a safe place, to somewhere you think you remember fondly, even though you may never have even been there. The smell alone, wheaty and sweet with a hint of the hamster’s cage about it, is instantly recognizable as a good place to be.

The book is wonderful, full of affection towards old favorites, pointed and spot-on descriptions of different types of cooks (there’s a kitchen fusspot in every family), and a real appreciation for what really fills a pantry shelf. It’s no coincidence that I wandered out to the kitchen, book in hand, to see what I could find. Last year at this time I was in London and Scotland, visiting friends and having my first Christmas pudding and mince pies. I’m looking forward to my next trip to the UK, to trying Jaffa Cakes and Custard Creams, Branston Pickle and crumpets. But nothing, and I mean nothing, not even the charming Nigel Slater, will convince me that Marmite is anything but evil-in-a-pot!

A feast of riches

I suspect the discovery that Amazon Marketplace takes giftcards is going to be very bad for those good intentions of mine.

The bottom three books were actually found at The Bookworm Bash, an annual booksale to raise money for seniors where all cloth editions are $1 and paperbacks 50 cents. I found Love From Nancy: The Letters of Nancy Mitford. I’m still working my way through The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters, and although I find the Mitfords more palatable in small doses, I’m quite pleased to have found it. I also found Elizabeth Taylor’s In a Summer Season. I spotted that distinctive Virago green and snagged it before even reading the back blurb. But the real find was Robert Benchley’s My Ten Years in a Quandry, and How They Grew. Benchley was a humorist with The New Yorker and Vanity Fair during the heyday of the Algonquin Round Table. The humor is a bit dated, but it still makes me laugh.

Amazon Marketplace turned up trumps with Noel Streatfeild’s The Painted Garden (for 1 cent!); Joan Wyndham’s Love Lessons, which a friend recommended when I was looking for books that covered the British war experience from the perspective of a child or teenager; True North, by Jill Ker Conway, which I’ve been itching to buy since rereading The Road From Coorain; and Nigel Slater’s Eating for England and The Kitchen Diaries. Nigel Slater is a recent discovery for me and, after taking him to bed with me for the past two nights, I feel this may be true love.

The World of Deep Valley

When I was young, we moved around quite a bit because of my mother’s job. This meant starting at a new school (or, as in the 4th grade, three new schools in one year) fairly frequently. I learned three valuable lessons from this experience: (1) Don’t get too cocky, because she who knows long division will be she who has to teach herself cursive from an old McGuffey’s reader; (2) winning at Red Rover is the surest way to make playground connections; and (3) make friends with the school librarian. My handwriting still looks like a drunken ice-skater doing loops, and Red Rover appears to have been banned in schools for being too violent roughly the same time they made it legal for a 5 year old to get a gun permit, but the librarian rule has never let me down. As a result, I was introduced to some of the most extraordinary and life-changing books I’ve ever read, by some of the most extraordinary and life-changing women I’ve ever met.

It was the introduction to the town of Deep Valley, and to the family of Betsy Ray, that I am the most grateful for. Bless my 3rd grade librarian! Whatever school I ended up at, I would immediately head to the library to search for old friends, starting with the Betsy-Tacy books. There was something deeply comforting about falling into the familiar world of Deep Valley, of Betsy’s Crowd, of Sunday lunch and princess dresses, of onion sandwiches and singing around the piano. The books were out of print the whole time I was growing up, but those library copies were my lifeline. I eventually discovered there were more people like me, girls who had loved the books, tried to copy Betsy’s pompadour, researched the sheet music Julia sang around the piano, and in the case of one college friend, had once borrowed a library copy and paid the lost fee rather than returning it. When Harper Collins republished them, I immediately went out and bought a copy of every book. I made the mistake of loaning one of them to a friend, and she left it on a bus! Naturally, they were out of print again by then and I could not replace it. Since that time, I have hovered suspiciously anytime I saw a friend or family member heading towards that shelf of treasures.

But I can finally stop patrolling my bookshelves, because Harper Collins has rereleased them in their Perennial Modern Classics editions. And I’ve spent the past week curled up on the sofa rereading them, revelling in Essay Contests and dances, muffins for the first day of school and train trips on velvet seats. This is the happiest kind of escapist reading, and it’s been hard to drag myself away long enough to do practical things. They haven’t republished the first few books (Betsy-Tacy, Betsy-Tacy and Tib, Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill, or Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown), which admittedly are for young children, but are also wonderful in their own right. They also haven’t republished the two “fringe” books – Carney’s House Party and Emily of Deep Valley, which are both brilliant and this is a mad oversight! They’ve gone straight into the high school years and beyond, and have published two books together in one, so there are only 3 rather than 6 to buy. They’ve kept the original and truly wonderful Vera Neville illustrations, and have added photos at the end of Maud Hart Lovelace and her crowd so we can see what they really looked like. And, what makes me even happier, each book has a foreword by authors who are also clearly fervent admirers of the books. Heaven to Betsy and Betsy in Spite of Herself is introduced by Laura Lippman, Betsy Was a Junior and Betsy and Joe by Meg Cabot, and Betsy and the Great World and Betsy’s Wedding by Anna Quindlen.

Much as I love children’s literature, there are very few books that I can read as an adult with the same degree of passionate attachment that I had as a child. The Betsy-Tacy books are, like Little Women, The Secret Garden, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, even better when read with an adult sensibility (yet another reason I’m grateful these have been republished under the Perennial Modern Classics imprint – it’s about time they get the recognition they deserve for being classics for all ages).  I appreciate even more the way Betsy’s family implicity believed she would grow up to be a writer, the way they help her when she gets bogged down in being fascinating and popular (making the house reek of Jockey Club perfume in the meantime), and the way they all care for each other. It’s a story about families, about best friends and boyfriends, about growing up and making mistakes, and about finding yourself. It is, in short, one of the best series I’ve ever read. And if that doesn’t convince you, maybe this selection from Anna Quindlen’s foreword will:

When I was first asked to speak about Maud Hart Lovelace I had to reread all ten of my Betsy-Tacy books. I would like to make this sound like a hardship, but most of you know better. There are three authors whose body of work I have reread more than once over my adult life: Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and Maud Hart Lovelace. It was, as always, a pleasure and delight.

Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. They really are that good.

bookmarked for now

I’m sorry for the radio silence – I didn’t mean to disappear for that long. It was one of those weeks where everything suddenly goes pear shaped all at the same time. I wasn’t able to read at all, either books or blogs, but I’m hoping things will be calmer this week and I can settle in and catch-up.

I’m taking it as a good sign of reading to come that, when I finally got around to checking my mail today, I had a book from Alibris, two kids books from a friend in London, and the new Persephone catalog and biannual magazine to relax with. And if all that wasn’t lovely enough,  I also had the happy surprise of finding baby apple trees pushing into the world.