As It Was and World Without End by Helen Thomas

Thirty-seven years ago I wrote a student dissertation on the War Poet, Edward Thomas and these books penned by his widow, not originally written for publication, were obligatory reading. They tell a poignant, heart-rending story of lives caught up in uncertainty and poverty under the shadow of the Great War. It is a world away from the comparative wealth we take for granted in the 21st century: a slow existence punctuated by changing seasons and observing nature in the midst of the daily round.
I particularly love the description of the room in a gamekeeper’s thatched cottage in which the young couple stayed: a small room almost filled by the four-poster… The tiny window was draped with dimity curtains, and the window was kept open by a large dried sunflower head.
Their last night together at the cottage at High Beech before the poet soldier leaves for the Front is made especially poignant by knowing, with hind sight, that he too will be killed in action like so many of his comrades. The snow falls and he writes his final poem Out in the Dark for Helen. Despite all the difficulties they have encountered in their marriage they remain soul mates to the end. Love is enough, much more than the writer’s periods of depression, anxiety about money and being able to provide for his wife and children. Their separation is unbearably sad.
These stories make me count my blessings, slow me down to a more authentic life and make me realise how swiftly time passes. Time spent together, digging the garden or listening to a blackbird singing, must be treasured before it is too late.

The Poet’s Wife by Judith Allnatt

It is 1841. Patty is married to John Clare: peasant poet, genius and madman.

A beautifully written, crafted novel telling the story of Patty Turner, the poet John Clare’s long-suffering wife. Judith Allnatt seamlessly weaves her historical research into a poignant story, so sad it could have been written by Thomas Hardy, as her husband returns to search in vain for his childhood sweetheart, Mary Joyce, to whom he believes he is married.
Clare walks home to Northamptonshire from the asylum at High Beech, Essex where he has been staying for the past four years. The poet’s life is well documented; Patty’s is less known. Judith Allnatt has given this strong, caring woman a compassionate voice, speaking for all those who have lost loved ones debilitated in body, mind and spirit.

The Botticelli Secret by Marina Fiorato

Florence looks like gold and smells like sulphur…

I’m not usually attracted to books this thick (548 pages) let alone anything delving into mysterious Da Vinci type codes. But the subject matter intrigued me: Botticelli’s painting, La Primavera, that hangs in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence. And as I had previously enjoyed Madonna of the Almonds by the same author I added it to my 3 for 2, or rather 6 for 4 basket in Hatchards in Piccadilly, recently and started it a few days later.
I have to say I couldn’t put it down. The Botticelli Secret became the ultimate page-turner as I sped from Renaissance Florence to Pisa, Venice, Genoa and Rome in the company of a beautiful ‘lady of the night’, Luciana Vetra, the model for Flora in the painting, and her unlikely companion, Brother Guido della Torre, a novice at the monastery of Santa Croce.
One day I’m sure this book will make a stunning film and I will race through it again, albeit more slowly. Now I know how the story ends I can spend longer unravelling the code. La Primavera will never seem the same again, thanks to Enrico Guidoni, a professor at Rome University who attempted to crack the ‘code’ of this enigmatic painting, on whose work the novel is based. Did Lorenzo de Medeci really have a plan for unifying Italy through a network of alliances between warring city states? I must confess I was more interested in the unlikely developing relationship between Luciana and Brother Guido!
Food for thought, but this is only one interpretation amongst many others attempting to unravel the mystery of such a beautiful painting. I am content to remain unconvinced and there let it rest. But it was a Good Read!

The Great Lover by Jill Dawson

It is forty years since my boyfriend (now husband) first took me to Grantchester Meadows, two miles along the river from Cambridge. We have been back many times, to walk along the river bank, picnic and take tea in the Orchard tea gardens, relaxing in old-fashioned deckchairs just as Rupert Brooke and his literary friends did before the Great War. The wide Cambridge skyline is unaltered; the river meanders on, green and lush with weeds and all is drenched in birdsong.
My mother passed on a leather-bound volume of Rupert Brooke’s poems, some of which I read to her when she, like Brooke, was dying of septicaemia years ago. I was familiar with his verse from school, even more familiar with sepia photographs of his handsome face but not too fond of his character, as revealed in letters and memoirs. Jill Dawson’s novel reinforces this; he is capricious, confused and complicated in his relationships with friends and lovers. In contrast, Nell Golightly, the fictitious maid with whom Brooke has a liaison, is grounded in hard work and a sense of duty to provide for her family despite her tender years. Although younger and of a lower class she is a much stronger character than Brooke and infinitely more attractive to the reader than his academic, privileged friends.
I love the familiar descriptions of the Old Vicarage and the Orchard at Grantchester: Byron’s Pool and lilac bursting through the poet's bedroom window. Similarly those of Tahiti, where we spent some time last year, abundant with tropical fish and fragrant tiare flowers. Brooke’s mistress, Taatamata, who bore him a daughter, is constant like Nell in her affection for the handsome poet, yet similarly abandoned when he returns to England.
I started this novel on a train to Cambridge yesterday on the way to meet my daughter and continued it on the train home to London. I finished it this afternoon, sitting in the garden; a gentle breeze, to quote Brooke was ‘sobbing’ through the trees. Time stood still as I was transported back to summer days before the Great War, recalled in those sepia photographs of long ago.
‘Was my father a good man?’ the poet’s daughter asks the elderly retired housemaid she contacts by letter years later.
The reader must decide. I would love to say he was but I am unsure. Another reading of the novel will help me make up my mind.

The Rose Grower by Michelle de Kretser

Just back from France and the garden is sprawling with old-fashioned English roses, tumbling into the sunshine: Ophelia, Rosa mundi, Rambling Rector, William Morris, Albertine. I love their scents, soft, pale colours and heavy delicate petals that fall away in my hand… The novel I read on holiday couldn’t have been a better choice.
June brings roses. Roses that show carmine in the bud and open to reveal petals of the palest shell pink. Roses in every shade of white: ivory, cream, parchment, chalk, snow, milk, pearl, bone. Roses with nodding globular flowers, large as teacups.
The Rose Grower contains tales of unrequited love: a young doctor’s love for a self-effacing aristocratic woman; her secret love for a visiting American who has fallen in love with her married sister on recouperating from a ballooning accident.
Set against the background of the French Revolution, the novel follows the lives of those living in rural Gascony, caught up in the Reign of Terror, under which they have no control. Sophie’s passion to create a repeat-flowering crimson rose survives through the turbulent times in which they are living.
The end is inevitable… At eight o’clock the sun in the courtyard is like a blade.
The previous night they chalked a number on her door, so she knew that the footsteps would stop there this morning…
The Rose Grower is a sad, moving story I long to read once more. It is beautifully written and the writer’s descriptions are to be savoured time and again.