Having taken our young grandson on a trip to the Cabinet War Rooms in Westminster today I am in the mood to re-read something about the Second World War. This book is the obvious choice: a cosy comfortable read I turn to time and again.
Originally written for a column in The Times, then published as a book in October 1939, just after the outbreak of war, these essays reflect the author’s positive enthusiasm for life seen through the eyes of a Chelsea wife and mother determined to ‘keep calm and carry on’ in unsettled times.
I’ve always loved the first essay: Mrs. Miniver Comes Home best: turning the key in the familiar latch, arranging flowers in a vase, settling down to tea and library books in the drawing room.
The clock on the mantelpiece chimed, very softly and precisely, five times. A tug hooted from the river. A sudden breeze brought the sharp tang of a bonfire in at the window.
And Mrs. Miniver, with a little sigh of contentment, rang for tea.
Weekends are spent at Starlings, their house in the country; Mrs. Miniver buys fireworks, goes Christmas shopping and treats herself to a green lizard engagement diary. They queue for gas masks at the Town Hall and life goes on. As indeed it must.
One is what one remembers: no more, no less.
Caroline Miniver comes into her own in four letters written to a friend , published in The Times in the autumn of 1939:
She observes people carrying gas masks with panache. You might think, walking around London, everybody was going off to a picnic with a box of special food.
Another noticeable thing is the way people are taking advantage of the wide sandbag ledges to sit comfortably in the sun and eat their lunch.
She describes the war-time concert at the National Gallery:
Everything she played seemed to have a double loveliness, as though she had managed to distil into it all the beauty of the pictures that were missing from the walls. It was quite unforgettable.
She recalls a quotation from a friend 'when it looked as if we were going to get no plays, films, pictures, music at all'. "We must live on stored beauty like a squirrel on nuts."
Mrs Miniver is an inspiration to us all.
Friday, 27 August 2010
The Beach Hut by Veronica Henry
He passed along the line of huts, head down. Some people were still outside, enjoying the night air, smoking the last cigarette of the day. Others were inside, and he could see their shadowy figures through the glass, eating, drinking wine, reading a novel, playing cards.
Our older daughter and her family have a beach hut on the Essex coast so I couldn’t resist dipping into this book to capture those memories of sandcastles, wind breaks, grandchildren body-boarding in wet-suits, going crabbing, brewing tea in the hut and sitting outside, just like my grandparents did in a sepia photograph taken in the 1930s along the same beach.
The Beach Hut is a compilation of fourteen short stories, some of them skilfully interwoven, about the lives of those spending their summers on the north Devon coast.
Veronica Henry writes: 'It was a writer’s dream watching the dramas unfold behind the weather-beaten walls – the only problem was going to be where to stop…'
At first I found the stories too ‘full-on’: the bored young girl typing for a selfish novelist who seduces her, a married woman embarking on an affair, an alcoholic coming to terms with the past. But I persevered and other stories about a single parent and her handicapped son and a widow scattering her husband’s ashes seemed all the more poignant.
I liked the structure of the book – each story is given the title of the possible name of a hut – but I can’t say ‘I wished I was there’. Apart from Roy and Harry, I didn’t really care enough for any of the other characters to wonder what might happen to them once summer faded.
Our older daughter and her family have a beach hut on the Essex coast so I couldn’t resist dipping into this book to capture those memories of sandcastles, wind breaks, grandchildren body-boarding in wet-suits, going crabbing, brewing tea in the hut and sitting outside, just like my grandparents did in a sepia photograph taken in the 1930s along the same beach.
The Beach Hut is a compilation of fourteen short stories, some of them skilfully interwoven, about the lives of those spending their summers on the north Devon coast.
Veronica Henry writes: 'It was a writer’s dream watching the dramas unfold behind the weather-beaten walls – the only problem was going to be where to stop…'
At first I found the stories too ‘full-on’: the bored young girl typing for a selfish novelist who seduces her, a married woman embarking on an affair, an alcoholic coming to terms with the past. But I persevered and other stories about a single parent and her handicapped son and a widow scattering her husband’s ashes seemed all the more poignant.
I liked the structure of the book – each story is given the title of the possible name of a hut – but I can’t say ‘I wished I was there’. Apart from Roy and Harry, I didn’t really care enough for any of the other characters to wonder what might happen to them once summer faded.
Wednesday, 11 August 2010
September by Rosamunde Pilcher
Just home from my seventh holiday in Scotland and I want to recapture everything I love about the place: long winding roads alongside abandoned lochs, sombre glens, isolated cottages, bracken and Rose Bay Willow Herb, deserted beaches, pewter skies and fly fishing. Country houses with stags’ heads, tartan cushions and log fires, renovated castles, malt whisky and smoked salmon. And so I turn to Scott and Burns or rather, Rosamunde Pilcher’s Wild Mountain Thyme or September to evoke a splash of Tweed perfume once more.
September starts in May, as summer comes at last to Scotland. A September dance is planned in the Highlands as family and friends converge in Scotland. Old relationships are rekindled and the lovely, troubled Pandora returns to her childhood home for the first and last time.
September was passing, and soon the winter gales would begin. She made her way to the foot of the garden, to stand by the gap in the hedge, looking out to the south, over the incomparable view. The glen, the river, the distant hills: sunless today, sombre but beautiful.
September starts in May, as summer comes at last to Scotland. A September dance is planned in the Highlands as family and friends converge in Scotland. Old relationships are rekindled and the lovely, troubled Pandora returns to her childhood home for the first and last time.
September was passing, and soon the winter gales would begin. She made her way to the foot of the garden, to stand by the gap in the hedge, looking out to the south, over the incomparable view. The glen, the river, the distant hills: sunless today, sombre but beautiful.
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