The Year in Books: March catch up

As I have not yet decided on April's book yet I thought I would write about March's book (well, books) first, maybe something someone else has written about will inspire me?  My March choice is Nella Last's diaries, published (so far) as Nella Last's War, Nella Last's Peace and Nella Last in the 1950s, which I have been listening to as audio books.  Nella Last was a housewife from Barrow in Furness, married to Will who ran a joinery and shop fitting business, who wrote for Mass Observation from 1939 until a year or two before her death in 1968.  Her diary is the longest and most complete record in Mass Observation at around 12 million words and covers every aspect of her life - her marriage, her sons, Arthur and Cliff, her neighbours, friends, relations, voluntary work, housework, politics, news, her love of the Lakes and many other subjects.

Nella Last

The first volume, dealing with the war, was of great historical interest and provided a clear picture of day to day life in wartime, the hardships, losses, absences and bombs (Barrow suffered as badly in the Blitz as London) but above all the emotional state of ordinary men and women through the war.  Nella's diaries allow us to see behind the positive images of wartime propaganda to the petty arguments between tired, emotionally strained women, the fear that was so pervasive and to the huge efforts people went to in order to persevere and overcome.  In many ways the war was a better time for Nella than the years beforehand, when she had had mental breakdowns in part caused by her husband, who wanted her to be at home alone with him all the time and whose own mental health was none too good.  During the war she had definite reasons for being out of the house and meeting people, volunteering with the Red Cross, the WVS and for the local hospital.  Notable among her war work was running a very successful Red Cross charity shop to raise money to send Red Cross parcels to POWs.  In the post war years she and other women she knew desperately missed these activities and she frequently comments on how she could feel the four walls of her house closing in on her and wonders how she is going to occupy herself.

As I have already mentioned, Nella's husband was not an easy man and she is frank about her marriage, her fears and frustrations.  Neither enjoyed particularly good health, from Nella's descriptions of her physical health I began to suspect that today she would probably have been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, but while Nella's response was to try to keep going and be involved in the world, her husband's was quite the opposite.  This created an enormous tension between them, however, Nella does not indulge in self pity and there is nothing maudlin about the diaries.  She was a woman of a great many interests, quite apart from her writing, and I particularly enjoyed hearing about the dolls and toys she made to sell for charity; her skill at sewing must have been quite something.  The diaries are also punctuated with details of her housekeeping, shopping for food and the meals she was cooking.  Since rationing was in force for much of the period of the diaries published so far Nella writes about the troubles of supply, fairness, quality and the need for ingenuity with meals.

Some of the finest writing comes when she is writing about her trips to the nearby Lake District, where she had grown up on her grandmother's farm.  She writes lyrically of the beauty of the Lakes and of how their peace helped her and her husband.  Throughout Nella's record of her relations, neighbours and friends is a delight; she has an ear for the interesting snippet of conversation.  As I listened I grew genuinely fond of Nella and was very sad when the diaries ended; I am hoping there will be further books published, fingers crossed!

You can see the other books in the Year in Books here.

The Year in Books: September

During the commemorations for the centenary of the First World War last month I decided that I should re-read Vera Brittain's memoir Testament of Youth sooner rather than later.  There was, of course, the usual trepidation one feels when approaching a book one first read as a teenager, but I am happy to say that it has more than held up to my memory of it as a magnificent book.  Vera Brittain left Somerville College, Oxford after one year to serve as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse (or VAD) during the war and the book covers her life from her birth in 1893 until 1925, when she married.  Testament of Youth is particularly valuable in giving an impression of the state of mind of the British in the run up to the war, throwing some light on why it was such a cataclysmic event and so very shattering to those who lived through it.

The first clue to this is given in the preface written by her daughter, the politician Shirley Williams, who writes that one reason we are so haunted by the war is, "the total imbalance between the causes for which the war was fought on both sides, as against the scale of the human sacrifice".  Brittain's account of the parts of the line, in the early part of the war, where neither side could see the point in killing one another and so had a small voluntary truce, shooting into the air and no man's land, is just one illustration of this point.  Why this war in particular has caught our collective imagination and is such an important part of our collective story is a question I have often pondered.  Our collective remembrance of war is still, a century on, so strongly shaped by the First World War, with our Remembrance Day poppies and our misty-eyed reading of Rupert Brooke and "age shall not weary them".

Brittain's book is a true help to understanding this question, by providing a solid pre-war background she is able to show how shattering the war was to her generation.  There seems to have been a deep complacency and belief in progress, running alongside a belief in the spiritual good of war, testing us and even (in a way that would seem shocking to a post-1945 audience) purging the population.  Brittain's account of attending speech day at her brother's public school in July 1914, with its military manoeuvres, shows the incredible militarism of the pre-war public schools, whence came most of the politicians and leaders of Britain.  The Arnoldian* curriculum of Officer Training Corps, sport and extensive study of Classics** lent itself to a romanticised, spiritual view of war; it is after all a small leap from the Pass at Thermoplyae to the poetry of the early part of the war.  However, these ideals failed to live up to the realities of trench warfare where death came at random from a shower of shells and bullets, killing indiscriminately the strong with the weak.

Testament of Youth has more than lived up to my teenage memories, it is an epic read, but not only is it worth reading, it is engrossing, so that you do not realise that you have somehow read a hundred, or two hundred pages.  According to the biography of Brittain at the beginning of Testament of a Generation (a collection of her and Winifred Holtby's journalism) she found the book extremely hard to write, but I am immensely glad she persevered.  I cannot recommend this book enough, do go and read it, it will enrich your understanding of the First World War immeasurably, but you will also spend time in splendid company.

Incidentally, reading Testament of Youth alongside Testament of a Generation has provided an interesting counter-point and each has cast some light on the other.  Aside from the impression that feminism has not advanced that far from the 1920s and that in politics little changes, each book has provided flashes of insight that have illuminated aspects of one another.  I was particularly interested to read an article discussing, in 1929, calls for the abolition of Remembrance Sunday, some apparently feeling that 11 years was quite sufficient to have remembered the war.  Likewise her horror at finding her children's nanny fixing a poppy on baby Shirley's cot for Remembrance Day throws light upon the gulf Brittain felt between her generation and the one that followed it; for her the poppy was a symbol of war and grief, but for her young nanny it was another "flag day" like any other.

You can see the rest of The Year in Books entries here

*Dr Arnold of Rugby School, whose reforms set the pattern for public schools in the 19th century and whose influence is still felt today, cf. Tom Brown's School Days
**Many of the texts studied were decidedly martial in flavour such as Homer, Thucydides and Caesar

Coronation Stitches

Once again I have ventured onto eBay, that dangerous treasure store, and emerged with a copy of the March 1953 edition of Needlework Illustrated, published by Weldon's, an edition intended to help its readers make their Coronation souvenirs.  The front cover is brightly adorned with knitting, embroidery and wonderful little felt toys of a soldier, a sailor and an airman.



The centrefold contains a wonderful double page colour picture of the embroidery transfer of the month (which is still extant with the magazine), with the Coronation coach and horses processing across the bottom. It would still make an attractive embroidered cushion or wall picture, I rather think my embroidery skills would need work first though!



Naturally I was most interested in the knitting patterns; it was one of those, for a man's jumper with a Fair Isle border, which interested me in the first place.  It is the sort of jumper I could imagine my father wearing, though hopefully he would accept it in a colour other than fawn, as I do not relish acres of stocking stitch in fawn!  The accent colours are red, green and blue, rather than the red, white and blue I would have expected.  Elsewhere there are a couple of women's patterns, including the twin set from the cover and a very sweet dress and bonnet set for a toddler.  The yoke of the dress is knitted in the round on a circular needle, which is earlier than I had previously come across their use, certainly in a mainstream British knitting pattern.  However, I did then wonder why the skirt of the dress was knitted flat in pieces.



Other features include table mats, some small items for gifts or bazaars - including a charming kangaroo sewn in felt and a crocheted tea cosy in an "Elizabethan" design.  In addition there is a schools' page with a simple embroidery design and a small piece at the bottom advertising Weldon's historical costumes for pageants, as seen in Weldon's Fancy Dress, price 1 shilling.  As in any old magazine the adverts are fascinating, mostly related to needlework, as you would expect and include holiday guides, knitting machines, children's clothes, fabric remnants, embroidery cloth and threads, knitting wool and a postal dress making course.  The best of the adverts is, of course, on the back cover and is for a series of Coronation Hats in Strutt's Candlewick Cotton. Many of the designs look more to me like something a French Revolutionary would have worn to man a barricade and the thought of them made in the same material as those old Candlewick bedspreads such as my grandmother used to have makes my mind boggle!



Anyhow, there we have it, a small piece of social history.

The Year in Books: June

This month's choice was something of an epic, The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, I listened to all 27 or so hours of it on audio book in May and June.  However, at no point was listening a slog, rather like a long, enjoyable journey; Juliet Stevenson's brilliant reading was a vital part of the experience.  The story concerns Anna, a divorced writer of a best selling novel in her 30s living in London with her daughter and covers a period of time from the 1930s to the 1950s.  In its structure it is far from a "normal" novel though, it moves fluidly through time and through different narrative perspectives and is a master class in plot and potentially unreliable narration.  The facts of who is who, or why or how particular things have happened are not spelt out, instead the reader is left to put the pieces of the jigsaw together.  Although this sounds as though it could be infuriating, I found that it actually meant that I thought a lot about the novel as I went along and tried to fit the pieces together, some you are never openly told but are simply expected to put together.  You are quite simply plunged into Anna's world.

The Golden Notebook is very much a novel of the inner life and is mostly told through a first person narrative, except when Anna is looking at the content of the notebooks into which she has attempted to divide up the various strands of her life.  One of these is a third person account of her time in Africa during the second world war and her experiences involved with the Communist party there, for this section of the book Anna gives herself a new name, Ella and also renames most of the other protagonists of the novel.  Hence Lessing is able to leave you unsure how accurate this account of the past is, as Anna tries to create a distance between herself and her past and to examine it in a new way and try out new scenarios - Ella has a son, whereas Anna has a daughter for example.

Relationships and sex play a large part in the novel, as Anna and her friend Molly seek to find a new way to live as single women, a process which seems to result in a lot of unsatisfactory affairs, generally with married men, who seem to see them as available.  In this respect Doris Lessing gives a very different perspective on the life of the unmarried woman in 1950s London to that of another of my favourite novelists, Barbara Pym, whose women are solidly respectable, generally engaged in unrequited love, the church and lonely meals for one in small flats.  Anna's life seems to demonstrate the beginnings of the women's liberation movement of the 1960s, its foundations, while Barbara Pym documents the last of a fast fading world.  Maternity becomes another key theme as Anna brings up her daughter, a very conventional young girl and Molly struggles with her son and what he should do with his life.  Molly's former husband Richard, who had a brief involvement in Communism, but has now settled down to business, represents conventionality and money and Tommy, their son, seems caught in between their two ways of life.  Furthermore one gets the impression from The Golden Notebook that it is not only the women who are struggling to sort out their relationships but the men too, such as Molly's ex-husband Richard, who moves from his second to third wives as the novel progresses.

Anna and her friends are experimenting in new ways of living, not just in terms of relationships but in everything; the Communist Party, in which many of the characters have been or are involved in, is a part of this search.  In the earlier, African part of the novel, Anna and her friends are frenetically engaged with the Communist Party and taking on some of the racism of the British rule.  While later on the novel illuminated the impact of the USSR upon the wider Communist Party, in particular showing the impact of Stalin's death and the revelations of atrocity that followed it on communists outside Russia; for many it seemed to destroy their faith in communism.  At the same time Anna comes into contact with Americans exiled because of the MacCarthy era in American politics; injustice in its various forms is a great concern of the novel.

Therefore, amid this tumult of ideas and identities, it may come as little surprise that mental health is another important strand of the novel, both for Anna and for those around her.  As I had been thinking a fair amount about identity myself before beginning this novel I did find it fascinating; there were a number of those moments of recognition when a novel describes a thought, a feeling, a sensation and you realise that you are not alone in what you feel.  Doris Lessing's descriptions of Anna's sessions with her therapist and of her time of disintegration, are vivid and the latter time becomes immersive, drawing you into Anna's world, it is powerful writing.  While Anna's notebooks, culminating in the final golden notebook of the title, are her way of working out her own identity and what she should do next, having published this successful novel and had a long, ultimately unsuccessful affair.

I have written all this and yet hardly touched on the themes, ideas and people of this novel, nor done the novel remote justice.  The Golden Notebook has to be one of the most thought provoking, absorbing books I have read in years and although its length may seem daunting at first I would recommend making the effort.  As time went on I found that I could lose hours to the book and that I became deeply engaged with what happened to Anna and loved the "Londonness" of the book - certain writers capture London so well.  While doing a little research to write this I have found The Golden Notebook Project, a website containing the novel and the debate a number of female writers are carrying on in the margins, with space for further debate in a forum, which might be an interesting way of reading it.  Lessing's own preface is on there too, although I am glad that I had not read it before I tackled the book, I prefer to make my own impressions, then read the introduction or preface to novels.  The audio book I listened to is available for download here - it is very much cheaper if you join Audible and buy some credits - and I very much recommend the reading, an excellent option for knitters or other crafters.

Perhaps this coming month I will read something that does not concern feminism?

All the other posts from A Year in Books can be viewed here

The Year in Books: May

Yet again I have left it until the very end of the month to write this, procrastinating and not getting around to things as usual.  Anyhow, here goes: this month's book is The New Woman: An Anthology of Writing by Women, 1880-1918, edited by Juliet Gardiner.  The anthology begins by defining how, “the 'New Woman'... with her demands for education, economic independence and sexual equality – and soon for the vote – offered a challenge and a threat to the established order” and outlining the debate surrounding the term.

Next the anthology turns to a discussion of education, which was (and is) a vital building block of progress for women and what the purpose of women's education should be: would it make her discontented with a married life of domesticity? This question of education also impinged on marriage and the expectations brought to marriage.  As Sarah Grand wrote in her 1888 novel Ideala:

“The girl has been taught to expect to find a guide, philosopher and friend in her husband. He is to be head of the house and lord of her life and liberty, sole arbiter on all occasions.”

But many women found that this was not so, how could it be? The same piece goes on to discuss the need for an equality in marriage and makes the wonderful comment that once women have secured higher education for themselves they should work to secure it for men! Many of the writers condemn the economic dependence in which marriage placed women and the problems faced by those who did not or could not marry. In order to pay men a “family wage”, women's wages were generally half that of men's wages, meaning that “the wages paid to women were barely sufficient to sustain independent life”.  The Women's Dreadnought records in October 1924 that qualified women typists and bookkeepers could be expected to work for as little as 4 shillings a week, meanwhile other women engaged in war work could earn as little 6 shillings a week working ten hours a day, six days a week plus overtime.

Students in a lecture at the Royal Free Hospital in London

Naturally there is a long section on the fight for the vote, but what this book illuminated for me was that what the women of this period were fighting for was much more than just the vote. I studied women's rights in history lessons at school but the late Victorian and Edwardian period was viewed solely in terms of “Votes for Women”. This book demonstrates that these women were fighting for rights in every field of life, true the vote was crucial, so that women could no longer be “safely neglected” by the male Parliament and have a say in the laws being passed, but the suffrage movement was part of a wider movement to bring women education, equality, respect and freedom. This anthology does what any good anthology does, introducing the reader to a wide range of voices, some familiar, some new, around a subject, providing insights and debate; I most highly recommend it.  It is not all serious, there are some moments of levity, such as Ethel Smyth's account of learning to bicycle on the gravel sweep outside Lambeth Palace and teaching the Dean of Windsor how to ride.  I exhort the publishers to re-issue this book, because it is an excellent read and because the issues discussed within it are sadly still relevant, as is shown by websites such as Everyday Sexism.  It is still available second hand mercifully, I came across it in our local library, the place I have discovered so many of my favourite authors.

I leave you with this forceful argument about the very nature of woman and an interesting counterpoint to Rudyard Kipling's famous poem.

If, after four or five generations of freer choice and wider life, woman still persists in confining her steps to the narrow grooves where they have hitherto been compelled to walk; if she claims no life of her own, if she has no interests outside her home, if love, marriage and maternity is still her all in all; if she is still in spite of equal education, of emulation and respect, the inferior of man in brain capacity and mental independence; if she still evinces a marked preference for disagreeable and monotonous forms of labour, for which she is paid at the lowest possible rate; if she still attaches higher value to the lifting of a top hat than to the liberty to direct her own life; if she is still untouched by public spirit, still unable to produce an art and a literature that is individual and sincere; if she is still servile, imitative, pliant – then, when those four or five generations have passed, the male half of humanity will have a perfect right to declare that woman is what he has always believed and desired her to be, that she is the chattel, the domestic animal, the matron or the mistress, that her subjection is a subjection enjoined by natural law, that her inferiority to himself is an ordained and inevitable inferiority. Then he will have that right, but not till then.

From Marriage as a Trade (1909) by Cicely Hamilton

As an after note, knitters may find the following poem interesting, although I do not entirely agree with the sentiment, it reminded me of Kate Davies' posts about images of knitting.

Oh it's you that have the luck, out there in blood and muck:
    You were born beneath a kindly star;
All we dreamt, I and you, you can really go and do,
    And I can't, the way things are.
In a trench you are sitting, while I am knitting
    A hopeless sock that never gets done.
Well, here's luck, my dear – and you've got it, no fear;
    But for me... a war is poor fun.

Rose Macaulay, 1915

The year in books: March

Yet again I have let the month almost slip through my fingers and get away without me having written about this month's book, or rather books, as this month's book is truly a trilogy, although made up of comparatively short books.  Ursula Holden's The Tin Toys trilogy, consisting of The Tin Toys, Unicorn Sisters and A Bubble Garden.  Like Penelope Fitzgerald, Ursula Holden began writing comparatively late in life, after attending a creative writing class in her late forties.  The novels are about three sisters growing up in England and Ireland around the time of the second world war.  Each novel is narrated from the perspective of a different sister, providing fresh insights and perspectives on the girls' joint past and uncovers what each knows about the others.

I bought this on a whim, as I had a dentist's appointment coming up and our dentist always runs late, making a good book a must for the waiting room, and I must admit I had vaguely expected something a little cosier.  Whereas these books are far from cosy, they make up a tale of neglect, of children pushed from pillar to post and considered an inconvenience by their mother who would rather follow her own path.  I get the impression that the children's mother feels that as her husband has died and thereby deserted the family, she is entitled to go too.  So the children move from one unsuitable place to another and endeavour to bring themselves up, searching for love and trying to make a home wherever they end up.  Holden evokes places as they seem to a child well, making her places atmospheric and her people real, with all their flaws. In many ways the adults around these sisters are every bit as lost, damaged and vulnerable as the children and just as unable to find their way through a changing world.  For a key theme of the novels is that of class and the impact the second world war had on the lifestyle of the upper classes.  In this new world it is the lower classes who thrive, while the upper classes struggle to adapt and are without suitable resources.

Ursula Holden photographed by Fay Godwin in the 1970s

In many ways I was reminded of Noel Streatfeild's wartime novel for adults Saplings, which deals with similar themes of neglect and the way children could be pushed from pillar to post during wartime.  Both novels do much to dispel the sometimes cosy image we get of the second world war; there is no cheery Blitz spirit to be found.  Other novels exploring similar themes include Streatfeild's first novel The Whicharts (later re-written as Ballet Shoes) and Eleanor Graham's The Children Who Lived in a Barn.  While Marghanita Laski's novel The Village explores similar themes of the war's impact on society.

In summary I would recommend The Tin Toys Trilogy most heartily; I read it in great gulps, riveted and wholly inhabiting their world and will have to go back and re-read it, hopefully more slowly.  Although I am currently attempting that with Rebecca West's magical novel The Fountain Overflows and for all my good intentions I get too drawn in to go slowly and instead read it in great deep draughts.  Do you find you have the same problem with some novels?

Virago have republished The Tin Toys as a Modern Classic and I sincerely hope that they republish more of her books soon.  Here you can hear a short interview  with Ursula Holden, who is in her nineties and living in a convent nursing home in West London.

Remembrance

Today is Remembrance Sunday, a day I approach with mixed feelings, as I had more ancestors in the German and Austrian armies than the British in the first world war, my maternal grandparents being of German, Austrian and Czech extraction.  My paternal grandfather's brother fought in and survived the first war and his sisters nursed, but it is still a day that makes me feel my mixed heritage more keenly than normal.  Although it is a day to remember the dead of all nations and of all wars, the first and second world wars do tend to dominate in this country, partly, the cynical historian in me thinks, because we won both wars, but also because Remembrance Sunday was founded in response to the widespread grief following the first war.

However, my ambivalent feelings are increased because Remembrance Sunday seems to be focussed on the soldiers who fell in the wars and of course should be remembered and mourned. But meanwhile the civilians, who also died in great numbers, seem forgotten.  I feel this personally as somewhere in the region of three-quarters of my paternal grandfather's family died or disappeared as civilians, whole families vanishing in their entirety, in the Holocaust during the second world war.


From a synagogue destroyed in Berlin on Kristallnacht Flickr Commons

This year Remembrance Day falls on the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht when the Nazis attacked Jewish people, homes, businesses and synagogues in Germany and Austria in reprisal for the killing of a German diplomat in Paris by a Jewish youth.  Ninety one people died and 30,000 were sent to concentration camps, but it marked the beginning of the Nazi "final solution".  My grandfather and his mother were lucky, they got out, my grandfather on the last train he could legally have got; his father and most of the rest of his family were less lucky.


My grandfather in his 1935 Czech passport

These events and the sense of loss they created have cast a long shadow across my family.  We need to remember all who have died or suffered loss on all sides, and never to allow remembrance to become glorification of war.  Although on the last point I think this ex-serviceman, writing in the Guardian puts things better than I can.  When I hear the jingoistic writing from the beginning of the first war repeated again and again by politicians, the media, social media, as part of remembrance day I shudder inwardly.  One might as well repeat the last line of Wilfred Owen's Dulce et decorum est and omit the all important context, of "the old lie".

And for the future?  We need to keep talking, keep telling the stories, try to stop ourselves repeating the same mistakes again and again.  We need to make sure our remembrance does not become justification for current or future war and work and pray for peace and reconciliation and healing.

Father forgive us our follies, grant us peace, comfort those who mourn, help us to love mercy and seek justice and walk humbly before you.

I leave you with Michael Tippett's Oratorio A Child of Our Time, which was written in 1939 in response to Kristallnacht.