It’s the podcast where my twin brother and I talk about nothing very important! In episode eleven, it’s sinking a boat, underground wizard golf, and libellous accusations against Hugh Grant. Subscribe via your podcast app of choice, what’s the worst that could happen!
The official author of my quarantine has been Beverley Nichols. Some have been great and others not-so-great – and then there’s Down the Kitchen Sink (1974), which combines high highs and – well, no lows, but definitely things I had less interest in. Its title is an homage to his famous book Down the Garden Path – and it is subtitled ‘a memoir’, but it is really only half that.
The opening is a typically Beverley concoction of nostalgia, dry wit, and whimsy:
It was an evening in early spring and underneath the Eros statue the steps were piled high with the gold of primroses and the purple of violets, which the flower-girls were selling at tuppence a bunch. In and out of the traffic, like figures in a ballet, darted the newspaper boys. selling sheets which have long since fluttered into oblivion – the Westminster Gazette, which printed on green paper and The Globe which was printed on pink; and The Star, whose pages needed no colour, for they sparkled and crackled with the brilliance of its prose. All at a penny a piece.
[…]
I strolled thoughtfully across Piccadilly Circus – (in those days, the early twenties, one could still wander about London like a gentleman, without courting the risk of instant death) – counting my blessings. They were many. I was twenty-five, and almost aggressively healthy. I was wearing a new suit in the latest fashion, with very wide trousers, which were flatteringly reflected in the plate glass windows. I was glowing with the fires of the latest thing in cocktails – the ‘Sidecar’. I had consumed it in the long bar of the Trocadero – an enchanting grotto of delight, all gold mosaics and nouveau art, which should have been painted by Sickert, but never was. And only that morning I had corrected the proofs of my first entry in Who’s Who. Not a very long entry, merely a couple of lines. But something inside me, probably the ‘Sidecar’, which was made of equal quantities of brandy, Cointreau and lemon juice, persuaded me that as the year went by, it would grow considerably longer. Which it did.
Yes, I should have been very happy, but I was not. For at home somebody was waiting for me whom I dreaded to meet.
The person whom Nichols was waiting to meet was Gaskin – the man-servant that Nichols had just installed into his small house in a backstreet of central London, which he almost convinces us was not a sign of affluence at the time. Gaskin was only a few years younger than Nichols, and recently removed from his upbringing in Norfolk to this situation. But he is entirely at ease, in a way that Nichols is not – or professes not to be, at several decades’ distance. Gaskin seems to know what is expected in the master/servant relationship, and gives subtle approval when Nichols gets it right (and censure when he gets it wrong). He is preparing the first meal – having rejected the fish at Fortnum and Mason, he has found a good fish shop down the road. The proprietor came from Norfolk. Nichols quickly learns that, wherever they go, Gaskin will find a network of people who are from Norfolk, and trusts them.
This first half of the book was lovely. Nichols talks about the wonderful meals that Gaskin has produced at different times, and writes about them with a dizzying rapture. I enjoy that when it was about paradise-like desserts, say, but there was rather too much about meat and fish for this vegetarian to enjoy reading it. No, what makes the first half of Down the Kitchen Sink so wonderful is the portrait of Gaskin. As Nichols and Gaskin spent several decades together, their relationship was one of the most long-lasting in Nichols’ life. Gaskin emerges from these pages as a wonder in the kitchen, but also a delightful mixture of competence and wonder. The way in which he inveigles a kitten into the house filled my heart with joy.
The portrait ends, alas, with Gaskin’s death. And the pages where Beverley Nichols describes discovering that Gaskin has long hidden his alcoholism are beautifully, thoughtfully written. It’s wonderfully done, and I have seldom been as moved by the testament to a friendship – which was never an equal friendship but, in Nichols’ eyes at least, no less to be treasured for that.
The second half of Down the Kitchen Sink is less enjoyable, for me. It purports to be Nichols learning to cook for himself – and I thought it might be the sort of funny, self-deprecating narrative that Nichols is so good at. There are moments of that, and understandably, because Nichols is shockingly ignorant about everything in the kitchen. But before long it becomes more of a collection of recipes. Perhaps that is what Nichols had been commissioned to do, and he twisted it away from that commission into something more enjoyable. But by the final sections, it’s just him describing recipes – with a little context, but not much more.
If I wanted to recreate any of these dishes, then it would perhaps be a delight – but the 1970s are not renowned for their culinary excellence in the UK, and Beverley Nichols doesn’t seem to have opted for vegetarian dishes for very long. I wanted humour or poignancy, not instruction.
So, very much a book of two halves. And I shan’t re-read the second half. But I feel like I may well go back to that funny, touching delight of a first half.
Dorothy Canfield [Fisher], Patrick Dennis, sea, and mountains – episode 84!
In the first half of this episode, we talk about novels set in the mountains vs those set by the sea. The classic dichotomy. In the second half, we compare two very different novels about relatives – Her Son’s Wife by Dorothy Canfield, also known as Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis.
Do get in touch at teaorbooks[@]gmail.com if you’d like to suggest a topic or a question for the middle section – and rate/review us if you can! Find us at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whichever podcast app you use – and you can support the podcast, and get little bonus eps, at Patreon.
The books and authors we talk about in this episode:
The Vanishing Celebrities by Adrian Alington
Dorothy L Sayers
Agatha Christie
Beverley Nichols
Inferno by Catherine Cho
What Have I Done by Laura Dockrill
The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel
Harry Potter series by JK Rowling
Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Heidi by Joanna Spyri
The Fortnight in September by R.C. Sherriff
Mutiny on the Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne du Maurier
The Shell Seekers by Rosamunde Pilcher
Coming Home by Rosamunde Pilcher
Famous Five by Enid Blyton
Jane Austen
Beside the Sea by Veronique Olmi
Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
In the Mountains by Elizabeth von Arnim
The Egg and I by Betty Macdonald
Katherine Mansfield
Idaho by Emily Ruskovich
Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver
39 Steps by John Buchan
Proud Citadel by Dorothy Evelyn Smith
O, The Brave Music by Dorothy Evelyn Smith
Illyrian Spring by Ann Bridge
The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim
In the Springtime of the Year by Susan Hill
Spring by Ali Smith
A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr
A Day in Summer by J.L. Carr
The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield
Stoner by John Williams
Travels With My Aunt by Graham Greene
Abbie by Dane Chanos
Fresh From the Country by Miss Read
A Thatched Cottage by Beverley Nichols
I joined my village book club at exactly the wrong time. I did make it for their annual meal (which was a slightly odd way to meet those I’d not previously met) but the next meeting came after the pandemic hit and we decided not to go ahead. A few days later, we were in lockdown. I still haven’t written about The Citadel by AJ Cronin that we read for that, but I loved it.
This was before libraries shut, so we were able to get our next book: Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey by James Attlee, published in 2007. As you find out in an epigraph – isolarion is ‘the term for 15th-century maps that describe specific areas in detail, but that do not provide a clarifying overview of how these places are related to each other’. It’s a pretty self-indulgent title, since nobody will know what it means without opening it, but authors often seem to lose their heads when it comes to a title. The ‘specific area in detail’ in question is Cowley Road, Oxford. It’s a long road that goes straight through East Oxford – the less affluent area of Oxford. (It’s an intriguing phenomenon that you will hear people talk about North Oxford and East Oxford, but never about South or West.)
From the events mentioned, Attlee was researching this around 2002-2004. I moved to Oxford in 2004 – to a big, ugly student accommodation block next to the Plain Roundabout, which divides East Oxford from Central Oxford. I could see Cowley Road from the kitchen window. I lived in Oxford for 15 years, and before I finally managed to move out to a little village, I lived in East Oxford again for a few years. I never lived on Cowley Road itself – this country boy could not have coped with living on a busy road – but I lived around it off and on for quite a while. So I definitely had a personal interest in seeing what Attlee would make of it – I don’t know if it would have the same appeal for people who’ve never been there. Who knows.
The beginning of this book starts a trend that was also my favourite element of Isolarion – going into the different shops, pubs, restaurants etc of the street, and learning about them from their owners. Learning what it was like to have a business there, and how the proprietors ended up there. Because East Oxford is easily the most multicultural part of the city, and that’s reflected in the range of shops there: Brazilian art gallery, Chinese medicine, Polish food, Lebanese food, Indian food… there are a lot of food shops there. My favourite to walk past, though I never went in, was a robemakers – because the mannequins in the window wore clerical robes that reminded me of life in a vicarage. Some of the places Attlee mentioned had disappeared before I moved a little while later – some are still in situ, though you’ll also find Sainsbury’s, Costa, and other signs of gentrification there now.
All of this was wonderful – building up the sense of recent history and community, talking to people who’ve been there all of their lives. It certainly isn’t romanticised – he also talks about the churchyard where people get drunk, the levels of homelessness, the mentally unwell people who pace the street (I recognised the people he spoke about). He talks about the porn shop – that, no, I have never been in. It’s called ‘Private Shop’ – when Attlee wrote about it, and when I moved to the area, it was a blue shop with a discreet sign. Now it’s still called ‘Private Shop’ but the ‘A’ is silhouette of a naked woman… some discretion has been lost.
Alongside this, Attlee documents his attempts to guide the local planning committee about how best to celebrate the area – he is very anti having a gateway arch at the beginning of the street. It was a little off-putting how certain he was that he was right and other locals were wrong, but it was an enjoyably immersive sense of living in the community.
So, there were the makings of a book I really loved. I could even forgive his casual dismissing of students as being part of East Oxford life, though I’d point out that they (we) spent a lot more time there each week than people like Attlee, who commute to London. But he rather lost me when he got abstract.
Increasingly, Isolarion turns to philosophical tangents. He gives overviews of various religions, and has some platitudes to share about them. The concrete gives way to his musings about them, and I didn’t find his musings particularly exciting. He quotes Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy a bizarre amount that an editor should have cut down on – it reminded me of another book about Oxford that kept going on about Isaiah Berlin. Stick to the topic on the table, folks, and don’t let your personal obsessions take over!
So, if this was edited down to the concrete – and if Attlee had interviewed more people – it would have been a truly wonderful book. As it was, I still loved reading it – paradoxically, I enjoyed it more than the sum of its parts. But I do wish he’d been stricter with himself about what made Isolarion great and what was interesting just to him.
The European Prize for Literature (EUPL) is an annual prize that awards emerging authors from across 41 countries in Europe – and, because of lockdown making promotion of the prize more difficult, I’m one of the bloggers who has been asked to help raise awareness of the prize and of the UK winner – Melissa Harrison, with All Among the Barley. I’ll get onto that, but first here’s a quick video explaining what the prize is… (I’ll also be doing a giveaway – check out the bottom of the post for that.)
I’m all for prizes that raise awareness of authors we wouldn’t otherwise hear of, and my reading of non-British European writers is pretty lamentable. It’s even more lamentable when it comes to those writing now. And I’m afraid that hasn’t changed with the 2019 winner I’m writing about, because she’s British, but at least I can go and look at the others among the 13 winners awarded in 2019.
I had heard of All Among the Barley before I was sent it to review, but I think only because I’d been so drawn to that beautiful cover. The ploughed fields, the swallows (maybe; look, I don’t know anything about birds). I am in danger of being like the townies who wander through the setting of 1930s Suffolk, seeing only the idyllic and not noticing the hard work, the striving for modernity, and the real lives behind the thatched cottages – particularly during a year apparently famous for drought. Except I grew up in the countryside, so I know it can be beautiful and difficult simultaneously.
My name is Edith June Mather and I was born not long after the end of the Great War. My father, George Mather, had sixty acres of arable land known as Wych Farm; it is somewhere not far from here, I believe. Before him my grandfather Albert farmed the same fields, and his father before him, who ploughed with a team of oxen and sowed by hand. I would like to think that my brother Frank, or perhaps one of his sons, has the living of it now; but a lifetime has passed since I was last on its acres, and because of everything that happened I have been prevented from finding out.
This is the opening page – well, the opening after a quick preface – and it quickly immerses us in the world she lived in. That ‘I would like to think’ sentence gives the reader a sense of mystery, but we forget it (I forgot it) as we are swept into her world. Edie is a young 13-year-old, a little more innocent than the other children in the community, a little less prepared for the outside world. At the same time, she fully knows difficulties. Her father drinks too much. Her mother has to make up for his shortcomings. She sees poverty, vice, brokenness. But she also sees the beauty of the world around her – and Harrison is wonderful at natural descriptions, giving not just the aesthetics of the stunning countryside but also its practicalities.
In October, Wych Farm’s trees turned quickly and all at once, blazing into oranges and reds and burnished golds; with little wind to strip them the woods and spinneys lay on our land like treasure, the massy hedgerows filigreed with old-man’s-beard and enamelled with rosehips and black sloes. Along the winding course of the River Stound the alder carrs were studded with earthstars and chanterelles and dense with the rich, autumnal stink of rot; but crossing Long Piece towards The Lottens the sky opened into austere, equinoctial blue, where flocks of peewits wheeled and turned, flashing their broad wings black and white. At dawn, dew silvered the spiders’ silk strung between the grass blades in our pastures so that the horses left trails where they walked, like the wakes of slow vessels in still water.
Into this world comes Constance FitzAllen. She shocks the locals by wearing trousers, and is there to document the old rural ways of life, and is keen to preserve it. I was initially reminded of Valentine Ackland, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s partner, who made similar investigations in similar trousers – but her resulting book, Country Conditions, was about the importance of good plumbing and hygiene in rural communities. Connie is much more concerned with setting rural life in amber – writing for a journal, but also lamenting any developments. Edie’s family don’t take kindly to this at first – they want machines that do the work faster; why would they roast food on an open fire if a modern oven is superior? – but they are won over by her charm and enthusiasm.
And Connie does come across as a delightful character. I was fully charmed by her. Which… well, I shan’t say more on that front.
Edie is certainly charmed by her, and sees her as a gateway into a new way of thinking – London, confidence, and adulthood. I find coming-of-age novels tricky sometimes, but I thought Harrison did a great job of showing the development of a teenage, torn between the dual wishes to enter adulthood and to remain in the safety of childhood.
And now the elephant in the room for anyone who knows my taste well: historical fiction. We know I’m not a fan. I have read so very many novels written in the 1930s that I did wonder why I’d need someone writing in the 2010s to tell me about that world. Sometimes it didn’t quite work – Harrison was very obviously writing from 80+ years’ distance, and the mores and morals of the 21st century seeped between the cracks of the world she was depicting. There was the implicit value system of a later day – but this was ok because Edie was also looking back, if not from 2019 then from many decades after the fact.
And there are twists and developments, which I shan’t spoil, that nobody writing in 1933 would have included.
All in all, I was impressed by Harrison’s writing style and descriptive abilities, fond of Edie, and startled by my own earlier reactions when more details of this world emerge…
* * Giveaway time! * *
EUPL are offering up a free copy – if you’d like one, please tell me your favourite rural novel (or novel with a rural setting) in the comments. I’ll pick a winner on Sunday 17 May 2020. It’s open anywhere in the world (though lockdown may mean it’s an ebook, depending who wins. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it!)
And head over to the European Prize for Literature site to learn more about them.
It’s been a while since I did one of these – but also, time no longer has any meaning. April has finished, apparently? What a strange, strange year. I am grateful that my reading abilities came back, though, and I certainly got through a lot of books in April – though I’m not doing so well at writing about them.
I hope you and the people you love are doing well. Stay safe, and enjoy a book, a blog post, and a link.
1.) The book – Chatteron Square by E.H. Young is now out in the British Library Women Writers series! It’s the first one that I chose myself, and it’s great. I had fun reading about 1930s divorce law while writing the afterword, which hopefully adds a layer of interest to the novel – but obviously it’s a wonderful novel without a word from me alongside it.
2.) The link – if you’re in the UK and looking for vegan and gluten-free cakes during the lockdown, I can recommend my friend Amy’s bakery. I’ve received, given, and bought for myself boxes from them during quarantine – check out Brutally Honest Bakery.
3.) The blog post – I always love when Claire at The Captive Reader reads A.A. Milne, it fills me with such joy – and she has made me want to go back and re-read The Romantic Age soon.