{weekend words} "a mummified world of books"

I haven't done a weekend words for ages, but I've just read this passage about a gorgeous library in John Dickson Carr's He Who Whispers (1946):

And in a long room at the rear of the house – a room after his own heart – stood Miles Hammond, holding a lamp above his head.

'It's all right,' he was saying to himself. 'I didn't make a mistake in bringing her here. It's all right.'

But he knew in his heart that it wasn't all right.

The flame of the little lamp, in its tiny cylindrical glass shade, partly drew the shadows from a mummified world of books. It was wrong, of course, to call this place a library. It was a stack-room, a repository, an immensely long dust-heap for the two or three thousand volumes accumulated like dust by his late uncle. Books old and broken, books newish and shiny, books in quarto and octavo and folio, books in fine bindings and books withered black: breathing their exhilarating mustiness, a treasure-house hardly yet touched.

Their shelves reached to the ceiling, built even round the door to the dining-room and enclosing the row of little-paned windows that faced east. Books piled the floor in ranks, mounds, and top-heavy towers of unequal height, a maze of which the lanes between were so narrow that you could hardly move without knocking books over in a fluttering puff of dust.

Standing in the middle of this, Miles held the lamp high and slowly looked round him. 'It’s all right!' he fiercely said aloud.

And the door opened, and Fay Seton came in.

*

I do feel a little sorry for the mysterious Miss Seton, who will be doing the dusting in here! 

{misc.} trains and buttered toast

John Betjeman Trains and Buttered Toast (2006)

(more info on the cover)

Trains and Buttered Toast is my current on-the-go non-fiction book. I haven't actually finished it, but last night I read a chapter that I can't resist mentioning here. The book is a collection of Betjeman's radio talks for the BBC mostly from the 1930s to 1950s. The talks cover a nice range of interests - modern architecture, urban planning, the pleasures of the seaside, churches, famous men and women, wartime life, and so on. It is a lovely book to dip in to, and quite funny in places (his views on modern town-planning are pretty snarky). 

But the chapter which caught my eye was the transcript of a talk called 'Yesterday's Fiction', delivered on the Home Service on Monday 21st August 1944:

Instead of telling you about the best of this week's latest books, because there are so very few being published just now, I am going to review some old favourites. I am going to review some Edwardian novelists - the sort of people who were very popular before the last war.

Of course my ears immediately pricked up at that!

The names I shall mention are probably to be found on the back of a book within three miles, possibly within three yards, of everyone listening this evening who lives in these islands. I shall choose authors who have never produced a wholly bad book and often produced a very good one. And while you are are going away to get a pencil to take down the new names I mention, I will indulge in a short background sketch of Edwardian novelists.

So who does Betjeman rate? First up is Anthony Hope ("top of my list... for consistent high standards") - I do indeed have him on my shelves within three yards (or close!), as I really rate his The Prisoner of Zenda as a classic tale of adventure and chivalry. I have also read the sequel Rupert of Hentzau (Rupert is a very naughty young man indeed), but the rest of Hope's novels have passed me by. Betjeman already notes that only these two seem to be still read, and recommends The King's Mirror and The Dolly Dialogues (the latter he suggests is a combination of Kipling and Wilde!).  

source

And then - another favourite I want to explore further - George Gissing. His The Odd Women is indeed as Betjeman describes, "a deeply agonizing book". He suggests Gissing's The House of Cobwebs (short-stories) as a taste of something different. 

Next? Someone I've not heard of, but surely some of you keen explorers of lost classics will know the name of the "lighter and totally forgotten author" Miss S. MacNaughton [sic - it is in fact MacNaughtan]. Betjeman tells us he was recommended her books by "Miss Elizabeth Bowen and Miss Rose Macaulay", which is a pretty good recommendation!

Miss MacNaughton specializes in good, kindly people in fairly easy circumstances and her novels have happy and probable endings.

(He suggests A Lame Dog's Diary, available free at project gutenberg; but the one which caught my eye was "The Fortune of Christina McNab, the story of a raw Scottish heiress let loose on smart London society" - that sounds just my cup of tea.) 

Who else?

...Conan Doyle, Booth Tarkington, Leonard Merrick (always good), E. F. Benson (nearly always), N. and A. M. Williamson, Rider Haggard, Stanley Weyman (according to taste), Seton Merriman (often good), 'Q', Somerville and Ross (to me, always good), H. A. Vachell, A. E. W. Mason and many, many more.

Of these, Conan Doyle will likely never be out of favour. I thought Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Amberson's was a good read (I reviewed it here). Benson still has plenty of fans (myself included). I've not read any Rider Haggard for what feels like a century, and really should revisit him. 'Q', of course, was reintroduced to a new generation by 84 Charing Cross Road. The only other one who rings a bell is Mason, with his The Four Feathers (and who knew there'd been what sounds like a ghastly Heath Ledger remake?).

Betjeman notes two other highly recommended reads: Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands as a classic spy story (true: but too much messing about on boats, and anything involving reading maps or train timetables is always wasted on me! - "there has probably never been written so alluring an account of the delights of the amateur yachtsman"); and - unknown to me - Mary Cholmondeley's (I assume that's a "Chumly" pronunciation?) Red Pottage. He adds the rather telling comment that "autobiographical novels are often an author's - and in particular an authoress's - best novel": apparently Red Pottage is "a picture of rectory life and mental cruelty and frustration and stupidity therein among the lush, lovely and uncaring landscape of Shropshire." Oh dear... 

(the Cholmondeley cover is an Arthur Rackham drawing and you can buy it for a mere $1750)

This was a nice little essay, which gave me quite a few ideas for future reading, and I am happy to note that the next chapter is 'Wartime Tastes in Reading', which I hope to find just as useful.

{review} creepy, noir, & memoir

What have I been reading? 

Michel Faber Under the Skin (2000)

I cannot actually say anything about this book as almost anything could be a spoiler! Um, it's about Scotland, hitchhikers, and a woman with a lot of scars. The setting is contemporary. I loved it. Anything else? It is nothing like The Crimson Petal and the White. If you like well-written, creepy books with slow and horrible revelations, this is for you. (Hmm. That rather sums up The Crimson Petal as well!)

Dorothy B. Hughes The Blackbirder (1943)

A fine, albeit highly melodramatic read for noir fans. The Blackbirder is someone who smuggles people and other cargo in and out of the United States during the Second World War. If you can afford the service, the blackbirder will organize your escape – whether that be from Nazi occupied France, or from justice.

"I didn't even know there was a Blackbirder, not really. It's all been whispers, a legend, something a refugee believes in because he needs to believe in it, because he might have a desperate need for such a man some day."

"To escape a murder charge?" Schein pointed.

Her mouth hardened. "To escape Gestapo agents who somehow manage to reach this country despite the F.B.I."

Blaike's voice was quiet. "Couldn't it be they enter by such a method as blackbirding?"

This was why the F.B.I. was searching for the Blackbirder. They couldn't chance the entrance of dangerous aliens among honest refugees. Nor the escape dangerous aliens over the same route. Somehow she hadn't thought of it that way. The Blackbirder to her had been only a shadowy figure of refuge. He was still that but a sinister blackness darkened his shadow. His helping wings could be abused. She shook away the tremor.

The heroine of Hughes' gripping thriller has been in hiding in the States since her perilous escape from France. She cannot take her safety for granted, for she is connected to some very powerful and very bad people. Moreover, she has lost contact with the love of her life. Then, one night in New York, she is recognised, and must flee for her life – south to New Mexico to find the blackbirder and search for her lover. But the FBI is on her track, and it looks like the Gestapo is catching up too… 

The atmosphere of a country that may not be sanctuary it seems is brilliantly evoked by Hughes – who can you trust? If you want to read some Hughes, I suggest In a Lonely Place {REVIEW} -- one of the best books I read in 2011.

Molly Lefebure Murder on the Home Front: A true story of morgues, murderers and mystery in the Blitz (1954 [2013])

I had very high hopes for this book, hoping it might be a bit of a World War Two meets CSI with better frocks. And it is that. Molly Lefebure was a journalist in the early 1940s when she accepted a secretarial post with the not-quite-as-famous-as-Spilsbury pathologist Dr Keith Simpson. She took her type-writer and shorthand pad into the mortuaries of London and the surrounding areas to take down Dr Simpson's autopsy findings verbatim. Throughout the war she was witness to some of the most famous investigations of horrible crimes; then, in 1954 she published this book as a record of her wartime service. 

The reissue comes at an interesting time, I think – as the romanticized vision of Londoners in the Blitz is being subject to a bit of a more or less candid debunking. Yes, people were tremendously brave – but the war also allowed a lot of clandestine activity to flourish under the blackout. It was also often hard to bring criminals to justice – given the ease with which they might be shipped out or return overseas or be blown to bits before they could be charged. Lefebure's narrative is perhaps not for the squeamish, though I was more troubled by something else, namely her constant air of occupying the higher moral ground to her victims: she has little sympathy for a fifteen year good-time girl who is strangled by two US soldiers, "more a matter of sordid accident than murder". The same judgement is not applied to a fourteen year old innocent, assaulted on her way home from Sunday School. Her remarks on prostitutes (that 'ancient but abysmal profession'), the lower classes, and the poor in general are achingly snobbish ("I wondered… why the State cannot prosecute people for being dirty"). She's quite a fan of hanging. 

However, if you can swallow that as a product of its time (and as part of a journalistic love of sensation, where everything is to be regarded as 'material'), the book is a fascinating insight into the daily dangers of life in the Blitz for a professional woman. Her writing is occasionally absolutely striking – such as the shrapnel at Southend which "fell in little showers, more cruelly than the summer rain", or the corpses of babies, "like weary imitation flowers". This memoir is apparently being turned into a TV series, and I shall be fascinated to see if our heroine becomes more empathetic and less judgmental in the transition.

Oh, and some July things... I'm gearing up for my third year of Paris in July, hosted by Karen at BookBath and Tamara at Thyme for Tea. Sadly this year I won't actually be in Paris, as I was last year. But I'm prepared to make the best of it... ;-)  And HeavenAli is hosting Anita Brookner Reading Month too: I'm hoping to find a Brookner I haven't read, but, it's long been my problem that they all seem to similar (in a good way) that I can't remember what I've read... Something to work on!

{review} miss pym disposes

You know, you're happily reading other book blogs, and you suddenly think, Bloody Hell [you always preface sudden thoughts with that phrase in Australia ;-)], when did I last blog a book myself?, and you realise that it was nearly a month ago. And, yet, you've been reading like a crazy thing. Bad blogger. So, what have I been reading? Well, re-reading, in this case:

    

Josephine Tey Miss Pym Disposes (1946)

Lucy always noticed other women's legs, her own being a sad disappointment to her.

Miss Pym Disposes is a re-read for me, after I read 20th century vox's great review, with her excellent comparison to Gaudy Night. I love Tey's books - I was hooked as a teen when my English teacher gave me A Daughter of Time to read alongside our class text of Richard III. I love her quiet, almost actionless detective stories. (I will say at this point that I did not greatly warm to the first Nicola Upson book featuring Tey as detective.)

Half-past five, said the watch. Half-past five! Miss Pym stopped breathing and stared in unbelieving fascination. No, really, did any college, however physical and hearty, begin the day at half-past five! Anything was possible, of course, in a community which had use for neither bedside tables nor bedside lamps, but-half-past five! She put the watch to her small pink ear. It ticked faithfully. She squinted round her pillow at the garden which was visible from the window behind her bed. Yes, it certainly was early; the world had that unmoving just-an-apparition look of early morning. Well, well! Henrietta had said last night, standing large and majestical in the doorway: "Sleep well. The students enjoyed your lecture, my dear. I shall see you in the morning;" but had not seen fit to mention half-past-five bells.

Lucy Pym has written - somewhat to her own surprise - a best-selling book on psychology. She travels to an exclusive girls to give a lecture as a favour to the headmistress, with whom she went to school. The school is unusual - it grooms young ladies for careers related to physical activity and the sciences - future doctors, physios, games-mistresses, etc. Miss Tey's lecture goes down a treat and she is persuaded to stay on to do a little light mentoring and socializing with the girls.

They stood there on the gravel looking up at her, smiling. That was how she always remembered them afterwards. Standing there in the sunlight, easy and graceful; secure in their belief in the world's rightness and in their trust in each other. Untouched by doubt or blemish. Taking it for granted that the warm gravel under their feet was lasting earth, and not the precipice edge of disaster.

The book is wonderful in a number of ways: first up, Tey's writing is a complete joy. Then there is the personality of Miss Tey - a little insecure and flighty, thrilled that she has made enough money to live comfortably instead of as a school-mistress, in love with fashionable things, and, really, not that good a psychologist when plunged headlong into mysterious happenings. Her witty, catty inner voice is a delight, as she reworks what she sees into a more or less plausible (and, perhaps more or less reliable) narrative.

Lucy's capacity for doing nothing was almost endless, and had been the despair of both her preceptors and her friends.

And, of course, there's the actual crime, which doesn't take place until one has completely given up on there ever being a crime. The tension is evoked so beautifully that one almost hopes the inevitable will never happen. How will Miss Pym dispose? (The title's allusion to Thomas à Kempis' 'Man proposes, but God disposes' hints at the futility of judging others, even when the judge has written a bestseller on psychology.)

She could never get away from that other half of herself. It had sent her into fights with her knees knocking, it had made her speak when she wanted to hold her tongue, it had kept her from lying down when she was too tired to stand up. It would keep her from washing her hands now.

Or will it? Find out for yourselves!

Highly recommended.

{review} how to run your home without help

Kay Smallshaw How to Run Your Home Without Help (1949 [Persephone 2005])

All work is coloured by the spectacles worn. Look on it as fearful drudgery and it will never be anything else. See it as a job supremely worth doing, some of it creative, some more humdrum, but all demanding one's best, then running the home without help becomes a challenge and rewarding in itself.

People who think it is romantic to adopt a retro lifestyle (all those lovely clothes, pin-curls, proper stockings, etc.) should perhaps read this household manual to remind themselves that a large number of other less attractive things went along with the rose-bespectacled prettiness: limited rights for women, marriage as a career-ender, rationing, entire days spent doing the family laundry by hand, and the truly insanely Stepfordy Wifey idea that one should 'turn out' every room (EVERY ROOM) once a week. 

Source: freshcardsgifts.co.uk via skiourophile on Pinterest

Housekeeping may well (as Smallshaw suggests) be a form of "creative work to rank with the best", but there is a hell of a lot of post-war societal brainwashing going on to rebrand (unpaid) "ceaseless toil" in that way. Smallshaw's ideal housewife "has a big job, and one that can seldom be compressed into an eight-hour working day." She is a stay-at-home wife and mother or mother-soon-to-be (working [single] "career" women get a mention, but are not her target audience, despite working herself!). 

The routine, as Christina Hardyment notes in her introduction to the Persephone edition, is "uncompromising". I felt exhausted (as well as uneasy) just reading this book.

Smallshaw sets out ideas for organising the day, what one must do in each room, how much time to allocate to meal shopping and preparation (two to three hours a day - but, given that rationing is still in force at this time, some of this time is spent in the dreaded queuing). Smallshaw is interested in making her housewife more efficient, whether by introducing a smarter layout to the kitchen, better "method", or offering a review of labour-saving devices (the Bendix automatic washing machine, a crippling 65 pounds). 

Source: ebaumsworld.com via skiourophile on Pinterest

Fundamentally, however, this is a book about unremitting drudgery from dawn to dusk and well beyond: Chapter 6 "The Daily Round"; Chapter 7 "The Weekly Clean", Chapter 8 "More Weekly Cleaning", Chapter 9 "Spring-Cleaning". Round about this point I think I would have drunk a neat cocktail of Smallshaw's favourite household chemicals: soda, precipitated whitening, DDT (!), paradichlorobenzene and oxalic acid ("useful, though poisonous"; coincidentally, I have recently read Death in High Heels). This however, would likely be classed as letting oneself go, as "[s]ome women will always". Housework makes you slim, ladies! 

Before you call it a day, replace furniture and ornaments, re-hang pictures and mirrors, make up the bed and put up fresh curtains. You can sleep well tonight, knowing that even the Victorian housewife wouldn't have done a more thorough job.

In sum... I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It is horrifying, and such a tonic against romanticising the past. I think my mouth started to hang open in shocked awe about midway through chapter 1 and never fully closed again. I do not own a teapot spout-cleaner or an upholstery whisk. I remain wholly puzzled by the concept of stringing currants as a leisure activity at the end of the day. (Do currants have strings?) I cannot think about the delights of "Offal Week" without feeling nauseated. I feel slightly guilty that labour-saving devices have freed up so much time that I happily waste on Pinterest rather than producing something truly and unforgettably creative, but books that are meant to make women feel bad are not going to make me change a single thing about my life of squalor independence... 

Source: weheartit.com via skiourophile on Pinterest

If you liked this... the wonderful diaries of Nella Last (for a taste of their wonderfulness, see the review at Stuck In A Book) give a first-hand view of what it is like to try to live up to these expectations.

{review} the small back room

Nigel Balchin The Small Back Room (1943)

I found this book as the author sits next to Beryl Bainbridge on the library shelves (and I'm thinking about Beryl Bainbridge Week). Also, the name rang a faint bell. A quick search of google reader (far more reliable than my memory) revealed that I'd flagged it to track down after reading the excellent review on futile preoccupations and that Balchin had been discussed (so recently that I should be ashamed of forgetting) by beauty is a sleeping cat and a work in progress.  

The Small Back Room is a shortish and very intense book, set during the Second World War. The protagonist is a 'backroom boy' - a scientist working in a small team which basically throws up ideas and sees if they'll work: new types of silent guns, odd fuses, ways to stop things freezing, and so on. The novel offers a deeply depressing look at how individual egos can dominate to the detriment of the big picture - the actual war and, more specifically, the men on the front who will have to use these new inventions. 

The separation in distance and mind-set between the back room boys and their masters and the men on the front is beautifully brought out when the protagonist - prevented from active service by the loss of a foot in the First World War - has to become actively involved in defusing a deadly new type of bomb. I liked the uneasy atmosphere evoked by this book: the impression that the war was intended to feather certain men's nests; the arguments between the 'old boy' scientists who want to maintain their little fiefdoms without regard to efficiency or making a difference to the war; the go-betweens in cushy safe jobs which they intend to keep. 

"But I don't think you understand," I said rather desperately. "That stuff matters. His own people know that it's good and say it's never been tackled before. There's stuff there that I was working on before the war. What's going to happen to it?"

Waring said, "That's entirely up to Hereward. After what's happened, you can't expect him to be very enthusiastic, can you?"

I felt myself shaking a bit. I said, "It isn't a question of whether Hereward is enthusiastic or not. That idea might make all the difference to operating transport and guns in cold climates. Why should it be stopped because of his bloody dignity? The war isn't his private show."

...

Mair said gently, "You're being logical, Sammy, and I'm afraid it isn't a matter of logic."

This is not a book about heroes (apart from one very brave and determined bomb disposal expert). The protagonist is not particularly likeable and spends a goodly amount of time feeling sorry for himself and making the life of his lover hellish. This doesn't sound promising, but nevertheless, Balchin's grim (and grimy) assessment of human nature at play on the home front offers much revisional food for thought. Incidentally, Balchin's wikipedia entry offers some interesting parallels between his life and his writing. 

Rating: 8/10; disheartening but great writing. It's been made into a film that sounds rather more redemptive than the book. 

source

{weekend words}

'What do you think about when you weed?' she said to me one day, as she sat and watched me busy among the onions. 'Well, all down that row I worried about the Linnet, and all down this one I'm worrying about Bill, and for the first three rows I worried about Libya, and for the next two our shipping losses, and - ' 'Stop!' said Lady B. 'I am an old woman,' she went on, 'and nobody expects me to do more than knit, but I'd never take a knitting needle in my hand again if I couldn't read at the same time and thus occupy my thoughts.' 'I wonder if one could read and weed?' I said. 'Of course you couldn't,' said Lady B. 'But it's time you snapped out of all this gloom, Henrietta. I think you'd better enter for the Bowling Tournament.' 'But I haven't played bowls since the war began.' 'That doesn't matter. I shall enter, too,' said Lady B recklessly. 'It will be unfortunate for our partners, but good for their self-control.'

Joyce Dennys (1986 [2010])

Henrietta Sees It Through: 

More News from the Home Front

 

{review} until the final hour

Traudl Junge (with Melissa Müller) Until the Final Hour: Hitler's Last Secretary (2003)

Joachim Fest Inside Hitler's Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich (2005)

  

Both of these books proclaim on their covers that they were the inspiration for the Oscar-nominated movie Downfall, which I have on whatever is the TBR equivalent of a To-Be-Watched pile. 

Now all the self-delusion is over. Finally, at last, that desperate, seductive voice in me is silenced, the part of me that wouldn't see and know reality, that wanted to believe. At the same time I suddenly feel very sorry for Hitler. A hopelessly disappointed man, toppled from the greatest heights, broken, lonely... I feel guilty all of a sudden. 

Traudl Junge, as the title suggests, was Hitler's last secretary. Junge was only 22 in 1942 when she began this role. This book is structured as a journal (although it was composed in 1947 rather than contemporaneously) of her time with Hitler. It is an extraordinary read, primarily, I think, because it offers such an intimate perspective on day to day life at the highest echelons of power as the Reich and its leader began to crumble. 

Traudl Junge on her wedding day, June 1943 (source)

I approached it with a somewhat cautious eye: after all, this was someone who lived at close quarters with Hitler for three years; who was remarkably lucky to escape with her life when Berlin fell; and who presumably had a vested interest in denazification. Junge, in general, manages to walk a fine line between criticism ("But this time it did disturb me a lot to find someone describing himself as a genius") and enthusiasm (as when Hitler survives the von Stauffenberg - Valkyrie - bombing). Incidentally, she notes "he looked like a hedgehog" post-explosion.

Mostly, however, her memoir captures the viewpoint, concerns and enthusiasms of a young woman and offer rich details about, for instance, Hitler's views on lipstick (negative), smoking (ultra-anti), food preferences (bland and vegetarian), his health fads (many), marriages (a keen matchmaker), fondness for tea-parties, music ("The only pop music he would let us play was the 'Donkey Serenade'"), lederhosen (his knees were too white: see here), and avoiding provincial hotel rooms without en-suites because of the embarrassment of returning from the loo along a corridor lined with saluting yokels. There are also odd insights like Eva Braun's dislike of fat women and her desire to be a "beautiful corpse". As the end draws near, Junge captures moments of great pitifulness: the look on the face of the eldest Goebbels' child, or Frau Goebbels declaration that "Our children have no place in Germany as it will be after the war." The Goebbels will, of course, kill themselves and their six children. 

One cannot help thinking about Arendt on the banality of evil. Junge has stated elsewhere that Hitler was "a pleasant boss". This boss sometimes seems far more like a Chaplinesque Great Dictator than a monstrous psychopath who would refer to his decision not to eliminate "thousands" back in 1934 coup thus: "Afterwards one regrets having been so benevolent."

It was salutary therefore to read Junge's memoir alongside Joachim Fest's account of the last days in the bunker, which retold the entire story from a rather more black-and-white viewpoint. 

The bunker as photographed by William Vandivert, the first American photographer 
to access the bunker after the fall of Berlin (source)

This is a very readable, almost popular, account of the last days, with plenty of structuring of the events within with those outside Berlin to give a broader historical perspective. Fest asks very interesting questions, the most significant (I thought) being - was what happened in Berlin inevitable? Fest's book is nearly as good as Junge's memoir at capturing the claustrophobia of those last days, trapped in a concrete bunker thirty-three feet below ground with a madman and an entourage that veered wildly between sycophantic and downright treacherous: "With treachery all around me, only misfortune has remained faithful to me - misfortune and my shepherd dog Blondi" (Hitler). 

I felt depressed for days after reading these books, but the consequences of evil on this scale must never be allowed to be forgotten. 

Rating: both 4/5.

If you liked this... for me it will be Downfall the movie, and probably The Great Dictator to restore my equilibrium.

source

{review} henrietta sees it through

Joyce Dennys Henrietta Sees It Through: More News from the Home Front (1986 [2010])

 

The sequel to Henrietta's War: News from the Home Front 1939-1942 is almost as delightful as its predecessor. 

Things on the home front are, of course, rather less lively by 1942, as the war drags on and more and more of the inhabitants of the little West Country village feel its effects. They are particularly irked that outsiders seem to think that they exist in a lost Eden of peacefulness.

This is a light-hearted book, which makes the small tragedies of war all the more poignant as everyone tries their hardest to maintain a stiff upper lip. As heartening morale-boosters, these well-crafted little letters to the mysterious 'My Dear Robert' are spot on. On the aftermath of enemy raid in the vicinity,

If it was Hitler's idea to strike terror into the hearts of sleepy West Country folk, then the whole thing was a failure, because it has simply made everybody very angry indeed. Lady B came round that evening, quite pink with annoyance. 'I'm in such a temper,' she said. Charles said he wished he could give her a little something, but there wasn't a drop in the cupboard. When we asked Lady B if she had been upset by the Incidents, she said no, she had got under the piano and taken some of Fay's Dog Bromide mixture, which had worked wonders. Lady B said Fay had been quite unmoved by each shattering explosion, and had remained in her basket with a bored expression on her face.

Henrietta (with her "two faithful hairpins, Castor and Pollux") is a delightful, scatty heroine, with her ability to get into all sorts of minor and very funny scrapes. Lady B. - Henrietta's companion in these scrapes and also her bulwark against the world's troubles - is a one of my absolute favourite characters. 

Lady B.

'What do you think about when you weed?' she said to me one day, as she sat and watched me busy among the onions. 'Well, all down that row I worried about the Linnet, and all down this one I'm worrying about Bill, and for the first three rows I worried about Libya, and for the next two our shipping losses, and - ' 'Stop!' said Lady B. 'I am an old woman,' she went on, 'and nobody expects me to do more than knit, but I'd never take a knitting needle in my hand again if I couldn't read at the same time and thus occupy my thoughts.' 'I wonder if one could read and weed?' I said. 'Of course you couldn't,' said Lady B. 'But it's time you snapped out of all this gloom, Henrietta. I think you'd better enter for the Bowling Tournament.' 'But I haven't played bowls since the war began.' 'That doesn't matter. I shall enter, too,' said Lady B recklessly. 'It will be unfortunate for our partners, but good for their self-control.'

It is not all fun ("Watching me garden is one of our gardener's favourite pastimes. He never seems to tire of it…") and games: there are losses, constant worries about the children's safety, and so many small but significant sacrifices to make (pulping one's books!). There are also a couple of interesting little bits and pieces: I didn't realize that doctors were exempt from having to take in evacuees. I would like to know more about a passing reference to women being compensated less than men for war injuries. And now I shall pronounce Noel Coward as "Nole Card"!

Dennys' wit is so sharp:

"At the Labour Exchange I was interviewed by a Young Person whose lips were painted where her lips were not."

On war on the English character: "Perfect strangers, they say, make each other cups of tea."

We nearly won the Dog Race (Owner to Run Backwards), too, but just at the finish Perry caught sight of the spaniel and twisted his lead round my legs. Some people fall elegantly and gracefully - I am not one. When I got back to my chair, Lady B said, 'Fancy those knickers lasting all this time. Didn't you get them before the war?'

Perry, incidentally, is the dog who "did catch a mouse once, but only after Charles had hit it with a telephone directory"!

Rating: lovely, lovely book. 10/10.

If you liked this... a different kettle of fish, but Mollie Panter-Downes' war stories {REVIEW}.

{weekend words}

God, how difficult he was making it! Why couldn’t he have said right out that she was a slut and he’d see her damned before he married her? Well, there was the cauldron of boiling oil; there was nothing to do but to shut one’s eyes and jump right in.

 W. Somerset Maugham (1941)

Up at the Villa

{weekend words}

Dorothy B. Hughes In a Lonely Place (1947)

No one watching Sylvia replacing her lip rouge, smiling over the mirror of her bleached wooden compact, would know that fear was raveling her nerves. Even he, permitted as friend to know that there was fear in her veins, didn’t know whether the fear was for Brub’s safety or her own. Or an atavistic fear of reasonless death. The color under her sunbrown had returned as she did the little normal things of lipstick, cigarette. He could make it recede so easily, a word, or one more question on the subject. He could make her heart stop beating as easily. With a simple statement. His lips smiled. And his eyes again turned to the room. Away from temptation.

I loved this book - review here.

{review} a surfeit of lampreys

Ngaio Marsh A Surfeit of Lampreys (1940)

Nanny came in. She was the quintessence of all nannies, opinionated, faithful, illogical, exasperating, and admirable. She stood just inside the door and said: ‘Good evening, m’lady. Patricia, Michael. Come along.’
‘Oh Nanny,’ said Patch and Mike. ‘It’s not time. Oh Nanny!’
Lady Charles said: ‘Look what Lady Katherine has sent me, Nanny. It’s a hat.’
‘It’s a hot-water bottle cover, m’lady,’ said Nanny. ‘Patricia and Michael, say goodnight and come along.’

I was very excited to see Ngaio Marsh's books being reissued for the Kindle since, while I own a number of her books as real books (tree-books), they are packed away somewhere and I really can't face finding them when the need for a familiar comfort read (with murder) strikes. This is the trap of giving a lazy person 1-Click access to e-books, and I can see that I will eventually have bought two copies of everything I've ever enjoyed just because I can't be bothered going out to the shed.

Of course it would have been even more delightful to read A Surfeit of Lampreys on the Kindle if it had not been for typos such as 'Chariot' replacing 'Charlot' for someone's name. Don't real people read e-proofs?   

Anyway, A Surfeit of Lampreys [also published as Death of a Peer] is my favourite Ngaio Marsh mystery, I think, although there are a couple of other crackers (The Nursing Home Murder is very clever; and Artists in Crime, where Inspector Alleyn meets his wife-to-be, is rather lovely too, for different reasons).

There are a couple of reasons why A Surfeit of Lampreys stands out for me: (1) even when I re-read it, I couldn't figure out whodunnit; (2) the characterisation of the rather large cast of eccentric aristocrats gone to seed is spectacularly, wittily well drawn; (3) the heroine - a most sympathetic heroine - is a colonial fish-out-of-water in big scary London (something to which this reader could relate); (4) the era - the late 1930s - is one of my favourites; and (5) Marsh writes angelically well. There are also some things which I am less keen on - the snobbishness; the attention to class difference; the infallibility of Inspector 'Handsome' Alleyn - but in A Surfeit of Lampreys these things become in themselves rather significant factors in the unravelling of the case. And 'Handsome' Alleyn is given a real run for his money by the wildly eccentric Lamprey family as he attempts to uncover which one of them dispatched their rich uncle with a kitchen skewer in the elevator.

‘Two of their friends have already explained them this evening,’ said Alleyn. ‘Their descriptions tallied fairly well. Boiled down to a few unsympathetic adjectives they came to this: “Charming. Irresponsible. Unscrupulous about money. Good-natured. Lazy. Amusing. Enormously popular.” Do you agree?’

Incidentally, Alleyn "smelt pleasantly. Something like a new book in a good binding..."

Rating: comfort read, 7/10.

If you liked this... Inspector Alleyn is a bit like Josephine Tey's Inspector Grant (and there are many connections with the theatrical world in both Marsh and Tey) crossed with a rather less sensitive Lord Peter Wimsey. But I'd read Agatha Christie's Murder at the Vicarage if I wanted a really good cosy mystery.