{review} dumps: a plain girl

L. T. Meade Dumps: A Plain Girl (1905)

source; source

I am going to tell the story of my life as far as I can; but before I begin I must say that I do wonder why girls, as a rule, have a harder time of it than boys, and why they learn quite early in life to be patient and to give up their own will.

I'm not sure this is a review; more of an extended laugh at one of the best book titles I've encountered for ages. I mean, REALLY, "Dumps: A Plain Girl"? One almost doesn't need to read the book - surely it is quite plain (ho ho) what happens in this one.

...but he said the true name for me ought not to be Rachel, but Dumps, and how could any girl expect to rule over either boys or girls with such a name as Dumps? I suppose I was a little stodgy in my build, but father said I might grow out of that, for my mother was tall.

This is my second read of an L. T. Meade book: I started with A Sweet Girl Graduate, because I am interested in the history of women's colleges (having attended one), and I was hooked on Meade's blend of sickly sentimentality and sober evangelism for educating girls. I chose Dumps because of the title, though I was tossing up about Polly: A New Fashioned Girl. Happily there are plenty of Meade titles out there to keep me going forever (she wrote over 300 books).

So, poor little Dumps. Yes, Dumps is a plain girl. And she lives a rather plain life with her widowed father, who is a genius, but quite poor --

He was also somewhat of a saving turn of mind, and he told me once that he was putting by money in order to help the boys to go to one of the ’varsities by-and-by. He was determined that they should be scholars and gentlemen; and of course I thought this a very praiseworthy ambition of his, and offered to do without a new summer dress. He did not even thank me; he said that he thought I could do quite well with my present clothes for some time to come, and after that I felt my sacrifice had fallen somewhat flat.

-- and her brothers and a faithful but slovenly servant.

Dumps' life is a lonely one:

"And a girl's little brain is meant to keep a house comfortable."

"But, father, I haven't such a little brain; and I think I could do something else."

"Could what?" said father, opening his eyes with horror. "What in the world is more necessary for a girl who is one day to be a woman than to know how to keep a house comfortable?"

"Yes, yes," I said; "I suppose so." I was very easily stopped when father spoke in that high key.

Given Meade's support of feminist causes, I was hopeful that he would be struck by lightning at this point, but no such luck.

I really was a very stranded sort of girl. Hitherto I had had no outlets of any sort; I was just Dumps, a squat, rather plain girl, who knew little or nothing of the world—a neglected sort of girl, I have no doubt; but then I had no mother.

And then... one day a mysterious lady comes to visit, then invites Dumps to stay with her for a holiday, and easily wins the poor girl over with nice clothes and plenty of food and gentle kindnesses. But what lies behind this kindly lady's unexpected generosity? I'm not going to tell you any more, but Dumps has her world-view considerably widened and learns some important lessons about life and herself. Also, we are happy to learn, getting enough to eat really helps with her looks.

And I don't think I can end without mentioning Dumps' first friend, the blue-stocking Augusta:

"Do let us walk about," I said, “and let us be chums, if you don’t mind."
"Chums?" said Augusta, turning her dreamy, wonderful eyes upon my face.
"Yes," I said.
"But chums have tastes in common," was her next remark.
"Well, you are very fond of books, are you not?" I said.
"Fond of books!" cried Augusta. "Fond of books! I love them. But that is not the right word: I reverence them; I have a passion for them." She looked hurriedly round her. "I shall never marry," she continued in a low whisper, "but I shall surround myself with books - the books of the great departed; their words, their thoughts, shall fill my brain and my heart. I shall be satisfied; nothing else will satisfy me but books, books, books!"

So, not great literature by any means, but an entertaining, often sad, rather sentimental bit of fiction. Dumps was a bit whingy (though she certainly had grounds for that!), and I didn't think it was as satisfying as A Sweet Girl Graduate - where there is also a lot of rather melodramatic and silly action but the theme of the importance of educating girls is never lost. 

Incidentally, Jane at fleur in her world has also recently reviewed another Meade title, A World of Girls. I have also been following a couple of blogs which constantly offer new lost wonders to explore, and I'd single out redeeming qualities and leaves and pages - there are so many great free e-treasures out there that I many never need to buy a book again. 

{review} a little bush maid

This is another review for Kim at Reading Matters' Australian Literature Month. Kim is generously donating 50p to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation for each review she receives for the month that links to her blog.

 

Mary Grant Bruce A Little Bush Maid (1910) & Mates at Billabong (1912)

She was perfectly aware that while Daddy wanted a mate he also wanted a daughter; and there was never any real danger of her losing that gentler attribute—there was too much in her of the little dead mother for that. Brownie, the ever watchful, had seen to it that she did not lack housewifely accomplishments, and Mr. Linton was wont to say proudly that Norah's scones were as light as her hand on the horse's mouth.

I have an ambivalent relationship with the Australian bush, the result of a teenagehood of family camping holidays with two keen parents and three much younger siblings. In fact, I shudder at writing 'camping' and 'holiday' in the same sentence. Our misguided (literally, if it was my job to read the map) forays away from civilisation exposed me to much of my home-state, South Australia. I am grateful for having seen so much (race-day riots at Coober Pedy), experienced so many things (feral cats in one's sleeping-bag), and been exposed to every extreme of temperature that this great land is capable of producing in spectacular abundance when one is forced to endure life under canvas. 

The 'Bush' - that bit of Australia that is neither urban nor Outback - is quite astonishingly beautiful:

 

This is in the Grampians, in Victoria (Feb. 2013).

But it is also filled with a variety of hazards ranging from the merely inconvenient (no showers!) to the downright deadly:

The Giant Koala (Feb. 2013)

I am, I readily confess, no Norah Linton:

She loved the bush, and was never happier than when exploring its recesses. A born bushmaid, she had never any difficulty about finding her way in the scrub, or of retracing her steps. The faculty of bushmanship must be born in you; if you have it not naturally, training very rarely gives it.

It is no surprise, therefore, that it took me until over the age of forty to pick up these classics of Australian children's fiction, the first two books of the 'Billabong' series. Mary Grant Bruce's stories (fifteen in all) of Norah Linton, her kindly father, big brother Jim and his mates from school, and the inhabitants of Billabong Station are classics of their kind.

Norah's home was on a big station in the north of Victoria–so large that you could almost, in her own phrase, "ride all day and never see any one you didn't want to see"; which was a great advantage in Norah's eyes. Not that Billabong Station ever seemed to the little girl a place that you needed to praise in any way. It occupied so very modest a position as the loveliest part of the world!

The two books that I have read (so far!) have many positives: the heroine, Norah, is a strong, self-sufficient, smart young woman, who has been brought up to think for herself and be kind to others. There are few things that she is not allowed to do (as a woman in the early twentieth century), and many, many things that she can do regardless of her sex, and sometimes far better than the blokes. I thought she was an excellent role-model. 

The bush is not depicted as a bucolic paradise, a sort of child's Eden: rather, the bush is a place where one has to work hard all the time to hold on to what is important; it holds unspeakable dangers for the naïve and unwary, and heartbreaking tragedy may lurk around every corner (are there corners in the bush?). Yet it is also a place of great community solidarity - a place where people help each other in times both good and bad. And, significantly, it is a place of great and healing beauty.

The negatives are mostly due to the series' grand old age and for that reason must be forgiven: the modern reader will cringe at the presentation of Aborigines ("That's a good boy," said Norah, approvingly, and black eighteen grinned from ear to ear with pleasure at the praise of twelve-year-old white) and non-white foreigners (although I note that Norah is generally open-minded about those she encounters) and, amusingly, almost anyone from a town:

And one of our men has gone down with the heat and can't field—fellow from the hotel with red hair, who made five—remember him, Wal.? He's out of training, like most hotel chaps, and as soft as possible, So we're playing a man short."

Curiously, she also has no time for the more generously fleshed: "she held the view that it was better to be dead than fat". In this, her outlook might appear excessively modern.

While Norah gains an enormous amount of outdoor experience (and can cook, sew and housekeep like an angel of the house), other aspects of her education are less satisfactory (until she is packed off to school):

Norah never could make out the people who pitied her for having no friends of her own age. How could she possibly be bothered with children, she reflected, when she had Daddy? As for Norah's education, that was of the kind best defined as a minus quantity. "I won't have her bothered with books too early," Mr. Linton had said when nurse hinted, on Norah's eight birthday, that it was time she began the rudiments of learning. "Time enough yet–we don't want to make a bookworm of her!"

In the first two books in the series, Norah deals with bushfires and typhoid, reunites a broken family, encounters heartbreaking loss and nearly loses her beloved father, tries to get to grips with city habits ("Further off came the cheerful voices of Jim and Wally on their way to the lagoon. Cecil preferred the bath in the house, saying that he considered it cleaner, which remark had incensed Norah at the time"), has a narrow brush with a fate worse than death, and prepares herself to be sent away from her beloved Billabong to a girls' school in Melbourne. I gather that, in the next books, the family travels to London, fights in the First World War (written contemporaneously), and is eventually reunited in our bush paradise. 

I am keen to read on; however, while some of the series are in the public domain in other countries (at Project Gutenberg; or Girlebooks), the series is still in copyright in Australia under a family trust (info). I plan to collect myself some nicer old editions as I see them.

Source

In sum: well-written children's adventure stories with a strong female heroine. Dated, but rollicking good reads. 

Thanks again to Kim for coordinating Australian Literature Month!

{misc.} learn to fly like biggles

I was sorting out some photos of my trip to the U.K., and this one made me laugh. It was in the window of The Haunted Bookshop in St Edward's Passage in Cambridge.  

The book is summarized here. W. E. Johns is given the rank F/O (Flying Officer) on the cover. The book dates from 1932, the year the first 'Biggles' book appeared (we've just missed the 80th anniversary of The Camels Are Coming). Johns published as "Captain", but never in fact held that rank. 

{not really a review} how nell scored

Bessie Marchant How Nell Scored (n.d. [early 1950s]) 

Less a review and more of a 'I bet you couldn't get away with naming a children's book this nowadays'.

I bought How Nell Scored in Carnforth in the U.K., after touring the railway station where the classic weepy Brief Encounter was partly filmed. If I wasn't totally banned from buying anything that wouldn't fit into my one small suitcase, I would have come away with a lot more from this very nice bookshop. But how could I resist How Nell Scored? It truly deserves a place on anyone's list of Worst Book Titles. 

How Nell Scored is a pretty awful book for young people. Or maybe a book for young people that is pretty awful? The writing style leaves much to be desired and the plot is flimsy. The setting is interesting in a ye olde colonies sense - New Zealand. 

Nell lives on a farm (I note that she is not going to be educated at a decent school like her brother). She manages to rescue a couple of dubious types from a shipwreck. One of them is less dodgy and has a fortune in pearls concealed in his undies (I am being less delicate about this than the book). Nell is entrusted with the pearls (which she also stores in her undies, perhaps more aptly) since - COINCIDENCE! - their owner was actually on his way to find her oldest brother who had foolishly lent him money. Without the money being repaid, Nell's brother will lose his reputation. Etc. 

Nell, whose sense of geographic direction is even worse than mine, sets off on a do-or-die mission to get the pearls to the bank before the other dubious character catches her. She lies in a lot of hay and spends a lot of time up trees. Bulls wish to gore her. She walks in circles and, unsurprisingly, is often hungry. Everywhere she goes, people have accidents. In a better writer, she'd be Carrie. Eventually everything turns out OK. This is how Nell scored. 

Rating: Tosh. Love the title though.

There's an interesting assessment of Bessie Marchant's works here. She was crazily prolific.

{misc.} oh dear...

Source: boredpanda.com via skiourophile on Pinterest

{review} the diary of a killer cat

 

Well, I'd be lying if I said this was a review. 

I was comparing 'worst-ever-cat-and-whatever-it-has-brought-inside' stories on Facebook, and a Friend said that I must read Anne Fine's The Diary of a Killer Cat (1994). 

It's a 64 page Puffin for "younger children", available on the Kindle too, and it is very funny (um, if you are a cat lover - the rest of you had better just click onwards and don't hold it against me too much). 

{review} the greengage summer

I am rather tied up this week, so this review of Rumer Godden's The Greengage Summer comes from the archives (June 2010).

Rumer Godden's (1958) The Greengage Summer is a book to which I return every couple of years. Each re-reading offers further rewards and I suspect that I enjoy it more each time, appreciating the excellent writing that enables it to function on both a teen and an adult level. 

It is a coming-of-age story: the Grey family (mother, Joss 16, Cecil 13, Hester 10, 'Willmouse' 7 and Vicky 4 - "Three years separated each of us children - Father's expeditions usually lasted three years") go on holiday to Vieux-Moutiers in the French Marne region in the late 1950s. Things do not go to plan: their mother is hospitalised, the eldest sister Joss becomes ill, and the younger children roam unsupervised about the hotel and its environs. They are unwelcome guests at the hotel, confined to the worst rooms and the dreaded lavatory "à la turque", but their behind-the-scenes status lets them observe that things are not what they seem at the Hotel Les Oeillets. This sense of wrongness is, on one level, overt, as the hotel specialises in entertaining char-à-bancs of visitors on pilgrimage to the battlefields of northern France, for whom the staff put on lunch and a macabre show:

The bullet-holes were real, but when the staircase was painted they were not closed up but picked out again; the stain in the cupboard was made freshly every now and then by Paul with blood from the kitchen; and one day... he beckoned me out into the garden and showed me what he had in its hand, the skull. It was gruesome, with its eye-sockets and long cheekbones... He had to shut Rita and Rex in the kennel or they would have dug it up at once; he buried it under the urn in the middle of the flowerbed and with it put a piece of raw liver. 'Le pourboire,' he said and laughed again.

The story is narrated by the thirteen year old girl Cecil, and Godden's characterisation of her naïveté yet concomitant loss of innocence is astonishingly good. It really is a remarkably candid book, with its references to menstruation, sexual awakening, homosexuality, illegitimacy, rape and murder - all seen from the teenager's point of view. Consider the characterisation of the hotel-boy Paul ("found in the American camp when it was broken up"):

One day Paul said, "J'avais une p'tite soeur."

"A little sister?" By then Hester was beginning to understand.

"Une mulâtre," said Paul carelessly, and, seeing we did not understand that either, he said "Une négresse," and showed half on his finger.

"Negro? But you are not mulat... what you called it," we said, puzzled, and asked, "Where is she, your sister?"

Paul shrugged.

"Don't you know?"

He shook his head. "Elle a disparu."

...

"Morte?" I asked sympathetically.

"Perdue," said Paul, "Pssts," and he made as if to throw something away.

"But you don't lose sisters." Paul's silence said clearly that you did. We felt dizzy.

The children are attracted by a mysterious Englishman, Eliot, who lives in the hotel and Eliot's shady enterprises are increasingly endangered by his contact with the idealistic English children and, in particular, by his infatuation with the ripe (yes, just like the greengages) Joss:

She [Joss] would not undress with me any more, and I was glad because my pinkness was still distressingly straight up and down while she had a waist now, slim and so supple I could not help watching it, and curves that tapered to long slim legs, while her breasts had swelled. I knew how soft these were and that they were tender, for once, out of curiosity, I touched them and she had jumped and sworn at me... "Is Joss beautiful?" I asked with a pang. "Just now," said Mother, "just now".

Eliot's decides to use the motherless children's presence to make his own residence in the hotel seem more innocent. Cecil overhears him explaining to his mistress, Mademoiselle Zizi, the patronne of the hotel, who dislikes his interest in them:

...there was the sound of a kiss; but Eliot said something else, something odd and . . . not pleasant, I thought, "Those children can be useful."

"How useful?"

"Stop people talking."

"Let them talk," said Mademoiselle Zizi.

"Don't be silly, Zizi. This is a little town and you have to live in it. The children will give me a reason for being here. After all, now I'm their guardian. They can be camouflage."

The book is filled with fascinating cross-currents: the ageing Mlle Zizi burning with jealousy over Eliot's infatuation with the young Joss; Mlle Zizi's protectress Mme Corbet loathing Eliot's attentions to Mlle Zizi ("Parce qu'elle en tient pour Mademoiselle Zizi" - "A lady loves a lady?") and writing "the figures into our account as if the pen could poison the paper"; the absent botanist father versus the vibrant neo-father Eliot ("He had a carnation in his buttonhole, a dark-red one, and it seemed to symbolise Eliot for us... Father brought flowers into the house but they were dried, pressed brown, the life gone out of them; with Eliot the flower was alive"); or the only boy in the family, 'Willmouse', crafting couture doll's clothes: at the Gare de l'Est, "Willmouse disappeared. 'Il est parti voir les locos,' said the attendant, but there was a new Vogue on a kiosk and he had gone to look at that."

One of the best-drawn relationships - also the most significant - and one constantly reassessed throughout the novel, is that between the narrator Cecil and the hotel boy Paul who bond, after coming to blows, over a Gauloise and the lees of the day's wine bottles. Paul is a lost boy, old beyond his years, dirty, overworked, amoral and violent:

I did not know about Paul in those days, but even then, in my carelessness and ignorance, I was worried by his face. We had come to see the battlefields and, though we did not know it, this face was a part of them.

Paul provides Cecil with an education of a sort:

He could not know that when he told me small prickles seemed to be breaking out all over me and the back of my knees felt hot. I had to persist. "You mean . . . you made love? When you were fourteen?"

But it is an education which Cecil herself sees as "a stain spreading through my bones": "I had become as stretched and as sensitive as an Indian with his ear to the ground, or as an insect's feeler or the needle in a compass to these doings". But how different is it to the education that her mother has decided to give her "abominably selfish" children?

"I shall take you to the battle-fields of France... So that you can see what other people have given," said Mother, "given for your sakes; and what other people will do in sacrifice. Perhaps that will make you ashamed and make you think... You need to learn . . . what I cannot teach you," said Mother, her voice quivering.

Of course, everything falls steadily apart as the children try to figure out the puzzle that is Eliot and his shadowy ventures:

"Were you ever a sailor? Joss asked...

"Probably," said Eliot.

"Don't you know?" asked Hester incredulous.

"I know I was a soldier," said Eliot. "Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, richman, poorman . . ."

Will Eliot ("I didn't ask to be a hero") redeem himself as the good Englishman?

Joss put her hand on Eliot's knee. "Eliot, what has made you so unhappy?"

He looked down at her hand and I shall always remember his answer. "What has made you so unhappy?" Joss asked, and he answered, "Being perfectly happy for two days."

For so many of the adult characters in this book it is too late for redemption or salvation. The narrative's growing 'feel' of wrongness moves relentlessly towards the brutal denouement that ends the children's stay in this lush Eden. As Joss says, "We never came back."

The awakening of the two older children from their childish selfishness and dependency to an acceptance of adult responsibility - and the realisation that the adults they admire do not necessarily share their uncompromising black-and-white moral outlook ("'Must you be so appallingly honest?' He said it so harshly that we stared.") - is deftly handled:

On and off, all that hot French August, we made ourselves ill from eating the greengages. Joss and I felt guilty; we were still at the age when we thought being greedy was a childish fault, and this gave our guilt a tinge of hopelessness because, up to then, we had believed that as we grew older our faults would disappear, and none of them did.

Obviously, I highly recommend this book and I plan to read as many more of Godden's books as I can (especially since many are being reprinted by Pan Macmillan).

Rating: 10/10

If you liked this... try Mabel Esther Allan's It Happened in Arles (1964; sadly out of print {REVIEW}).

BTW, the image at the top is of the wonderful cover of my 1959 copy (London: The Reprint Society).

{review} two in the western isles

Mabel Esther Allan, Two in the Western Isles (1956)

Mabel Esther Allan wrote 130 books for children/young adults (wiki) but has pretty much sunk without a trace nowadays. I fell in love with her It Happened in Arles {REVIEW}, many many years ago but have only got around to reading another of her works more recently. Her books evoke a kinder time in which to be young, especially, as in Two in the Western Isles, if you happen to have been carted off to a freezing island in the Outer Hebrides (the Western Isles) away from the strains of modern life.

Tory and Jess are carted off to Milvanaig by their parents who seek a sea-change rather more drastic than the girls had envisaged:

"Oh, well, I don't suppose we'll go far. We'll be able to come in for the day and our friends can come out and visit us. I expect it'll be Bucks or perhaps Oxfordshire. Anyway, whatever we feel about it we'll have to look as though we like it."
"I know," agreed Tory, signing. "After all, it will be wonderful for Father and Mother. Father was told years ago that if only he could give more time to painting he'd be famous quite soon, but he wouldn't risk making it his career because of us. And Mother's awfully bored with writing tripey novels, though they do so well. I shouldn't be surprised if 'Sylvie Forrest' died for a time and she wrote something quite different; the sort of book she's dreamed about."

As you can see, they are a pair of plucky girls with a strong streak of moral good sense. These are the girls in whom Mabel Esther Allan specialised.

Once stuck on Milvanaig they discover that the previous owner was not at all popular with the locals and they are treated with suspicion as English interlopers. As is typical of books of this sort, the girls find themselves a local mystery (involving folk song!), save a life and wind up with half the island's inhabitants in their living room during a ferocious storm - ensuring that everyone lives happily ever after.

You know, it's just a nice little book. Sometimes that's enough.

Rating: 6/10.

If you liked this... well there's those other 129 Mabel Esther Allan books. Some have been reprinted by Fidra Books. I Prefer Reading has reviewed Allan's only adult book (Murder at the Flood) here.

{weekend words}

"Oh, well, I don't suppose we'll go far. We'll be able to come in for the day and our friends can come out and visit us. I expect it'll be Bucks or perhaps Oxfordshire. Anyway, whatever we feel about it we'll have to look as though we like it."

"I know," agreed Tory, signing. "After all, it will be wonderful for Father and Mother. Father was told years ago that if only he could give more time to painting he'd be famous quite soon, but he wouldn't risk making it his career because of us. And Mother's awfully bored with writing tripey novels, though they do so well. I shouldn't be surprised if 'Sylvie Forrest' died for a time and she wrote something quite different; the sort of book she's dreamed about."

Mabel Esther Allan (1956)

Two in the Western Isles

{wishlist}

Source

Frank O'Hara (see tomorrow's post) roomed
with Edward Gorey at Harvard. 

Everyone needs a copy of
Gorey's crazy alphabet,
The Gashlycrumb Tinies. 

{wishlist}

The cats nestle close to their kittens now.
The lambs have laid down with the sheep.
You're cozy and warm in your bed, my dear
Please go the f*ck to sleep.

Adam Mansbach (2011)

Go the F*ck to Sleep

I've pre-ordered it - and I don't even have kids.

{review} a world of girls

Rosemary Auchmuty A World of Girls (1992)

The other day I was trying to remember who was expelled from the Chalet School (the setting for a series of books by Elinor Brent-Dyer). The books themselves are packed away but this book was on the shelf. It didn't give me the answer (thank you Google: Thekla von Stift; crime: being too German), but as I dipped into it again I remembered how interesting I had found my previous read. 

Auchmuty examines the elaborate school environments created by Elsie J. Oxenham (the 'Abbey' books), Dorita Fairlie Bruce ('Dimsie'), Elinor M. Brent Dyer ('Chalet School') and Enid Blyton ('St Clares'; 'Malory Towers') and discusses the types of recurring patterns that mark out girls' school stories from the 1920s to the 1960s. Examples of these include 'The Schoolgirl Code', the importance of 'games', the prefect system, types of heroines, the significance of school-girl friendships, role models, the rejection of social distinctions and preparation for adulthood. These books, one finds, offer girls a form of affirmation of the right way to live. There is also an interesting section on the 'sexology' of girls' school stories: crushes, spinster teachers and tomboys. Of Miss Peters in the Malory Towers books ('tall, mannish, with very soft hair and a deep voice'):

The girls liked her, but sometimes they wished she would not treat them as though they were boys. She had a hearty laugh, and a hearty manner.

Our knowing parody is never far from lines such as these:

"So there grew up a real understanding between the form mistress and Bill [aka Wilhelmina], delightful to them both." (Third Year at Malory Towers)

As Auchmuty notes, the 'problem' of spinster teachers - sexual failures or sexual dangers? - plays out in the subtexts of these books, but we should also bear in mind that the majority of teachers were women in the era 1921-1931, with the censuses for those years indicating further that 85% of female teachers were unmarried. This is a reflection, too, on a bar on married women as teachers.  

A World of Girls is filled with much well-chosen material taken from the school stories, and from academic writings on girls' education and feminist topics. Auchmuty's observations are always pertinent and well expressed. This is an intriguing and amusing read and will make you want to go read those school stories again. 

Rating: 8/10.

If you liked this... I'm going to add her book A World of Women: Growing Up in the Girls' School Story to my wish-list.

{review} relaxing reads

At Christmas time I like to revisit old favourites. They are a sure salve against the craziness and don't require a big effort to concentrate when all hell is breaking loose around the reader. I might turn to a much-loved Agatha Christie or - returning right to basics - an Enid Blyton or a W.E. Johns. To sit back with a G&T and relax with an old friend is a huge luxury at this time of year. 

So, Biggles in the Baltic: an all-time favourite, from the opening paragraph that 'England is now, therefore, in a state of war with Germany' right to the spectacular end on a tiny island in the Baltic Sea where Biggles has been sent to set up a secret squadron. His arch-enemy Erich von Stahlein is in the picture again (love his 'lithe' menacing figure) and everything ends with a bang. Classic children's adventure fiction. 

Pour me another gin.

This jacket comes from fantastic fiction.

{review} gimlet lends a hand

W. E. Johns Gimlet Lends a Hand (1949).

Image source (I read the same edition)

£10,000 is offered for the services of a man accustomed to living dangerously. Must be physically fit, prepared to go anywhere, possess a high degree of initiative and able to furnish highest references concerning moral character. Familiarity with lethal weapons and ability to speak colloquial French are essential qualifications. Apply in first instance to Box 4791.

I re-read Gimlet Lends a Hand for the umpteenth time earlier this year when I was planning a trip to the South of France. My reading program for this visit was somewhat eccentric, I suppose: W. E. Johns Biggles 'Fails to Return' (1943; set around Nice/Monaco); Ernest Hemingway Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises (1926; I didn't get as far as Biarritz); and, for my more northerly plans, Mabel Esther Allan It Happened in Arles (1964); Fred Vargas Seeking Whom He May Devour (2004). I ran out of time before I could reacquaint myself with Worrals' adventure in the Cévennes (W. E. Johns Worrals on the Warpath, 1943; I did see a bit of the Camargue tho'). Anyway, that sort of thing. As you can see, the modern world doesn't hold that many attractions for me, though I appreciate a good en-suite bathroom.

This book can barely be termed a 'Gimlet' one, since Captain Lorrington 'Gimlet' King doesn't appear until near the end. Instead this is about Nigel 'Cub' Peters, Gimlet's young protégé, and his Second World War commando comrades-in-arms, the French-Canadian 'Trapper' and the Cockney 'Copper'. Then again, it is really Cub who is the hero of the entire series although it is his Skipper Gimlet's strong moral presence and sense of daring which inspires so many of his actions.

To business: Cub takes a job to find a kidnapped child who is being held in a mountain village somewhere in the South of France. The scenery is spectacular – Roman aqueducts, dodgy cafés in Nice, ruined medieval chateaux – and the cast of characters are suitably exotic – American gangsters, gypsies with hearts of gold, and a dubious effete poet (the effete, with the exception of Gimlet himself, are always villainous). Of course, Cub will triumph, though not before Gimlet has to 'lend a hand' to save the day.

The series which followed the spectacular WW2 books (particularly Gimlet, King of the Commandos, 1943) are always well-written and have gripping and imaginative narratives. W. E. Johns, it is quite clear, was never daunted by the end of hostilities cutting off his subject matter and all his three major heroes (Biggles, Gimlet, Worrals) managed very interesting after-lives. I particular enjoyed the ingenuity of Gimlet Mops Up (1947) where a group of vengeance-fuelled Nazis do a sort of reverse Nuremberg and establish their own war crimes tribunal – everyone's guilty – and execute their 'guilty' victims in various dirty underhand ways (and in fancy dress). They try to bump Gimlet off while he's judging the local flower show. That some allied atrocities could be perceived in the same light as those of the Axis is, of course, never fully explored.

Don't over-analyse children's books – but bear in mind that they're written by adults with issues… I try to remember, quite successfully, that it was the Biggles' books which fuelled my love of reading as a child and made me the avid reader and nostalgic traveller I am today.

Rating: 7/10.

If you liked this... you'll have to go secondhand as it is well and truly out of print.

{lit link}

Heinrich Hoffmann's 

Struwwelpeter (1844)

reassessed in

The New Republic

(15 April 2010)

{reviews} it happened in arles

Mabel Esther Allan It Happened in Arles (1964)

Another much loved, much re-read book. My copy was 30 cents from my old high school's library sale. A young English girl, on the cusp of adulthood, goes to visit her cousin in Arles and discovers mystery, intrigue and romance. 

Sitting there, the past was strangely, heavily upon me, and it was so all the time I was in Arles. The vague menace of ancient history seemed to rise up from the stones everywhere I went, but later I got it mixed up with a menace that was much more modern.

Mabel Esther Allan was a prolific writer (see here, here, here) of children's stories filled with well-mannered decent young English/Scot/Manx boys and girls who go on holidays (or to school or ballet lessons) and encounter adventures which test their character and from which they emerge strong and morally reinforced. There are lots of nice frocks, gloves and sensible but pretty sandals. The protagonists have lovely and unusual names: in this case, Damaris Cleveland. Tourist sites are rarely dirty, over-priced or filled with undesirables. Beds don't have bugs. The food is always plentiful, although it may be strange to English tastes. Taking a photo takes a long time (and you have this amount of time, since travel is leisurely). And sometimes you take a photo of a murder... 

This is what happens to lovelorn Damaris Cleveland as she whiles away her time in Arles (her cousin having conveniently broken her foot) and very soon she is being pursued by French gangsters, her room is robbed, her host family's son is arrested and she encounters a brave young Englishman named Thomas who saves her life.

I visited Arles in February and it was just as beautiful as Allan's descriptions. I thought to myself that one day I would return and stay for a month. Sadly I don't think there are enough months to spare to spend one everywhere I fall in love.

This book appeared in 1964 and it gives one a pang of sorrow to think of how brutal and ugly the close of that decade (and that which followed) would be. You can't picture a Mabel Esther Allan heroine at Altamont.

Rating: 7/10.

If you liked this... I notice that fidra books are republishing some of Allan's books but I have not had one in my hand to assess the quality. I have Two in the Western Isles (1956) somewhere to read. If you like this sort of genre, I'd recommend Rumer Godden's The Greengage Summer (review here).

{wishlist}

Begging to join the groaning shelves this week: 

Alan Bradley (2010):

The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag

Waiting for the paperback. I'm terrified that 

this won't live up to the first Flavia de Luce 

and am refusing to read any reviews.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is my choice for the 2009/10 second-best 'book set in a country house'. The first place went to Sarah Waters' magnificent The Little Stranger (2009).

{review} daddy-long-legs

Jean Webster Daddy-Long-Legs (1912).

This is the cover of my 1954 copy of Daddy-Long-Legs, which I found in a second-hand bookshop in Perth for a measly $7:

I can't believe that I didn't read this wonderful book in my youth. It is quite magical and I think I might sit down and re-read it immediately. Just as soon as I download all the other books by Jean Webster (they're mostly available for free on-line). Puffin are going to reprint Daddy-Long-Legs soon too:

I loved the film (how could one not like a Fred Astaire film, although the age-gap between Astaire and Caron was considerably more than in the book):

Jerusha Abbott is an orphan miraculously taken under the wing of an anonymous benefactor who sends her to a nice ladies' college of the Vassar type and provides an income so that she can fulfil her promise of becoming a writer. Summer holidays are to be spent on a farm working at her craft. In exchange? Once a month, Judy - as she now becomes - must write her guardian a letter about her life. She will never hear from or meet Daddy-Long-Legs, as she calls him - having spied his elongated shadow on the orphanage wall - and she is not to ask any questions about him. Judy's letters are a delight as we learn how she adapts to college life and to having money to spend on clothes and entertainment for the first time in her life. Her letters reveal snippets of the ills of life as the oldest orphan and we watch as she flowers intellectually and physically. Romance enters her life in the form of a room-mate's "big, good-looking brother" and, most spectacularly, another room-mate's wealthy older uncle Jervis - all of which she documents to Daddy-Long-Legs. Can't give away the rest (though it's pretty obvious).

I hope he'll [Jervis] come soon; I am longing for someone to talk to. Mrs. Semple, to tell you the truth, gets rather monotonous. She never lets ideas interrupt the easy flow of her conversation. It's a funny thing about people here. Their world is just this single hilltop. They are not a bit universal, if you know what I mean. It's exactly the same as at the John Grier Home. Our ideas there were bounded by the four sides of the iron fence, only I didn't mind it so much because I was younger, and was so awfully busy. By the time I'd got all my beds made and my babies' faces washed and had gone to school and come home and had washed their faces again and darned their stockings and mended Freddie Perkin's trousers (he tore them every day of his life) and learned my lessons in between - I was ready to go to bed, and I didn't notice any lack of social intercourse. But after two years in a conversational college, I do miss it; and I shall be glad to see somebody who speaks my language.

It is remarkably undated, apart from references to women not having the vote. Loved it: laughed, cried, rushed out and bought the 'sequel' Dear Enemy on ebay before I discovered it for free everywhere.

Rating: 10/10.

If you liked this... I want to read Anne of Green Gables again. Not that other red-headed Orphan Annie though. Failing that: Patrick Dennis' Auntie Mame.