A Barrowful of Bacon, and Coffee by the Tubload

It's September, and Elizabeth von Arnim's Solitary Summer has run its course with the arrival of 500 soldiers (and their horses), who are being quartered at the farm, and 30 officers (plus their servants) who are staying in the house. In addition there are other officers billeted in surrounding villages who must be invited to dinner. Actually, according to Elizabeth, 'quartering' is not accurate and she prefers the German word Einquartierung. Since I never studied German (I did Latin, and was very bad at it) I cannot tell you what this means, but whatever the definition, Elizabeth gives a detailed account of the disruption caused by the military visitors.

She describes the two-week event as an epidemic which 'rages' at the end of almost every summer:

'… when cottages and farms swarm with soldiers and horses, when all the female part of the population gets engaged to be married and will not work, when all the male part is jealous and wants to fight, and when my house is crowded with individuals so brilliant and decorative in their dazzling uniforms that I wish I might keep a bunch of the tallest and slenderest for ever in a big china vase in a corner of the drawing-room.'

The 'holy calm' of her home is disrupted by the clanking of officers and the 'grievous wailings' of her servants, who are faced with a massive amount of extra work in the main house. And, since there is no room on the farm for all the extra men and horses, the Man of Wrath has ordered temporary sheds to be erected, to provide stables, dormitories where the soldiers can sleep, and dining rooms where they can eat.

'Nor is it easy to cook for five hundred people more than usual, and all the ordinary business of the farm comes to a standstill while the hands prepare barrowfuls of bacon and potatoes, and stir up coffee and milk sugar together with a pole in a tub.'

I love that image of the agricultural workers boiling up vast quantities of coffee for the soldiers – and I only hope harvest was over by the time the army arrived!

Elizabeth and her husband receive six pfennigs a day for providing accommodation for a common soldier, and another six pfennigs a day for his horse, with an additional daily payment of eight pfennigs for food – the daily allowance of provisions for each man is two pounds of bread, half a pound of meat, a quarter of a pound of bacon, and either a quarter of a pound of rice or barley, or three pounds of potatoes.

There is a higher rate of pay for taking in officers – two marks fifty a day, without wine. Presumably officers, being from a higher social class, get better food, as well as enjoying the company of the von Arnims. But they create a lot of extra work:

'The thirty we have now do not, as I could have wished, all go out together in the morning and stay out till the evening, but some go out as others come in, and breakfast is not finished till lunch begins, and lunch drags on till dinner, and all day long the dining-room is full of meals and officers, and we ceased a week ago to have the least feeling that the place, after all, belongs to us.'

They must have needed bedding as well, but Elizabeth doesn't mention this. Did the house have that many extra beds, along with sheets, blankets and pillows, or did the officers kip on the floor, curled up in the 19^th century equivalent of a sleeping bag which they (or, more likely, their servants) carried around with them?

The whole thing reminds me of one of the royal progresses when medieval and Tudor monarchs upped sticks and marched the entire court around the country, staying at other people's castles and stately homes, generally at great expense and considerable inconvenience to their host.

All in all, Elizabeth believes herself to be a much-tried woman, and she has a point. Her soldiers, whom I assume were on some kind of manoeuvres in the area, include the 'upper' part of the regimental band (by this I think she means instruments with higher notes – the bass musicians are in the next village) and the men march past the window, playing their instruments, at six in the morning.

And she is kept busy all day as she organises the household, tries to keep things running smoothly, soothes the servants' shattered nerves, makes amiable conversation with the officers, and tries to look happy. But she longs to be out in her garden, inhaling the perfume of roses and ripe fruits, enjoying the sunshine, admiring her plants, and listening to the bees and the larks.

In fact, she tells us, she prefers larks to the beautiful, charming young men who have invaded her home. She goes on to discuss the various ranks of officer (no-one lower than a colonel pleases her) and how difficult it is to talk to a lieutenant - and she recalls the visit of one such young man earlier in the year, who was especially tiresome, although he was

'.. the most beautiful specimen of his class that I have ever seen, so beautiful indeed in his white uniform that the babies took him for an angel-visitant of the type that visited Abraham and Sarah, and began in whispers to argue about wings.'

In her final, brief 'entry', for October 1, Elizabeth insists she has never spent a happier summer, but admits that being solitary has not helped her soul grow. And so we love her, her head resting on the Man of Wrath's shoulder, his arm encircling her waist. What, as she asks us, could possibly be more praiseworthy, or more picturesque?

NB: I've re-posted this because I had it and scheduled, and when I came to check it things were all muddled up and looked very peculiar indeed.

Lupins, Radishes, and Triangular Dances

August has come, and has clothed the hills with golden lupins, and filled the grassy banks with harebells. The yellow fields of lupins are so gorgeous on cloudless days that I have neglected the forests lately and drive in the open, so that I may revel in their scent while feasting my eyes on their beauty.

So opens Elizabeth von Arnim's chapter on August in her book The Solitary Summer, which is written in the form of a diary. And, as with some of the other flowers she describes, I suspect that these plants must be very different to the hybridised garden varieties we know today. Modern lupins come in a huge range of pinks and purples, but I cannot call their perfume to mind, so perhaps von Arnim's beautiful blooms were wild flowers.

And here, in her first 'entry' for the month, the writer who sought solitude seeks a companion with whom she can share the pleasure of the lupins. “I am frightened once more at the solitariness in which we each of us live,” she writes, and tells us that only one of her many friends has similar tastes – and that they almost fell out because this particular friend would not like to be a goose-girl! Von Arnim who, it has to be said, has a very romantic view of rural life and country folk, says: “For six months of the year I would be happier than any queen I ever heard of , minding the fat white things.” She would, she adds, keep one eye on the geese, and one on a volume of Wordsworth (overlooking the fact that goose-girls couldn't read, and were unable to return to 'civilised life' during the winter). But nevertheless, she does present a charming view of her imaginary rural idyll.

Visits to the 'middle class' seaside and the pleasures of food come under her scrutiny, but by August 16 she is still concerned with her garden, which should be beautiful from 'end to end'.

It makes one so healthy to live in a garden, so healthy in mind as well as body, and when I say moles and late frosts are my worst enemies, it only shows how I could not now if I tried sit down and brood over my own or my neighbour's sins, and how the breezes in my garden have blown away all those worries and vexations and bitternesses that are the lot of those who live in a crowd.

Her joy in nature, and her love of life, are so enthusiastic that I cannot help but smile with her, and sympathise when she recalls the pious missionary who told her off for being happy when we live in a 'vale of woe'. And I can only agree when she says that if she is miserable and discontented it will not help anyone else.

There's a charming interlude when she discusses naughty boys with the April, May and June babies, who persist in speaking in their usual mix of English and German, with only the occasional word of French. When von Arnim remonstrates with them, she is told that while Seraphines speak French to children, mothers do not (Seraphine is their nurse) and the conversation ends in tears – so she organises a 'ball' for them, where they dance in triangles round the pillar in the library, while she plays cheerful tunes on the piano, before they eat radishes for supper (which give them nightmares) and curtsey before they go to bed. It all sounded a bit a like the impromptu indoor picnics we used to organise for our daughters when they were small, and they ate a back-to-front meal (pudding first) and danced madly round the room while the Man Of The House played his own folk-style nursery rhymes on the guitar. My memories seemed to bring von Arnim closer, and I thought mothers and young children have not really changed all that much over the years.

Later she visits the mill, where the water is 'ablaze with the red reflection of the sky' and the pools are full of water-lilies and eels. This time she doesn't go boating, but she recalls how the miller is always uneasy when she goes punting, for he insists that 'people with petticoats' were never intended for punts and 'their only chance of safety lay in dry land and keeping quiet'. She is tired, so she sits quietly sipping tea and reading Goethe's 'Sorrows of Werther'.

Yellow water-lilies floating in the water.

Sitting there long after it was too dark to read, I thought of the old miller's words, and agreed with him that the best thing a woman can do in this world is to keep quiet... Keep quiet and say one's prayers – certainly not merely the best, but the only things to do if one would be truly happy; but ashamed of asking when I have received so much, the only form of prayer I would use would be a form of thanksgiving.

I don't know that keeping quiet is necessarily the kind of advice that would be welcomed by women in the 21st century, but perhaps counting one's blessings is not such a bad thing.

The Solitary Summer in July

Well, it's mid-way through July already, so I thought I'd take take a quick look at the month's happenings in Elizabeth von Arnim's wonderful The Solitary Summer, which has an unexpectedly serious note. In her first entry (for the first of the month), she waxes lyrical about sweet-peas, which are her favourite flowers, after roses. She says:

A garden might be made beautiful with sweet-peas alone, and, with hardly any labour, except the sweet labour of picking to prolong the bloom, be turned into a fairy bower of delicacy and refinement.

Perhaps modern hybrids are more difficult to grow, or perhaps they've gone out of fashion, but you rarely seem to see them these days, and I've never had any luck growing them, but I love the delicate pastel blooms, and the wonderful perfume they give off. Anyway, Elizabeth is shocked to find the head inspector's wife has no sweet peas, but grows 'exceedingly vulgar' red herbaceous peonies in her garden.

Elizabeth von Arnim's comments about sweet peas,
 and a fairy bower, reminded me of Cicely Mary Barker's
painting of the Sweet Pea Fairies.

And there is domestic drama when the June baby falls into a slimy, smelly farmyard pond and is brought home looking like 'a green and speckled frog', so all the children are dosed with castor oil, as a preventative measure against typhoid, and kept in bed for three days, which seems a little extreme, but it did remind me of the various accidents and illnesses my daughters suffered when they were small, and how I over-reacted and always assumed the worst!

But they did nothing, except be uproarious, and sing at the top of their voices, and clamour for more dinner than I felt would be appropriate for babies who were going to be dangerously ill in a few hours; and so, after due waiting, they were got up and dressed and turned loose again, and from that day to this no symptoms have appeared.

On the 15^th there's a contrast in tone and subject as we get a glimpse of life in the one-roomed back-to-back cottages where the farm workers live, which are so very different to her own castle home.

The village consists of one street running parallel to the outer buildings of the farm, and the cottages are one-storied, each with rooms for four families – two in front looking on to the wall of the farmyard, which is the fashionable side, and two at ther back, looking on to nothing more exhilarating than their own pigstyes. Each family has one room and a larder sort of place, and share the kitchen with the family on the opposite side of the entrance; but the women prefer doing their cooking at the grate in their own room rather than expose the contents of their pots to the ill-natured comments of a neighbour. On the fashionable side there is a little fenced-in garden for every family, where fowls walk about pensively and meditate beneath the scarlet-runners (for all the world like me in my garden), and hollyhocks tower above the drying linen, and fuel, stolen from our woods, is stacked for winter use; but on the other side you walk straight out into manure and pigs.

Life there can't have been too dissimilar to that of the Birmingham Back-to-Backs, but although Elizabeth describes the conditions, she has no real insight into the way people must feel. She writes about their beds, 'rather narrower than a single bed', where mother, father and a baby manage to sleep 'very well' with three of four children in another such bed in the corner. She cannot understand how so many people sleep in one bed, but attributes it to 'no nerves, and a thick skin', which shows a lack of insight into their lives, for they have no choice.

We see her visiting the poor and offering advice – often on the benefits of fresh air, and seeking (and following medical) advice. She is uneasy with the role of Lady Bountiful, and whilst she can see that conditions are not right, she has little idea of how to change things, and is bewildered by the ignorance she encounters. However, just as my Socialist principles come rushing to the fore, and  I'm thinking 'just stick to the gardening Elizabeth', she endears herself to me by admitting:

But how useless to try and discover what their views really are. I can imagine what I like about them, and am fairly certain to imagine wrong. I have no real conception of their attitude towards life, and all I can do is to talk to them kindly when they are in trouble, and as often as I can give them nice things to eat.

When she does try to do something more practical, her efforts are spurned.

Shocked at the horrors that must surround these poor women at the birth of their babes, I asked the Man of Wrath to try and make some arrangements that would ensure their quiet at those times. He put aside a little cottage at the end of the street as a home for them in their confinements, and I furnished it, and made it clean and bright and pretty. A nurse was permanently engaged, and I thought with delight of the unspeakable blessing and comfort it was going to be.

But none of the women would use it, and at the end of year it was let out to a family, and the nurse dismissed. She has more success helping one of their grooms when he gets a housemaid into trouble, for the Man of Wrath agrees the young couple can live in an empty room above the stable, and he buys 'what is needful', but insists they must pay him back. In this chapter the change in outlook on relationship issues like sex before marriage, and babies born out of wedlock is very clear – when the book was written it was a sin, but but Elizabeth finds she cannot chastise this particular couple.

A Garden by Moonlight

Right, here is this month's instalment from Elizabeth von Arnim's The Solitary Summer, which I was going to post tomorrow, since one of the 'entries' is for June 16. However, tomorrow is my Saturday Snapshots day, so today we will enjoy Elizabeth's garden, and her reflections on life, the universe and everything – all of which makes her something of an icon as far as I'm concerned. And not only that, but she writes beautifully.

Her first 'entry' for the month is June 3, when she tells us:

The verandah at two o'clock on a summer's afternoon is a place in which to be happy and not decide anything, as my friend Thoreau told me of some other tranquil spot this morning. The chairs are comfortable, there is a table to write on, and the shadows of young leaves flicker across the paper. On one side a Crimson Rambler is thrusting inquisitive shoots through the wooden bars, being able this year for the first time since it was planted to see what I am doing up here, and next to it a Jackmanni clematis clings with soft young fingers to anything it thinks likely to hep it up to the goal of its ambition, the roof. I wonder which of the two will get there first.”

One of my roses - I think it's beautiful, though it's obviously
not in the same league as the roses in Elizabeth's garden.

It sounds so comfortable and pretty I considered sitting in my own small garden to write this while observing the roses (unnamed I afraid) which are trying to cover the fence. There's a honeysuckle there as well, and some jasmine, both of which I grew from cuttings. Sadly, it is too cold and windy to sit outside, and although it is not raining today the garden chairs are so waterlogged they feel as if they will never dry out.

Anyway, Elizabeth's thoughts stray to her children, for through the open window she can hear the two eldest 'babies' at their lessons (the village schoolmaster gives them lessons for a couple of hours every afternoon), and she writes:

I hope he will be more successful than I was in teaching them Bible stories. I never got farther than Noah, at which stage their questions became so searching as to completely confound me; and as no one likes being confounded, and it is especially regrettable when a parent is placed in such a position, I brought the course to an abrupt end by assuming that owl-like air of wisdom peculiar to infallibility in a corner, and telling them they were too young to understand these things for the present; and they, having a touching faith in every word I say, gave three contented little purrs of assent, and proposed that we should play instead at rolling down the grass bank under the south windows...

On June 16 she describes how on the previous day (June 15 – so there is a link to today) she stole through the house at three in the morning, and let herself out into into a wonderful, unknown world. It's one of the most magical passages in the book.

I stood for a few minutes motionless on the steps, almost frightened by the awful purity of nature, when all the sin and ugliness is shut up and asleep, and there is nothing but the beauty left. It was quite light, yet a bright moon hung in the cloudless grey-blue sky; the flowers were all awake, saturating the air with scent; and a nightingale sat on a hornbeam quite close to me, in loud raptures at the coming of the sun. There in front of me was the sun-dial, there were the rose bushes, there was the bunch of pansies I had dropped the night before still lying on the path, but how strange and unfamiliar it all looked, and how holy – as though God must be walking there in the cool of the day.

But after breakfast she cannot believe it is the same garden, because the wind blows, and there are angry showers. It is so gloomy that in the evening, despite her wish for solitude, she welcomes a visit from the 'least objectional' of the candidates seeking a position as parson on the estate. She despises herself for feeling pleased to see a visitor but, with a fine sense of irony, decides that such is the weakness of the female mind, coupled with the effect of a two-day gale after two months alone.

After meeting the impoverished parson, and listening to him talk about his family, and his struggles to make ends meet, Elizabeth reflects on the daily task of distributing sausages (which she hates) to the servants, and the problems of being both poor and genteel, in which case she would sit with a piece of bread, a pot geranium, and a book. Then she would buy a radish, and eat it wit the bread, sitting under a tree, and feed crumbs to a robin, and no creature would be happier.

It sounds an unlikely scenario for someone in her position, but she does seem to have had the gift of taking pleasure from the simple things in life.

Ellizabeth von Arnim

Elizabeth von Arnim, born Mary Annette Beauchamp, was the daughter of a wealthy shipping magnate. She met Count Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin (her first husband) in Italy in 1889, when she was 23 and he was a 38-year-old widower. They lived in Berlin for five years, then moved to his family's vast estate at Nassenheide, in Pomerania, which was then part of Prussia.

There, she obviously led a cushioned existence, but in her writing she is quite satirical about the Germans' social conventions and way of life. She didn't enjoy entertaining visitors and playing lady bountiful to poor tenants and servants, and would rather spend her her time reading and thinking as she wandered about the garden and the fields, forests and farms. It is obvious from 'The Solitary Summer' that she was a great reader, who loved her favourite authors, for she talks about them as if they are having conversations with her, whether they are alive or dead.

She loved living on the estate, but in 1908 it was sold to pay off the count's debts, and Elizabeth – who became known by her pen name – moved to England. Her husband died two years later. 


My original post is at http://chriscross-thebooktrunk.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/what-blessing-it-is-to-love-books-and.html

What a Blessing it is to Love Books - and Gardens

The cover on my 1992 Virago edition
bears a detail from Vase aux Anemones,
1942, by Marevn (Maria Morobieff)

This week I have been busy in the garden, trying to restore some kind of order by pulling up weeds, which always reminds me of Persephone, because in the version of the myth I read as a child she was tugging at a particularly tough plant, and when it finally came out it left a huge hole in the ground, from which Hades, God of the Underworld, emerged and carried her off to his domain. All things considered, coping with slugs and snails should be quite simple compared to what Persephone had to contend with.

Anyway, there I was, hot, tired and cross, all ready to relax with a good book – and I decided the perfect volume to read in the garden on a hot, sunny day was The Solitary Summer, by Elizabeth von Arnim, so I’ve been joyfully rediscovering it after an absence of several years. Published in 1899, it’s a follow-up to Elizabeth and her German Garden and is, I think, even better, linking the garden, life and books in a series of essays or discourses, rather than a conventional novel.

It’s written in the form of a diary, with two entries a month from May to September, and one for October, so I’ve decided to try and post a few short thoughts, or an extract, over the summer. I’m not always in favour of splitting books into sections, because I can never manage to restrain myself to a slow read over a period of time – once I’ve started, I have to find out what happens (unless, of course, it’s a book I don’t like). But this lends itself to that approach, and is worth taking a closer look at. So, having read it in one sitting I can revisit the individual chapters in a more leisurely fashion.

It’s an enchanting book, witty, light-hearted and beautifully written – but be warned, Elizabeth von Arnim is very much a product of her time and class, and on occasions she can come across as more than a little snobbish. However, she has the ability to laugh at herself, and her joy in life is infectious.

The book opens with her desire to be alone for the whole summer, so she can enjoy her garden undisturbed by visitors. In the first entry, for May 2, she tells us: “I shall be perpetually happy, because there will be no-one to bother me.” Her prosaic husband, the Man of Wrath, warns that she will get her feet damp, catch cold, and be dull. But she waxes lyrical about the joys of a solitary life, the peace she will find, and the beauties of nature.

Each chapter has one of these drawings at the beginning but,
sadly, there seems to be no attribution

I suppose these days many people might regard the way she writes about her garden as overly sentimental, but I enjoy her style, and she has a keen eye for nature. Describing her tulips, she says: “The only ones I exclude are the rose-coloured ones; but scarlet, gold, delicate pink, and white are all there, and the effect is infinitely enchanting. The forget-me-nots grow taller as the tulips go off, and will presently tenderly engulf them altogether, and so hide the shame of their decay in their kindly little arms.” Don’t you think that’s a lovely (and accurate) account of the way tulips go over, and get swallowed up by airy clouds of sky blue myosotis?

Elizabeth von Arnim was born Mary Annette
Beauchamp. Her first husband was Count
Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenchin

The Solitary Summer, like many of Elizabeth’s other books, draws on her own life, and reflects her love of the garden – and her love of books, as the entry for May 15 shows. For her, each author and book must be read in a particular place, at a particular time of day.  Thoreau, one of her favourites, is best savoured outside, by a pond, because he likes the open air, but Boswell is deemed unsuitable for the great outdoors.

“So I read and laugh over my Boswell in the library, when the lamps are lit, buried in  cushions and surrounded by every sign of civilisation, with the drawn curtains shutting out the garden and  country solitude so much disliked by sage and disciple,” Elizabeth writes.

Afternoons are for pottering in the garden with Goethe, while in the evening, when everything is tired and quiet, she sits by the rose beds with Walt Whitman and listens to what he has to tell her of night, sleep, death and the stars.

And who could argue when she says: “What a blessing it is to love books. Everybody must love something, and I know of no objects of love that give such unfailing returns as books and a garden.”