A Dinner Party from Hell

This is my copy, found in the Oxfam
Book Shop, published by Fontana.

Injury Time by Beryl Bainbridge features a dinner party from hell. Forget 'Abigail's Party', this is far, far worse. Accountant Edward Freeman has agreed to have a meal at the home of his mistress Binny and, at her insistence, has invited along another couple, which obviously makes for a rather difficult situation. He tells his wife he may be working late (again) and reckons he won't arouse her suspicions because he'll be home at a reasonable time.

But things don't go according to plan. First there is the unexpected arrival of Binny's friend Alma, who is fond of 'little swiggies' of whisky (or any other alcohol that's available). Then a gang of armed bank robbers burst through the door and things go from bad to worse as the disparate group is held hostage. While police, reporters and the general public gather outside, a grim drama is played out inside.

As you would expect from Bainbridge, it's darkly funny: she's a keen observer of the absurdities of human behaviour, and portrays them with an ascerbic wit. Take Binnie's attitude towards her son and daughters. We may not like to admit it, and wouldn't express in these terms, but I'm sure most mothers have felt like this at some stage:

Being consantly with the children was like wearing a pair of shoes that were expensive and too small. She couldn't bear to throw them out, but they gave her blisters.

Bainbridge is also good on setting the scene. Perhaps it's due to her early days with a repertory company, but she describes places as if they were stage sets. The view outside is bleak: there are eggshells in the hedge, barbed wire in the garden (to keep the cats out) and when the curtains fell down Binny never replaced them. The view of urban decay is reflected inside Binny's grimy, untidy home by the decay of hope and love.

Over the course of a few hours the captives build a relationship with their captors – despite the horror of the situation, they seem to feel a degree of sympathy for the robbers, and they accept what is happening. They seem apathetic, yet at the same time they almost welcome the intrusion, which brings excitement into their lives.

I prefer this cover!

Ginger and Harry entered the room. Edward caught himself noding. It was like growing familiar with people on the television – actors, celebrities – and then seeing them on the tube or in a restaurant. One imagined one knew them socially.

They don't question their unwelcome guests, or make judgements about them – unlike the robbers themselves, who are horrified by Binny's lack of housewifely skills, and the fact that she is having an affair with a married man.

As time passes secrets come to light, and relationships shift and change, but no-one fully engages with anyone else – indeed, I don't think they ever did. The hostages remain passive: there is little they can do to escape or take control, but they have lost control of their lives long, long ago.

Things happen for no particular reason, and there is never an explanation, but life is never tidy and clear-cut.

Snapshot of a Lighthouse with no Light!

Lighthouse on a hill: The Sir John Barrow Monument in Cumbria.

Today's Saturday Snapshot may look like a lighthouse on a hill, but it's never had a lamp, and it's not on the coast (although it does look out across Morecambe Bay). Perched on the top of Hoad Hill, in the Cumbrian town of Ulverston, it's known to residents as the Memorial, and was built to honour Sir John Barrow, who was a great traveller and naval man. Wherever you go in the town you can't escape it, and it's visible for miles around – when our daughters were small and we travelled up there they would watch eagerly through the car windows, each wanting to catch the first glimpse of the inland lighthouse.

Smeaton's Tower, on Plymouth Hoe, which we
visited a couple of months ago - do you think
the Monument pictured above looks like this?

Owned by the Sir John Barrow Trust, which is part of Ulverston Town Council, the Monument has been extensively repaired and restored in recent years, thanks to a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, and a lot of hard work from the Friends of the Sir John Barrow Monument and the Ulverston Partnership. The structure is based on one of the lighthouses built at the Eddystone Rocks at Plymouth – there have been four over the centuries, and the upper part of this particular one, known as Smeaton's Tower, stands up on the Hoe, where Drake played bowls while he waited for the Armada to arrive, but that's another story... 

Sir John Barrow's birthplace at Dragley Beck. In his day the cottage
 had a thatched roof, but since then it's been replaced with slate.

Sir John Barrow (by the way, his name is nothing to do with the nearby town of Barrow in Furness) was the son of a tanner. He left school at 13 to work as clerk in iron foundry, then joined a whaling trip to Greenland, and was part of a British Embassy expedition to China. His diplomatic work also took him to the Cape of Good Hope, where he married and set up home, but he returned to England in 1804 to become Second Secretary to the Admiralty – a position he held until 1845.

By the cottage is Dragley Beck, from which the area
takes its name. A beck is a stream, and this is not
very big, but just before we were there it was a raging
torrent and flooded the road and surrounding land.

To get back to Sir John, he was born in 1746, at Dragley Beck, which must once have been a small village, or even a hamlet, but is now on the outskirts of Ulverston. The cottage where his family lived still stands and is occasionally open to visitors. It was shut during our visit to the area, but we have been inside because years ago it was a sweet shop, and I can remember going in with the girls, when it seemed to be very dark and musty. However, I assume restoration work has been carried out since then, and it is probably very different. We passed it each time we walked into Ulverston from the campsite where we stayed, and in the town itself one of the little alleyways off the main street has the most amazing murals showing Sir John's life and achievements. There are a series of beautiful, colourful paintings along each wall, and they are much too big to get into one photograph.

One of the wall paintings showing the young John Barrow -
you can see his cottage in the background.

A keen astronomer, he helped develop navigation techniques, was a founder member of Royal Geographic Society, and promoted British exploration in various parts of the globe, including West Africa, and the north polar region, as well as supporting the search for a north west passage through the Canadian Arctic. During his retirement he wrote his autobiography and compiled a history of Arctic voyages.

Another part of the mural celebrating Sir John Barrow's work.
I think this is such a fantastic way to remember someone.

Sir Robert Peel (MP for my home town of Tamworth), made him a baronet, in 1835, while Barrow Strait, Barrow Sound, Barrow Point and Cape Barrow were all named after him. And after his death in1848, at the age of 84, Ulverston honoured him by raising £1,250 through public subscription and building a lighthouse, with a lower room for a Keeper, and 112 steps leading to the lightless lantern room. Some 8,000 people climbed the hill for a special ceremony when the foundation stone was laid in 1850, and they must have been been jolly fit, because Hoad Hill is pretty steep. Mind you, all the hills on the Furness Peninsula seem pretty steep, and although we always promise ourselves we will walk up this one and look inside the Monument, we never do. 

A  colourful panel marks the start of work on the Monument.

  The Man of the House, who scrambled to the top when he was younger and slimmer, remembers buying fizzy pop and snacks there, and says you weren't allowed to climb the Monument in bad weather, which sounds sensible (I think a flag flies to show when it is open). The ground was certainly muddy after all the rain, and quite windy, and the thought of staggering 450 feet to the summit, then crawling up a spiral staircase which is almost 100 feet high, was singularly unappealing – so we wimped out again!

For more Saturday Snapshots see  Alice's blog at http://athomewithbooks.net/

A Heroine who is Hard to Like

Henrietta was third daughter and fifth child of Mr and Mrs Symons, so that enthusiasm for babies had declined in both parents by the time she arrived. Still, in her first few months she was bound to be important and take up a great deal of time. When she was two another boy was born, and she lost the honourable position of youngest. At five her life attained its zenith.... When she was eight her zenith was past, and her plain stage began. Her charm departed never to return, and she slipped back into insignificance.

These opening lines of Flora MacDonald Mayor's The Third Miss Symons gave me high hopes for this novel, and I liked that rather ironic, detached tone, and the exploration of relations within a family. But overall I was disappointed and I found it hard to like Henrietta – or Etta, as she is known to her family - and it's a somewhat bleak tale.

Henrietta reminded me of Alex, in EM Delafield's 'Cosequences' (http://chriscross-thebooktrunk.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/consequences-beware-of-spoilers.html ). They are set in a similar period, and although Mr and Mrs Symons are middle class their attitude towards their offspring is very much like that of Alex's aristocratic parents. Mrs Symons is not fond of children (so it's unfortunate really that she has so many of them), while her solcitor husband finds it difficult to provide for his ever-increasing family.

Like Alex, Henrietta is desperate for attention, and wants to be loved – but she doesn't know how to make herself lovable. She' never seems to fit in, and is regarded as 'difficult', so by the age of thirteen she has 'settled down to bad temper as a habit'. she had settled down to bad temper as a habit'. She hopes that when the 'magic season of young ladyhood arrived, a Prince charming would come and fall in love with her'. But it never happens.

The only person Henrietta gets along with is her youngest sister, Evelyn, who she adores, but when she causes a rift between them she becomes even more lonely and bitter, convinced that people despise her, and that nothing ever goes right in her life.

I could see how her experiences soured her and sapped her confidence and, just as with Alex, I felt sorry for an unloved child who grew into an unloved woman - but she was so disagreeable it was difficult to feel any sympathy. And once again I found myself wondering about the way Victorian and Edwardian women were treated, and how that treatment affected their attitude and relationships with their children.

Gardens and Wild Places

Two reviews today as I'm still trying to catch up on posts. The reading is more or less on track, but the writing isn't! There's a link of sorts between these books, since they are both about about the environment, with reflections about man's place within it, and both authors are intelligent, articulate, passionate about their subject, and excellent writers.

First up, The Morville Year, by Katherine Swift. Her earlier book, 'The Morville Hours', which charts her creation of a garden in the grounds of the Dower House, at Morville, in Shropshire, is a superb mix of gardening know-how, history and folk-lore, with a rich appreciation of the natural world and the passing of the seasons. 'The Morville Year', which is every bit as good, is a selection of the weekly articles she wrote for the Saturday edition of The Times between 2001 and 2005. She writes about the weather, her work in the garden, taking up bee-keeping, buying a motorbike, local places events – and, most of all, the plants themselves. In her introduction she explains:

When I began the research that would underpin the garden, I found that every plant had a story – who first grew it or collected it from the wild, gave it a name or painted its picture, wrote a poem about it or used used to cure some ailment? Every one came trailing clouds of glory.

That urge to discover everthing she can about each and every plant makes for some fascinating reading. On 29 January 2009, for example, she discusses the weird world of lichens: there are 1,700 varieties in Britain, and each is made up of two organisms, a fungus and an algae, living in perfect harmony, since neither can exist without the other. And did you know that those bright, crusty-looking orange and yellow lichens, and the flat grey and white ones, only grow on alakine rock, like limestone? And the cushiony green and pink types thrive on acid surfaces like granite, slate and sandstone. And all lichens need a smooth surface – they won't grow on new, smooth, polished gravestones... and they need sunshine... and clean air. I never realised they were so interesting, but I've been looking at them in a whole new light since I read this.

Lichens on an old gravestone at Offchurch, in Warwickshire,
look almost like plants in a rock garden. There seem to be flat
and cushiony ones here, so I'm none the wiser about the rock.

And Swift makes some wonderful observations about plants and wildlife. In one of her October pieces she writes:

The search for hibernation sites is also on for the newly-mated queen bumble-bees and the big brown-and-yellow hornets (surprisingly pacific despite their fearsome appearance) – the Harley-Davidsons of the insect world, with a deep resonant buzz quite unlike the Suzuki whine of the black-and-yellow wasps which have terrorised us all summer.

The comparison may sound odd, but think about it for a moment, and you realise she is absolutely right.

Gardens are generally regarded as well ordered places, where man (or woman) has tamed nature, but Swift is concerned about the extent to which gardeners can relinquish control, stepping back to allow nature to take take a hand and create some wildness.

And it's wildness that attracts Robert MacFarlane. In The Wild Places he takes his interest to what many of us would consider to be extreme levels, for he searches out the most inaccesible places it the British Isles, so remote that the land remains untouched by human activity. Each site he visits has a different landscape – his journeys take in an island, a hidden valley, a moor, a mountain summit, a forest, and an ancient holloway.

Much of his exploration is magical. On the island of Ynys Enlli he watches seals and birds, finds a heart-sized stone of blue basalt, marked with white fossils, and sets 'a thin shell afloat, carrying a cargo of dry thrift heads'. But elsewhere the terrain is almost alien. When he tries to climb the Pinnacle of of Sgurr Dear, above Loch Coruisk, you sense that this land does not wan him there and MacFarlane – who is obviously an experienced traveller well able to cope in adverse conditions – is surprised by his reaction.

I stood, walked to the start of the Pinnacle's incline, and laid a hand against its rock. It was so cold that it sucked the warmth from my skin. But this rock had once been fluid, I thought. Aeons ago it had run and dripped and spat. On either side of the Pinnacle, the ground dropped immediately away. I took a few steps up the fin. Suddenly I felt precarious, frightened: balanced on an edge of time as well as of space. All I wanted to do was to get back off the ridge, back down into the Basin.

At this point he decides it not merely be dangerous to climb, but 'impertinent', which seems a strange word to use, but you understand that here is something powerful and ancient.

Like Swift, he's the kind of magpie author who gathers facts, and one piece of information leads him on to another, and another, and another... In the chapter on Ynys Enlli for example, he talks about the tide race, ancient Irish monks, the origin of the word 'pilgrim', the connection between inner and outer landscapes, George Bernard Shaw's trip to the Skelligs, boats, faith, the wildlife n the island, the word 'wild' and our reaction to wilderness, and the Chinese wanderers who wrote and painted, and believed there was no divide between nature and human.

That sense of oneness with the natural world pervades the writing of Swift and MacFarlane. The landscapes they inhabit may be very different, but each knows their place, and they recognise its importance. And each makes a plea for us to work with nature, nurturing and preserving what we have.

Gunpowder Plot

Not having written anything for a week, I think I've forgotten how to do it, so forgive me if this post doesn't pan out quite as planned! I've been at my mother's again, as she is still not well, and everything else seems to have gone by the board. However, I returned home to find those lovely people at Persephone Books have included a snippet from one of my reviews ('How to Run Your Home Without Help' by Kay Smallshaw) on the 'Our Bloggers Write' page of the latest 'Biannually', and that really lifted my spirits. Definitely a 'pleasing' as Lyn at dovegreyreader would say, and I am delighted that Persephone liked what I wrote.

There seemed to be a fair amount of catching up to do, but after I'd tackled the washing, looked at the ironing pile, and shoved all the junk lying around the house into cupboards and drawers where it can't be seen, I bought myself a bunch of flowers, made a cup of tea, and dipped into the book again to find out what the perfect housewife did circa 1949 – without actually following any of the advice!

Then the postman delivered my copy of Sylvia Townsend Warner's 'Lolly Willowes', which was another pleasing, as I am really looking forward to reading it. And a friend invited me round this morning for a cup of tea and some home-made cake, and I've been asked to meet up with another friend this evening to celebrate her birthday. And the sun is shining (although it's a bit windy), and the leaves on the trees are turning to glorious shades of yellow, red and orange. So there you are: lots of 'pleasings' or cheerings to make me thankful for the good things in life.

Anyway, the purpose of this blog was to write about a book, but because my brain is not in gear, and I can't think about anything serious, I couldn't decide which book, so here are my thoughts on Gunpowder Plot by Carola Dunn, an author I have never read before, but people kept telling me I would enjoy her Daisy Dalrymple mysteries (published by Constable and Robinson) – and I did!

Let me start by saying that if you like your reading to be difficult and challenging (like this year's Booker judges), then this is not the book for you. And I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who likes their crime novels peppered with violence and gory descriptions of dead bodies, or to enthusiasts of of taut psychological thrillers.

But I don't like any of those things: I like my crime to be gentle and cosy, and that is exactly what 'Gunpowder Plot' is. Daisy, daughter of a viscount, is a thoroughly modern young woman (but do bear in mind this is 1924) and earns her own living as a jourrnalist. She is visiting old schoolfriend Gwen Tyndall to write about the family's 400-year-old bonfire festivities.

It should be a pleasant assignment, but all is not well, for tensions are surfacing in the Tyndall family. Gwen's eldest sister Babs, who is running the estate, clashes with their traditionalist father over modern farming methods, while their brother Jack is also in trouble because he wants to be an aircraft engineer. Then, after the firework display, hot-tempered Sir Harold and a female guest are found dead. It is thought Sir Harold has shot the woman and killed himself, but it soon becomes apparent that both have been murdered and the culprit must be one of the family, or the dead woman's Australian husband.

Daisy's husband, Detective Chief Inspector Alec Fletcher (from Scotland Yard), is called in to investigate, aided by Daisy herself, and the story romps along along at near break-neck speed as local VIPs squabble about who should be in charge, various family members are questioned, and hidden secrets come to light...

It's not great literature, but it's not that badly written, and while the characters may lack depth, they are not so two-dimensional as to be unbelievable, and they are not caricatures, although they are viewed in a very conventional way – roughneck, uncultured Australian; autocratic landowner, and so on. There no great insights into human nature, and it's not too difficult to guess the killer, but there are enough twists and turns in the plot to keep you reading, and there's enough period detail to be convincing. I'm not sure how accurate the police procedures are (not very, In suspect), but the same could be said for an awful lot of crime novels, and this was such fun that I don't care! It's all down to the willing suspension of disbelief I guess, but I really did enjoy it.

Daisy herself is a rather charming amateur sleuth, who is sympathetic and intelligent, and finds herself a key witness to events at various points in the story, as well as using her charm and sympathy to gain information from people without them realising what is happening. In this novel she is six months pregnant, and spends much of her time ravenously hungry or desperately needing the loo, which added a touch of humour (and, contrary to what I thought at first, did actually have a bearing on the main plotline).

I gather there are about 20 Daisy Dalrymple books, but I seem to have plunged slap bang into the middle of the series, so I need to backtrack and start at the beginning, if only to discover how Daisy and Alec first meet.