Farewell Victoria

My vintage Penguin was
published in 1945, and has
a dancing Penguin logo,
used for a short period.

Farewell Victoria, by TH White is a paean to bygone era and must, I think, have been something of a curiosity, even when it was first published in 1933. It's interesting for its record of rural customs in Victorian times, and the feudal existence of people living in a great house, but I felt it was less successful as a novel. Mundy - groom, soldier, coachman, hackney carriage driver – is dying at the age of 83, and looks back on his long life, the momentous events he has seen, and the people he has known.

Somehow there is a lack of empathy for the characters, and they never really come to life, but perhaps that is White's intention, since people and events are viewed from a distance, by a dying man, and what emerges is a series of moments in time: dusty, faded snapshots of the past retrieved from his memory. Here he is at the start of the story, the eight-year-old son of a groom, already good with horses, running errands in the stables, watching the children of the house, trying out horses for them, and caring for their animals.

Time passes and we see him fall in love, only to lose his wife and surviving child to his gamekeeper friend. By the 1870s he is a soldier in the Zulu Wars, and by 1901 when Queen Victoria dies, he marries his second wife, Alice, a cook. As the rest of the world moves into the age of the motor car, Mundy works as a coachman for an eccentric Russian countess, and following her death some 20 years later he sets himself up in business as a hackney carriage driver, with a horse-drawn vehicle.

Mundy himself is known throughout by his surname (although at one stage his brother refers to him as Johnnie), which seemed to distance him even further, annoyed me, though I suppose it shouldn't, since servants were never called by their Christian names, and there are plenty of books with characters who are known by their surname. And I hated the way White compares Mundy and the other lower-class characters to animals. Mundy is like a monkey, his first wife Ellen has kittenish qualities, and Foxwell, the charismatic gamekeeper, is an otter. From what little I could find out about White I think he regarded animals and working men as noble creatures and may have viewed as complimentary, but personally I found it patronising and demeaning – it dehumanises people.

Towards the end of his life, while he is still working, Mundy is described as:

An old man came slowly from behind one of the horses in a stall, wiping his hands upon the sack he wore for an apron. The hair was of that singular whiteness which is seldom achieved except in wigs; the face, wrinkled and fallen in till it was practically a skull, was the skull of an old monkey. It was a gentle face, of happiness and sympathy, that of a domestic animal, such as is called a friend to man.

I think that's horrible when he's talking about a fellow human-being. Overall, White seems to have had an idealised image of the Victorian period (and the past in general) as well as the 'Working Man' who was proud, independent, loyal to his betters, and determined not to accept state hand-outs. He acknowledges the social problems that existed in the 1930s, and says: “The end of the Victorian era had banished man from the world.” But he's no social reformer, and you get the impression he'd welcome a return to the old paternalistic system.

His account of the carnage of the Zulu Wars is very much of its time, with no effort to explain the issues involved, and to see the Zulus as anything other than a savage people in a primitive land, and all I can say is that hopefully we have moved on.

Novelist TH White

Where White comes into his own is when he writes about nature and rural life. A rabbit in the early morning mist; the gamekeeper doing up his gaiters as prepares for the day ahead, and the grooms soaping saddles and leathers and washing the horses, are all lovingly described. He does, however, have a tendency to indulge in some over-blown, fanciful writing – a 'toilsome angler' sticks in my mind, as does a dragonfly flying 'with the action of those aeroplanes which were still within the womb of time'.

I didn't hate 'Farewell Victoria', and I'm not sorry I read it, but it is very different to 'The Once and Future King, or 'Mistress Masham's Repose' (although his keen interest in nature is apparent in both). It lacks the quirky charm and humour of both those books, and somehow seems to hark back to an earlier age, not just in the subject matter, but in the way its written, and the opinions expressed. From reading this I had the feeling that if I had met Terence Hanbury White I would not have liked him, and that feeling was compounded by an interview with Robert Robinson, which is available at the BBC archive http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/writers/12242.shtml 

Magical Finnish Stories - With Not a Moomin in Sight

Tove Jansson

Writer and artist Tove Jansson is best known for her children's books about the Moomins, which I have never read, but she also wrote for adults, and The Summer Book and A Winter Book are both utterly enchanting. The first is the story of an elderly artist who spends the summer with her six-year-old grand-daughter on the family's small isolated Finnish island. The second is a collection of Jansson's work (put together since her death), based on memories of her childhood, and correspondence, including letters from a young Japanese girl.

When reading a foreign author it's sometimes difficult to know how much of the writing is their work, and how much is due to the translator, but there is no problem here: Jansson's voice and style are the same in both books, although different translators were involved. She writes (or perhaps I should say wrote – it would be more accurate) beautifully. She is warm, wise, gentle and generous, and has a tremendous zest for life. 

The Summer Book was inspired by her mother, the illustrator Signe Hammarsten and her niece Sophie. It's not a conventional novel with a beginning, a middle and an end. It's a series of incidents, in which feelings and emotions are explored as the child (and the old woman) come to terms with their fears and learn about life, friendship, approaching death – and the way old age can provide new freedoms, as well as imposing physical and mental restrictions. I thought the following passage offered a poignant view of the way memory fades:

That's strange, Grandmother thought. I can't describe things any more. I can't find the words, or maybe it's just that I'm not trying hard enough. It was such a long time ago. No one here was even born. And unless I tell it because I want to, it's as if it never happened; it gets closed off and then it's lost.

She and Sophie collect skeletons and stones for the Magic Forest; they build a miniature Venice in the marsh, but it is washed away by floods, just as the real city is threatened by water. They take an abandoned kitten, who is less than grateful for their ministrations, and they try to entertain Sophie's friend, who scared of them and the island, because it is all unknown territory and not all like her own home and family.

It's a magical time, but Jansson is never twee: life can be sad and hard, and people don't always get along. It's clear that Sophie and her grand mother love each other, but that doesn't stop them quarrelling. At times they can be cantankerous and cross, but they support each other, and Grandmother knows how to soothe Sophie's fears and anger, helping the child to discover truths about life for herself, and never imposing her own views and values. She uses what Granny Weatherwax (in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series), calls 'headology' to give her young grand-daughter what she needs, rather than what she wants.

At the end of the summer, before they return to the mainland, the family prepare the house for winter, and even leave notes for anyone who might be shipwrecked, telling them where everything is, and how to work the stove.

A Winter Book explores similar themes, and also seems to be drawn from Jansson's own life. There are delightful tales about her Bohemian childhood with her artist parents; a short story about a woman and a squirrel battling for survival; letters from a Japanese girl, turned into a kind of poem.

In one short, bitter-sweet tale, the child finds a huge, silver rock, as big as she is, which no-one else has ever seen, and tries to rolls it home, with disastrous results. In another she meets an iceberg, so close she can reach out and touch it, and considers jumping into a grotto which is just the right size for her to curl up in. Instead, she throws her father's lighted torch into the little cave: the iceberg glows like a green emerald, so beautiful that she cannot bear to look at it. In another story she is pursued by her angry father when she sails off alone after getting her own rowing boat at the age of 12, and elsewhere she feels joyous exhilaration when a terrible storm strikes at the end of a long, stifling summer. 

Most moving of all is her account of the onset of old age, and how she and her partner leave Klovharun (an island even more isolated than the one featured in The Summer Book) because they can no longer manage.

There came a summer when it was suddenly an effort to pull in the nets. The terrain became unmanageable and treacherous. This made us more surprised than alarmed, perhaps we weren't old enough yet, but to be on the safe side I built a couple of steps and Tooti fixed up some guide ropes and hand grips here and there, and we continued as usual but ate less fish.

Worse follows:

And that last summer something unforgivable happened: I became afraid of the sea. Large waves were no longer connected with adventure, only anxiety and responsibility for the boat, and indeed all boats that ply the sea in bad weather. It wasn't fair; even in my worst dreams the sea had always been an unfailing deliverance: the danger was after you, but you hopped in and sailed away and were safe and never returned. That fear felt like a betrayal – my own.

The thing that struck me most about both books is that I have rarely read anything where the author is so much part of the place where she lives. Jansson is part of the weather and landscape, and knows every inch of the land, sea and sky, and has the greatest respect for them. She makes no impassioned pleas for preservation the environment, but her way of life, dependent on the changing seasons, speaks for itself. She seems to be at one with the world around her, accepting her place in it, and working with it, not against it. And even when she is old and must leave her island, she still has hope for the future and an enjoyment in whatever life has to offer.

On the last day, when Tooti was clearing up the cellar, she found one of our kites from the 1960s and took it out on to the slope. Just for fun, she gave it a little push on its tail and at that moment a gust of wind came along and took the kite with it and it flew high, straight up, and continued far out across the Gulf of Finland.


Both books are published by More Than Books, with nice covers with French flaps (I like French flaps), and a selection of old photographs of the author and her family which would, I felt,  have benefited from captions beneath them. 


This was posted for the 'Something You'd Find on a Calendar' section of the What's In A Name  Challenge at http://www.bethfishreads.com/2012/01/whats-in-name-5-gateway-to-challenge.html

Tove Jansson as a child,
reproduced from The Summer Book.

Parisian Pictures Take Two!

This week's Saturday Snapshots don't need many words, because they're a collection of some of my favourite views of Paris, taken over the last two or three years. My parents were very fond of the city, and planned to celebrate their Diamond Wedding Anniversary there, but sadly Dad died a few months before their special holiday. Since then Mum and I go to Paris for a few days each May.  We have a wonderful time wandering around, and eating French bread and cheese, with huge bags of fresh fruit (the cherries are delicious), and I've taken lots of photographs, which I've been looking at because the weather is so awful, and they cheered me up. So here is a selection of some snaps, as a kind of postscript to the pictures of the Luxemburg Gardens which I posted on my return from our holiday. For more Saturday Snapshots see  Alice's blog http://athomewithbooks.net/

If no-one minds, I'm also posting this for the Paris in July challenge hosted by Karen from BookBath and Tamara from Thyme For Tea. 

The Eiffel Tower, designed and built by engineer Gustave Eiffel to provide the main entrance for the World's Fair in 1889, dominates the city and is incredibly beautiful.

Flowers on a market stall, stacked sideways on to make a wall of blooms.

Bread on another market stall. I love French bread, and the bakers and supermarkets bake twice a day, and you see men cycling home from work, clutching their fresh baguettes as they pedal furiously along the streets.

A boat on the Seine - I couldn't resist taking a picture, because the name is my surname!

YellowIrises in the Jardin Plantes. I love the colours.

More food - French food always looks so mouth-wateringly good.

My mother and I sat in this beautiful courtyard at the Mosque de Paris and drank sweet tea, in the shade of a fig tree, while the birds sang, and we watched men smoking with hookahs, like the Caterpillar in Alice, but I didn't like to take their photo, so I waited until they had gone!

The Flower Market, in the shadow of Notre Dame, on the Ile de la Cite, is one of the most wonderful spots in Paris - you can smell the flowers before you see them. It's a riot of colour and perfume, with all kinds of garden ornaments hanging from the roof and walls.

Notre Dame, perched on the edge of the Ile de la Cite, looks like a ship sailing along the river when photographed from the smaller, quieter Ile de St Louis.

Houseboats moored up on the River Seine.

The French enjoy exercising alongside the Seine on Sunday mornings, when the road is closed to traffic and everyone, from tiny tots to elderly pensioners, turns out to keep fit. Some do exercises holding on to the railings or trees, but mostly they run, jog, walk (often with their dogs), cycle or roller-skate. I think this is such a good idea and it looks such fun, and is very sociable because whole families and groups of friends trot along together, then they all go off for their lunch. It's such a fantastic idea to encourage people to exercise - I wish British towns would do the same. 

Shakespeare and Company, the iconic book shop, is not to be missed. You can browse inside for hours, even if you don't buy anything, and soak up the atmosphere.

The Provincial Lady in a Floral Cover

I picked this up in the Oxfam shop
(again), but I think it looks like a
book on needlework, or a notebook,
or drawliners, or writing paper.

I started reading EM Delafield's The Diary of a Provincial Lady online at Project Gutenberg Australia, which has all kinds of books unavailable on the British site, but they can't be downloaded on to Kindle. Personally, I never find reading online very satisfactory, because I can't sit comfortably with the laptop balanced on my knees, and every time I move it topples off. So you can imagine how delighted I was to find a Proper Book, even if it does have a Cath Kidston floral cover. Not that I have anything against her designs: I'm very fond of them, but preferably on tea towels and tote bags, not novels. I know I rave about those lovely Persephone end-papers, but they are on the inside, not the outside. Besides, this a Virago Modern Classic, and should be dark green, with a painting on the front carefully chosen to complement the writing. Anything else is unacceptable, even if it is a 30th anniversary edition.

Anyway, that's quite enough ranting. You want to know what I thought of the book, so here goes. I LOVED IT. I'm sure I'm one of the last people in the world to read this, and everyone else knows all about it. But just in case someone doesn't, it's a fictional diary of an upper-middle class woman living in a Devonshire village circa 1930. Thought to be based on life of the author, it charts her struggles to balance the household books, and to keep her home running as smoothly as possible while trying to solve various crises and keep everyone happy, from her husband and children to her friends, neighbours, servants and tradesmen. She deals with colds (herself and the children), measles (herself and the children), and a cat who is continually producing litters. Cash is always tight, and her bank balance totters from crisis to crisis, but she avoids disaster by pawning a great-aunt's diamond ring.

It may not sound very exciting, but she records everyday events with self-deprecating warmth and humour – and a wonderfully ironic turn of phrase. She peppers her entries with memos and queries which veer from the practical to the philosophical. The tone is set from the very beginning:

Virago could have stuck with this, which
looks shabby and faded, as one images
The Provincial Lady's home to be.

November 7th.-Plant the indoor bulbs. Just as I am in the middle of them, Lady Boxe calls. I say, untruthfully, how nice to see her, and beg her to sit down while I just finish the bulbs. Lady B. makes determined attempt to sit down in armchair where I have already placed two bulb-bowls and the bag of charcoal, is headed off just in time, and takes the sofa.

Do I know, she asks, how very late it is for indoor bulbs? September, really, or even October, is the time. Do I know that the only really reliable firm for hyacinths is Somebody of Haarlem? Cannot catch the name of the firm, which is Dutch, but reply Yes, I do know, but think it my duty to buy Empire products. Feel at the time, and still think, that this is an excellent reply. Unfortunately Vicky comes into the drawing-room later and says: "O Mummie, are those the bulbs we got at Woolworths?"

I like the way our heroine, who remains unnamed, tries to turn buying cheap bulbs into a virtue by saying she's supporting the Empire, and then her young daughter lets the cat out of the bag by revealing the truth. This instantly shows the Provincial Lady to be short of cash, rather inept, since the bulbs should have been planted long ago, and not as strict with the children as she could be, or Vicky would never have made such a remark in public.

The diarist is much too well-bred to say what she really thinks, or to stand up to other people, and consequently she frequently finds herself involved in things she had no intention of doing, whether it's attending a function at the home of fearsome Lady Boxe, or inviting people she hates to accompany her family on a seaside picnic in the pouring rain. She's equally incapable of exerting authority over the servants, especially the cook, who counters any kind of criticism with complaints about equipment – the range is perpetually faulty.

EM Delafield

Nevertheless, social conventions must be obeyed, and there are certain ways of doing things, as we see when the parlourmaid gives notice and an agency supplies a house-parlourman called Howard Fitzsimmons, which our Provincial Lady feels is a most unsuitable name for a servant. She feels uneasy issuing instructions regarding his duties, but decides she must make it clear that the correct response when receiving an order, is not 'right-oh!'

You wonder how women like her, who didn't work, filled their time, but she organises picnics and children's parties, writes letters, attends parties and literary soirees, entertains at home, stays with a friend, and attends meetings – lots of meetings, for the church, the village show and the WI. She and her friends discuss the latest books and plays, politics, and even birth control, but what really interests them is village gossip.

Reading this through I find I've not mentioned the children, who bicker, and say the wrong thing at the wrong time, and have straight hair, and no musical talent, and lack the charm of other people's offspring - but she loves them very dearly. Or Our Vicar's Wife, who always outstays her welcome (on one occasion Robert, who rarely expresses an opinion - he always seems to be asleep or reading the paper - suggests they prevent her return by turns out the lights, locking the door, and going to bed. Or our heroine's best friend, Rose, who is everything she is not - effortlessly elegant, fashionable and well informed,with wealthy and famous friends. 


Nor have I described the romance between Barbara Blenkinsop and Crosbie Carruthers, who wants to marry her her and whisk her of to the Himalayas, a plan hindered by her mother, who cannot (and will not) be left on her own. And I've not said anything about the sweep, or the bran tub, or what happens when Robin unscrews a hot water bottle top in his sister Vicky's bed. Then there's the Provincial Lady's trip to France, and the story of what happens to the new bulbs, which prompts her to note: 


(Mem: Very marked difference between the sexes is male tendency to procrastinate doing practically everything in the world except sitting down to meals and going up to bed. Should like to purchase little painted motto: Do it now, so often on sale at inferior  stationers' shops, and present it to Robert, but on second thoughts quite see  that this would conduce to domestic harmony, and abandon scheme at once.)


I have often made the same observation and come to much the same conclusion, which shows that things have not changed as much as I thought in the last 80 years.

My Perfect Library

A wall full of books.

This morning I have been at the Oxfam bookshop, then I met some friends for tea and a chat, so I spent the afternoon relaxing with EM Delafield's 'The Diary of a Provincial Lady' whilst eating home-made vegetable soup with cheese and wholemeal pitta bread (which I didn't make, but I'm thinking of having a go - I just need a decent recipe).

To tide you over until the next review, when I have finished reading, here are a couple of photos of the library in Lord Lichfield's private apartments at Shugborough Hall, in Staffordshire, which I visited recently. It was a bit awkward getting pictures, because part of the room is roped off, and the subdued lighting may help preserve the books, furnishings and decorations, but it makes it jolly difficult to take pictures without a flash. Still, I suppose I should be grateful that English Heritage allow photographs to be taken inside.


Anyway, this is my idea of what a library should like like, with beautiful purpose-built shelving all the way round, and a hidden door. Personally I'd like a big squashy armchair, with lots of cushions, so I could curl up, with my feet and legs tucked beneath me, but you can't have everything. I just hope that the Anson family who lived at Shugborough actually read and enjoyed their books, and that they weren't installed by some 18th century designer who was out to create an impression. 

A rather blurred photo of the door,
complete with handle.

Edited on Wednesday: I wrote this yesterday and scheduled it to appear today, and forgot to put yesterday in the intro instead of today, if that makes sense. Now it's actually tomorrow, and the wording sounds very sounds odd if you're reading it early in the morning. Sorry about that.