A Chelsea Concerto - Frances Faviell

In 1939, Frances Faviell was living in Cheyne Place, Chelsea. She was an artist in her mid 30s & had just met Richard Parker, the man who would become her second husband. She had a facility for languages & trained as a Red Cross volunteer in preparation for the bombing that became more & more inevitable as Germany invaded & occupied Holland, Belgium & France. The Blitz devastated many parts of Britain but Chelsea, close to the main bridges over the Thames, was one of the most heavily bombed areas of London. A Chelsea Concerto tells the story of the Blitz through the eyes of a compassionate, sensitive woman whose common sense, patriotism & sense of humour were tested but never entirely broken by the onslaught.

Faviell's memoir begins with the process of training as a Red Cross volunteer during the early months of the war. This period of Phoney War allowed London to prepare but also added to the sense of unreality as volunteers were bandaged up after imaginary bombing raids & practiced putting out incendiary bombs with sand & stirrup pumps. Practice shifts in hospitals were interspersed with lectures, including one by a doctor who had served in Spain during the Civil War. His words, "Casualties don't choose their place of annihilation - the bombs choose them - anywhere - anytime. You must be prepared for anything.", came back to Frances many times during the years that followed as the sometimes comical practice sessions gave way to the first bombing raids.

Frances Faviell was part of an artistic community in Chelsea that included Rex Whistler, with whom she'd studied at the Slade, & Edith Walker. She lived with her dachshund, Vicki (later nicknamed Miss Hitler because of her German origins), in a flat in a house on Cheyne Place that became a haven for her many friends. Her most prized possession was a green cat made of celadon that she had acquired as she left Peking in 1937. The cat was the Guardian of the Home & the man who gave it to Frances in exchange for her camera, told her that her home would be safe as long as the cat was treated with respect. Mrs Freeth, Frances' housekeeper, was a remarkable manager who kept the household running no matter what else was happening. Frances acknowledged that she couldn't have got through those years without Mrs Freeth's support. On the top floor lived Kathleen Marshman & her daughters, Anne & Penty. Penty was intellectually disabled & was sent to live in the country when the Blitz began. Kathleen ran a dress shop & was a close friend of Frances even though she was older. Other friends included Larry, an American who had joined the Canadian Army & Cecil, a Canadian soldier who fell in love with Anne Marshman. Frances & Mrs Freeth also kept open house for the Civil Defence workers in the area who could rely on a cup of tea or bowl of soup after a long shift.

As the first refugees from Belgium began arriving, her language skills proved useful & she became an interpreter for a group of refugees living in Chelsea.This was a challenging task as the refugees were naturally shocked & traumatised by their experiences. The men were mainly fishermen who wanted to get back to their boats but the authorities had to screen them before allowing them into the community. Frances began teaching them English & tried to find them some employment to keep them busy as idleness & worry led to disputes over cooking & cleanliness. Vegetable plots were successful until the most difficult of the refugees, called by Frances the Giant, accused two others of stealing some of his plot &, once again, the police asked Frances to sort it out.

Other friends needed more support. Ruth, a German Jewish refugee, became suspicious of authority, convinced that she was being followed, her phone was tapped & that They would take her away. Her paranoia led to a breakdown & she attempted suicide. Ruth's daughter, Clara, became Frances's responsibility & she paid her school fees while Ruth was in hospital. Another young woman, Catherine, who had fled Belgium ahead of the invading German Army, narrowly escaped death as the refugees were bombed & shot at. She arrived in London alone & pregnant. She had been unable to marry her boyfriend in the rush of war & was obsessed with the shame of her predicament & with the perceived hostility of the other refugees to her plight. Frances supported her throughout her pregnancy & cared for the baby, Francesca, when Catherine failed to bond with her.

The Blitz was unrelenting during 1940. Sirens went nearly every night & sometimes during the day as well. Frances was working at a First Aid Post (FAP) as well as helping the Belgian refugees & also relieving telephonists at the Control Room in the Town Hall, taking messages for the Civil Defence staff. The bombs fell night after night, unexploded bombs (UXBs) were a hazard as well & negotiating the streets in the blackout during a raid had dangers of its own as Frances discovered when she almost fell into a crater that had once been a house. Running into a half-dressed woman who had been thrown clear when the bomb hit, Frances witnesses the efforts of the rescue crew to remove debris & rubble to get to the people who had been sleeping in the basement.

And almost at once there was sudden violent activity in the dead, ravaged street; the wails were drowned in the jarring of brakes, the screeching of engines, and sudden short sharp commands. In the thick evil-smelling blackness it was an eerie and ghastly sight to see all the preparations being made, the paraphernalia unloaded. did any of us realise how terribly dangerous and treacherous it was to have to excavate, shore up, and tunnel in such complete blackness for buried bodies - living or dead? Did we appreciate it until we saw it? I know that I had not until I watched the tunneling for Mildred Castillo and that had been mostly in day-light.

On another journey she was called on to be lowered head first into a shaft to sedate a badly wounded man. The description of this is horrific yet forensic in its detail, even down to the way she held the torch in her teeth & looked back on her acrobatics training with gratitude as she fought nausea & dizziness to stay conscious & help the man.

The sound coming from the hole was unnerving me - it was like an animal in a trap. I had once heard a long screaming like rabbits in traps from children with meningitis in India, but this was worse - almost inhuman in its agony. The torch showed me that the debris lay over both arms and that the chest of the man trapped there was crushed into a bloody mess - great beams lay across the lower part of his body - and his face was so injured that it was difficult to distinguish the mouth from the rest of it - it all seemed one great gaping red mess.

One of the worst jobs Frances was required to do was to reconstruct bodies blown apart by bombs, putting the limbs back together so that the families could be shown a body to identify. Sometimes there weren't enough limbs & body parts to make the right number of bodies. The macabre nature of the task was mitigated by the knowledge that it just had to be done. There was no time to show fear or to be ill or disgusted; time enough for that when the work was finished. It was only when she had to visit a sick child on the top floor of a house (where no one willingly slept during a raid) that Frances felt afraid.

I think it was during some of those many visits to Raymond ... that I first began to know real fear. Up to that time I had not really minded the Blitz at all. I had just married, and we were very happy, although the occasions when we were both together were increasingly rare. Richard was frequently away on tour for the Ministry, and I was often on night duty, but the bombs seemed a macabre background to our personal life, and the fear that either of us would be a victim of the Blitz was a remote thought - but it was one which now began recurringly to enter my head.

Life wasn't unremittingly awful, even during the worst of the Blitz. Frances & Richard managed to get away from London & go walking on the Downs in Surrey where they watched dogfights overhead & marveled at the beauty & peace in the midst of destruction & death. There were parties in Cheyne Place & amusing incidents to relieve the horror as Frances tried to keep the peace among the refugees & planned her wedding. Little Vicki was unperturbed by the bombs & the knowledge that the Green Cat was serenely sitting on the windowsill guarding the house & its occupants was comforting. Frances was pregnant & had reduced her workload. Then, in December 1940, during the biggest raid Chelsea had experienced, Frances' home suffered a direct hit & was completely destroyed. Frances, Richard & Vicki survived & were miraculously able to get out of the house with minor injuries. The description of the blast & the dazed aftermath is horrifying. Frances & Richard went to the FAP, not really knowing what else to do & returned to the house to discover that they had been presumed dead. This was the end of their life in Chelsea & the Parkers left London & moved to Esher.

Standing there by the great heap which had been our home without possessing even a pocket handkerchief gave me an extraordinary feeling of freedom mingled with awe. Yesterday it had been a lovely home filled with choice and beautiful objects. Like all the others round it, it had vanished in a few seconds, truly 'gone with the wind'. I understood a little then of how some of the bombed-out and refugees must have felt, but strangely enough I didn't mind at all,. I had already learned that home is to be with the person you love, and hadn't I been wonderfully blessed in having Richard, the expected baby, and even Vicki all saved? As I turned over some of the rubble looking for even a chip of the Green Cat I thought of the Second Commandment, for, like the huge carpets, the heavy furniture and easels, he had simply disintegrated into dust.

This is a devastating book. I've never read a better memoir of the Blitz or one that affected me so much. The final chapters are heartbreaking to read & I read the last half of the book in one sitting, compelled & horrified in equal measure. I cannot believe that this book has been out of print for so long & I'm just so pleased that Scott from the Furrowed Middlebrow blog & Dean Street Press have brought A Chelsea Concerto back into print as the first title in their new imprint, Furrowed Middlebrow Books. Virginia Nicholson, author of Millions Like Us, has written the Foreword for this new edition. She describes her search for the author of this remarkable memoir & Faviell's life after the war as she continued to paint & wrote fiction as well as A Chelsea Concerto & another memoir about life in post-war Berlin, The Dancing Bear (all reprinted by Dean Street Press), which exorcised the memories of the war at last.

Dean Street Press kindly sent me a review copy of A Chelsea Concerto.

Star Fall - Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

I love this series. Bill Slider is one of my favourite detectives & this entry (number 17) in the long-running series is as good as any of them.

Rowland Egerton is an expert on Antiques Galore!, a TV program that sounds very similar to the BBC's Antiques Roadshow. The program visits various locations, experts appraise objects brought along by members of the public who are amazed or horrified by the valuations. Egerton is one of the stars of the show; handsome, debonair, charming. One afternoon, Egerton is found dead in his home, stabbed in the throat. His business partner & friend, John Lavender, who discovered the body, is shocked & distraught. Slider & his bagman, Jim Atherton, are quickly on the scene & realise that this is no random burglary gone wrong. There was no sign of forced entry & only two objects, out of the vast array of antiques on display, are missing. A green malachite Fabergé box & a painting by Berthe Morisot. Neither object was fabulously expensive so there must have been a reason why the killer only stole those two pieces.

As Slider's team begins to investigate, Egerton's public persona as the charming expert is dented quite a bit. He'd changed his name, left his wife & daughter & had many affairs. His colleagues also accused him of pinching the most promising objects to feature on the show & of buying the best objects from their flattered, star-struck owners after the show. Egerton & Lavender owned an antiques shop which was mostly bankrolled by Egerton although it was Lavender who had the real knowledge of antiques that propped up Egerton's role as an expert. It soon becomes clear that there were several people with a motive to kill Egerton. Politics, forgery & the television business all have a role to play in solving the murder of Rowland Egerton.

Apart from the puzzle element of this series, I really enjoy catching up with the characters. Bill's wife, Joanna, is a musician & they have a son, George. Joanna suffered a miscarriage at the end of the previous book & they're both still coming to terms with it. Jim Atherton is a ladies man who looked as though he was finally ready to settle down with Emily until his inability to stay faithful doomed the relationship. The rest of the team are just as individual & I enjoy the procedural element of the book. No flashes of brilliant deduction, just dogged police work - interviewing potential witnesses, looking at CCTV footage & asking lots of questions. My favourite character is Slider's boss, Porson. His speech is full of malapropisms. I always like to quote a few of Porson's most beautifully mangled sentences,

Porson went on, "Well, keep me informed. The instant you've got something. And don't go plunging in irregardless, like a bowl in a china shop."
"No, sir."
"I want all your ducks in a row before I go in to bat. This is a whole new kettle of worms you're opening up."
"I know, sir," said Slider. It was never a good sign when Porson's imagery started to fracture.

The atmosphere of this book is a little more downbeat, in tune with Bill's worry about Joanna. The wintry weather is also very much in tune with Bill's melancholy & the depressing dead ends of the investigation. I picked up Star Fall when I was reading several big books & needed a change. It's been a while since I read a contemporary detective novel & I read this in just a few days. Bill & his team are reliably entertaining & I'm looking forward to the next Slider mystery, One Under, which is published in November.

The Studio Crime - Ianthe Jerrold

A foggy November night in London. In Laurence Newtree's studio, a party is about to begin. Newtree's friend, John Christmas, is there & Christmas has brought along novelist Serafine Wimpole & her slightly dizzy aunt. Philanthropist Sir Marion Steen, suave psychiatrist Dr Simon Mordby & Dr George Merewether complete the party. Newtree is a celebrated cartoonist, but shy & easily overcome by awe for more confident personalities such as Miss Wimpole. His friend, John Christmas, fancies himself as an amateur detective, having assisted the police in a case or two. His father owns a department store & Christmas has no need to work. Serafine's aunt Imogen imagines that she's a nervous personality & Dr Mordby has made his fortune from women like her. Steen & Merewether arrive together & both of them tell a similar tale of being approached in the foggy street by a foreigner wearing a red fez, who asked them for directions to Golders Green.

An indeterminate noise from the studio above, belonging to Gordon Frew, sends Dr Merewether up to investigate. He has attended Frew in a minor illness & insists on going alone. He soon returns, with a reassuring message from Frew that all's well & an invitation to the party to go up to his studio in half an hour. When they do so, they discover Frew dead, murdered, with a knife sticking out of his back. The police doctor believes that Frew has been dead for at least an hour but Merewether sticks to his story that Frew was alive & well half an hour before. Inspector Hembrow allows Christmas to assist with the investigation as they've worked together before. Merewether's position looks grim as he sticks to his story that Frew was alive half an hour before his body was discovered & Christmas begins an investigation into the murder & the life & character of Gordon Frew.

Frew was an unpleasant man, a poseur who published books that he didn't write himself & aspired to be a collector of everything from Persian rugs to Oriental weapons. Several people visited him that night, seen by Newtree's servant, Greenaway, from the man in the fez to his valet, Greenaway's tearaway son, Ernie, & Miss Pandora Shirley, who modeled for Frew & had recently broken off her relationship with Ernie. Christmas dismisses Ernie & Miss Shirley early on & concentrates his attention on the mysterious man in the fez. However, it appears that Frew, besides being unpleasant & phoney, may also have dabbled in fraud & a little blackmail among other crimes. Christmas' investigations uncover more of Frew's background & the more he discovers, the more disreputable Frew seems to have been. The red herrings come thick & fast before Christmas & Hembrow make a surprising discovery that leads them to the solution of the mystery.

I enjoyed The Studio Crime very much. The plot was incredibly convoluted but very entertaining. Jerrold certainly has a vivid way of describing characters & the psychological motivations of several of the characters were very interesting & well-portrayed. I particularly enjoyed Serafine Wimpole. I have a weakness for sensitive female novelists (I much prefer Harriet Vane to Peter Wimsey & wish Dorothy L Sayers had written more books with Harriet) & Serafine's no-nonsense character is shaken a little by her desire to save Dr Merewether from the consequences of his actions (as she sees them). Her quick thinking in an episode surely inspired by Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White is terrific & the interplay between Serafine & her aunt is a lot of fun. London in the gloomy fog is also very atmospheric & Hembrow & Christmas visit some very disreputable parts of the city in their investigations.

Published in 1929, The Studio Crime was the first of two mysteries by Ianthe Jerrold, a member of a family of writers, journalists & actors. Ianthe Jerrold wrote many books over her long career & the success of The Studio Crime led to her being invited to join the Detection Club, the famous group of Golden Age crime writers that included Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers & Anthony Berkeley. I've just started reading Martin Edwards' new book about the Detection Club, The Golden Age of Murder, & in the book, there's a photo of Ianthe Jerrold with E R Punshon, author of the Bobby Owen series (coincidentally about to be reprinted by Dean Street Press, publishers of Jerrold's novels). This edition of the novel also has an informative Introduction by Curtis Evans, who blogs at The Passing Tramp.

Dean Street Press kindly sent me a review copy of The Studio Crime & I'm looking forward to reading Jerrold's other crime novel, Dead Man's Quarry.

A Vicarage in the Blitz : the wartime letters of Molly Rich 1940-1944

Molly Rich spent the war in London, keeping her home going & providing comfort & support to friends, family & neighbours. She was 41 years old & married to Edward, the vicar of St Nicholas, Chiswick. They had four children, aged from 12 to 6 - Helen, Lawrence, Patience & Anthea - all away at school out of London. The two youngest girls had been evacuated to Ware as their grandmother lived there & they went to the local school. The vicarage, which stood right on the river, was large & old-fashioned; the kitchen was a nightmare of inefficiency. Even so, Molly filled the rooms with refugees, bombed-out neighbours, relatives & anyone else who needed somewhere to stay.

One of these refugees was Otto, an Austrian Jew from Vienna, who arrived, aged 20 in 1939 & quickly became part of the family. Molly considered Otto to be her fifth child so she was horrified when he was interned as an enemy alien when war broke out & sent to an internment camp in Australia on the HMT Dunera, along with 2800 other men. The Dunera episode was a scandal as the ship was overcrowded & conditions on the voyage were so appalling that several of the ship's officers were court-martialled. Otto survived the trip & spent over a year in Australia before being allowed to return to England where he joined the Pioneer Corps & eventually the Army. He served in Europe until the end of the war.

This book consists of the letters Molly wrote to Otto during this time. Many of the early letters are quite despairing as she has no idea where he is & spends a lot of time visiting various Government offices trying to find out where he is. She knows her letters will be censored so she writes of the family, domestic trials, the impact of the war on Chiswick. Molly spent her nights fire watching & as the Blitz began, the upstairs rooms of the Vicarage became uninhabitable as it was too dangerous to sleep there in case of bombs.

Molly's letters are often funny as she is very good at seeing the lighter side of rationing, impossible train travel & the bureaucratic roundabout she goes on when she's trying to get news of Otto.

One of the mysterious things is why trains should be so crowded directly there is a war. There are the same trains and the same number of people in the country and no one travels unless they can help it, but the trains always get crowded all the same. I remember in the last war when we went up to London we always made for the milk van, because we knew it was the only place where there would be any room. We always had to stand all the way, but we rather enjoyed it as our friends went by the milk van too and it was more fun than being stuck stiffly in seats at each side of a carriage.
August 31, 1941

Even when Molly is tired & exasperated, her humour still comes through.

My fingers are frozen and covered with chilblains, which have burst and I think the typewriter is frozen too. Thank God the water is still running, but I expect it is merely a matter of hours before that goes as well. ... Uncle Edward is interviewing replacements for Fred (the curate). He is considered a married curate with a young wife. I cannot cope with new curates and their wives. She will be pretty with big eyes, fluffy hair and a good complexion. She will wear her clothes as though she had thrown them on in the dark and will not put powder on her nose. She will have a soft voice and a bit of a Yorkshire accent. He will be tall, with a long face and big feet and look as if he had no insides. Very soon they will have a baby and I shall have to be very enthusiastic and produce baby clothes. I feel fed up, very tired and don't want to be excited about a baby or anything else.
January 6, 1942

At times she reminds me of the Provincial Lady,

The children and I attacked the garden yesterday. We were weeding and discussing the afterlife. I wonder why it is that when two or three people garden together this subject always comes up. We all rather like talking about it, because we know nothing about it and we can let our imaginations run riot. In the end I made a hole in my hand and have blisters all over the palm and the garden looks much the same as it did before. I want to get the ground clear so as to be able to plant fruit bushes as soon as possible in the spring.
December 25, 1944

By this time, Edward has left Chiswick & is a residentiary canon at Peterborough Cathedral. Their house in the Cathedral Close is even more old-fashioned than the Vicarage & Molly faces starting all over again in a new place with her usual good humour.

As well as writing to Otto, Molly also kept up a correspondence with her mother in the country, the children at school, two sisters in Africa & Edward's family in America & Trinidad. She also dug up her front lawn to plant vegetables & did all the housework & cooking with very little help. Molly's daughter, Anthea, who has put this collection together & illustrated it with charming line drawings, remembers her mother sitting in the garden, typing away on any scrap of paper she could find. The Rich family stayed in touch with Otto after the war & he gave Anthea the letters - over 600 of them - in the 1970s, telling her that they had kept him alive at a time when he felt completely hopeless & alone.

I love reading letters & journals of this period & it's wonderful that more are still to be discovered. I was amazed at all that Molly managed to achieve in her busy life. Maybe her letters, keeping all her correspondents in touch & included in her life, assuring them they were not forgotten, were the most important war work she could have done.

Dream of the Dead - M G Scarsbrook

Theatre producer Charlie Maitland is dead, poisoned with tartar emetic, or antimony. The poison is invisible when dissolved in water but did Charlie commit suicide or was he murdered? He suffered in hospital for several days after the poisoning & refused to accuse anyone or admit he took the poison himself  & the police investigation has stalled. Charlie's marriage to actress Georgia Foxley is volatile & their frequent arguments about her drinking & extravagant habits have dominated their marriage. Georgia's personal assistant, Jane Edouard, may have had a motive for killing Charlie as he resented her closeness to Georgia. Charlie's new production, a musical version of The Picture of Dorian Gray, is in financial trouble before it even gets off the ground & his strict stepfather is determined that Charlie will stand on his own feet. The Maitlands' maid, Zofia, also knows something & is driven to attempt suicide from guilt & remorse. The initial investigation got nowhere & now, DI Jack Ravenshaw has been seconded from Bristol because of his special knowledge of the London theatre scene.

Jack is one of the Ravenshaw theatrical dynasty, as famous as the Redgraves or the Oliviers. He hasn't acted since a horrific bout of stage fright during a performance of Hamlet just after his father's murder. He's estranged from his mother, Vivien Ashton, who is still involved with the family theatre, The Curtain, although it's now owned by another company. Vivien was horrified when Jack joined the police & they've barely communicated since. Now, however, Jack is forced to use all his theatrical connections to get to the bottom of Charlie Maitland's mysterious death. Jack's investigation is also being obstructed by elements inside the police force. The senior officer on the original investigation, DCI Wade, is openly hostile & seems to be willing Jack to fail. DS Emily Hart is assigned to help Jack with the investigation but she has secrets of her own. Where do her loyalties really lie? Jack's investigations open up several new leads but not everyone is happy with his progress & there will be more deaths before he can discover the truth.

I enjoyed this book very much. The West End setting was very effective, which probably isn't surprising as  M G Scarsbrook is a screenwriter as well as a novelist. Jack is a sympathetic character. His life is shambolic & he seems to have no personal life at all. He joined the police force after leaving the stage as a way of gaining the skills to solve his father's murder which has haunted him. He seems to be procrastinating in every area of his life & being forced to return to London & the West End tests him in many ways. Emily Hart is also an intriguing character, not entirely sympathetic as her loyalties are confused but definitely a woman with ambition & good at her job. The supporting characters are well-drawn, especially Zofia & Darlington Bell, a family friend of the Ravenshaws & an influential critic. The only aspect of the novel that seemed unnecessarily far-fetched were the absinthe-induced hallucinations that Jack experiences. However, that's a minor quibble about a novel with an intriguing, multi-layered plot & a pair of detectives who will hopefully appear in another novel.

M G Scarsbrook kindly sent me a copy of Dream of the Dead for review.

Barbara Pym Reading Week - An Unsuitable Attachment

The rejection of An Unsuitable Attachment was a turning point in Barbara Pym's career. At the time, it must have seemed as though it marked the end of her career. The book was finished in 1963 & her publishers didn't want it. No other publisher wanted it either. Barbara Pym's letters to her friend, poet Philip Larkin, are bravely resigned but her disappointment is obvious.

Of course it may be that this book is much worse than my others, though they didn't say so, giving their reason for rejecting it as their fear that with the present cost of book production etc etc they doubted whether they could sell enough copies to make a profit. 12 May 1963

An Unsuitable Attachment wasn't published until 1982. Famously, Barbara Pym was "rediscovered" in 1977 when the Times Literary Supplement ran an article about the most over- & under-rated authors of the century. Only one writer was mentioned twice as being under-rated (by Philip Larkin & Lord David Cecil) & that was Barbara Pym. Suddenly her books were publishable again. Quartet in Autumn was published & shortlisted for the Booker Prize. An Unsuitable Attachment & The Sweet Dove Died (another rejected manuscript from the 1960s) followed were also published for the first time along with her final novel, A Few Green Leaves, published after her death in 1980.

In a way I can see why the publishers rejected this novel. It was certainly out of step with the early 1960s, the era of the Angry Young Men of literature & the theatre. It's slightly old-fashioned & slightly self-indulgent in the way that characters from the earlier novels pop up or are dragged in. The appearance of Everard Bone (Mildred is at home with a cold) at a dinner party & Harriet Bede in Rome accompanied by a pale young curate, don't add to the narrative & the mention of the death of Wilf Bason's mother would be meaningless to anyone who hadn't read A Glass of Blessings. When Rocky Napier from Excellent Women is mentioned in A Glass of Blessings, it evokes a real feeling of nostalgia for the War in Wilmet & Rowena & we feel we know & like them better because they were two of the many young Wrens who fell in love with glamorous Rocky in Naples. However, I loved all the references & it's been so many years since I first read An Unsuitable Attachment that it was as enjoyable as discovering a new Pym.

Mark Ainger is the Vicar of St Basil's, a distinctly unfashionable parish in North London. His wife, Sophia is described as a faded Pre-Raphaelite beauty & her main interest in life seems to be their cat, Faustina. Sophia's sister, Penelope, is a fashionable but discontented young woman who is getting to the age where she feels she should marry. Their congregation is typically Pymian with blunt, hearty Sister Dew & the Pettigrews (Edwin, a vet, & his sister, Daisy who's obsessed with cats & runs a cattery) typical of the parishioners.

Ianthe Broome moves into a house in the parish after the death of her mother. Ianthe trained as a librarian after her father died & works in a library specialising in politics & sociology. Ianthe is in her early 30s, always beautifully & suitably dressed, reads Elizabeth Bowen, attends church & delights in having her own house & garden after years living in a tiny flat with her mother near Westminster Cathedral.

Ianthe works with Mervyn Cantrell, the head librarian. Mervyn is prickly, pedantic & always delights in catching Ianthe out in a cataloguing mistake. He seems to be interested in Ianthe but does he really just covet her furniture, that "lovely Pembroke table" & her Hepplewhite dining chairs? When Miss Grimes retires, Mervyn appoints John Chellew to take her place. John is a very handsome young man but is he really suitable to work in the library? Ianthe is attracted to him but he's younger than she is & she's unsure how he feels about her.

Anthropologist Rupert Stonebird lives opposite Ianthe. He's come back to the Church in middle age as anthropologists sometimes do. He's also a bachelor & Sophia can't decide whether he should marry Ianthe or her sister, Penelope. On a parish trip to Rome, Ianthe meets an old acquaintance, Father Basil Branche, a handsome but delicate priest escorting two elderly ladies around Italy. The unsuitable attachments multiply & Sophia's matchmaking has very little effect as Rupert, Penelope, Ianthe & John diffidently circle each other in a mass of misunderstandings.

An Unsuitable Attachment is definitely early period Pym. The parish setting, the delicate gradations of class between the characters & the humour. It's a very funny novel. I loved the observations on working in the library, the comments about celibacy among librarians & Daisy's finicky ministrations to the cats she looks after. Mark is another of Pym's many ineffectual clergymen, giving sermons that are over the head of his congregation & offering to buy dinner & then dithering between rock salmon & plaice & deciding on plaice with an extra piece for Faustina. In tone, the novel is closest to Excellent Women although we never get to know Ianthe as well as we do Mildred with her ironic first person narration. I loved An Unsuitable Attachment & I'm looking forward to rereading more Pym before this centenary year is over.

There's a copy of An Unsuitable Attachment, and many other books by Barbara Pym, available at Anglophile Books.

Pictures at an Exhibition - Camilla Macpherson

The author of Pictures at an Exhibition, Camilla Macpherson, emailed me recently to ask if I would like to review the book for the blog. I had so much else to read that I said thanks but no thanks. But, the blurb was intriguing & we had copies at work so I borrowed one & I loved it. I read it in just a few days & it was a struggle to put the book down at lunchtime & go back to work.

The novel is the story of a young woman, Claire, who has had a miscarriage & can't get over her loss. She blames her husband, Rob, for not being there when she needed him. Her grief is so all-consuming that she has lost interest in her work as well as her marriage. Everywhere there are reminders of her lost baby, Oliver. Then, one day, a parcel arrives that will give Claire a new interest in life. Claire begins reading the letters of a young woman called Daisy Milton who was in London during the Blitz. Daisy was writing to Rob's grandmother, Elizabeth, in Canada & the letters have been left to him in his grandmother's will. The letters are full of Daisy's life in London, the horrors of the Blitz & the boredom & irritations of life in wartime. Daisy decides to visit the National Gallery every month where one painting from the collection was displayed (everything else was stored in caves in Wales for safe keeping) & she describes her visits & the paintings in her letters to Elizabeth. This was part of a Government project to keep up morale which also included a famous series of lunchtime concerts by renowned pianist Dame Myra Hess.

Claire decides to follow Daisy's example & each month after reading Daisy's letter to Elizabeth she visits the painting in the National Gallery. She becomes fascinated by Daisy's life as well as her reactions to the paintings on display. Daisy was engaged to Charles, a young man about to be sent overseas to North Africa. Charles has a very conventional idea of their future. They will live in a house in the country & Daisy will look after the children & the house while he earns a living. Daisy isn't entirely sure that this is the future she wants, or at least, not yet. She enjoys working, although she struggles to see how her work as a typist in a Whitehall ministry is helping the war effort, no matter what her boss says. One day at the Gallery, Daisy meets Richard Dacre, an artist who has a commission as a war artist. They begin meeting at the Gallery to look at the paintings & Daisy knows that she's falling in love with Richard. Her letters to Elizabeth become a way of working through her feelings about Charles & Richard & the decisions she makes that will affect them all.

Claire & Rob grow further apart & she meets a man at the gallery who is obviously attracted to her. Dominic is handsome, knowledgeable & confident & soon Claire has confided in him about Oliver & her marriage as they drift towards an affair. Claire finds she has to make some decisions about her future as Dominic pursues her & Rob seems to have given up waiting for her to forgive him & let him back into her life.

The parallels in the lives of Claire & Daisy are highlighted by the paintings both women see. This is what makes Pictures at an Exhibition stand out among the many novels set in two different periods. If you have an iPhone, you can scan a QR code at the beginning of each chapter to see a reproduction of the painting. I just searched for them on my iPad. The paintings include Botticelli's Mystic Nativity, Apollo and Daphne by Pollaiuolo, Madonna of the Basket by Correggio & Constable's Weymouth Bay. The paintings provide a link between two time periods & two women whose lives are at a crossroads. Claire isn't always a sympathetic character as her absorption in her own grief shuts out Rob as well as her family & friends. She finds a way to deal with her emotions through becoming absorbed in Daisy's story & she begins to heal. Her search to find out more about Daisy & what became of her helps her to reconnect with her own life & accept her loss.

I'm very grateful that Camilla Macpherson emailed me because I hadn't heard of her book & I probably wouldn't have found it without that little push. I always find it interesting to think about how I decide what to read next. Even though I had so much to read I was intrigued enough to download a sample from Amazon & then get hold of a copy from work. Serendipity has a lot to do with my reading choices & this was an especially fortunate example of that.

Hot Chocolate - Alice Castle

Bella Renfrew loves chocolate. She also loves her husband, Tom, her children, Oliver & Madeleine & her job as a features writer on a major daily newspaper. But, chocolate occupies Bella's thoughts most of the time. Her handbag is crammed with emergency supplies, her desk drawer has more chocolate wrappers than pens. Chocolate is a comforter, a consoler & a refuge from all the issues Bella is avoiding in her life. Returning to work after Oliver's birth had been tough. Bella loves her career but journalism is a cutthroat world & she yearns to be at home with her baby. Her best friends Louise & Pete are glad to see her but the boss from Hell, Denise, is not so welcoming. Denise sends Bella on ridiculous, time-wasting assignments with no thought for the routines of children & nannies, obviously hoping that Bella will give up her career & become a full-time mother.

When Bella falls pregnant a second time, Denise is incredulous & very disapproving. On her return from her second maternity leave, Bella finds that her desk has been taken over by Denise's daughter, Gemma, & her own workspace is crammed in next to the photocopier. Determined to regain her spot in the office pecking order, Bella scores an interview with Jane Champion, the new Home Secretary. Champion has some pretty conservative moral views about single mothers & when Bella makes an embarrassing discovery about the Home Secretary's past & gets a quote that will push everything else off the front page, she is triumphant. Denise is grudgingly complementary & Bella's career prospects are looking up. Unfortunately the scoop unravels due to an unfortunate chocolate incident & the Home Office denies everything. Bella is sacked & suddenly she becomes the story. Forced to hide out while her former colleagues stake out her home, she has to reassess her future.

Tom Renfrew is a political journalist & has been offered the position of Europe Correspondent, based in Brussels. Less than enthusiastic about the move at first, once Bella realises that Belgium is the home of chocolate & that she has no hope of getting another job in London, her mood rapidly changes. Tom is amazed by her backflip but accepts the inevitable & the family move to Belgium. Bella & the children love Brussels. Making friends among the ex-pat community, Bella also explores everything Brussels has to offer the chocolate lover. Discovering a chocolatier, Clara's Chocolat Chaud, run by a grumpy woman who nevertheless makes the most divine chocolates, opens a new path for Bella. Unfortunately she also realizes that her marriage is heading for trouble.

Tom is ten years older than Bella &, although he's charming & handsome, he could also flirt for England. Bella has never doubted his love for her but, as her confidence drops & her waist expands, she starts to wonder whether Tom's flirting has moved to another level. Suddenly he's never home, dashing from one meeting & conference to another & conveniently forgetting to mention his gorgeously slim, blonde assistant, Vanessa. Bella has also met Fabrice (in the queue of a local bakery where she buys almond croissants every morning, naturally) & her romantic daydreams about him cause her to question her marriage. It takes another crisis to reveal exactly what Bella & Tom want.

Hot Chocolate is a lovely, warm, funny book. I don't believe anyone could eat as much chocolate as Bella & live to tell the tale but I admit to a few chocolate cravings while reading. Chocolate isn't the only food mentioned in the book though. There are many other scenes of delicious cooking & foodie delights. Bella is a warm character, loving her life as a mother but starting to have some doubts about the worth of her work as a journalist. Moving to Brussels is the beginning of a new life for Bella in more ways than one. I loved reading about Brussels too, a city I know very little about. The only other novel I can think of that I've read that was set in Brussels was Charlotte Brontё’s Villette.

Discovering this book was another little bit of serendipity. When I reviewed John Barlow's thriller, Hope Road, I had a look at his blog & he'd just reviewed Hot Chocolate. I thought it sounded like a lovely read but was disappointed to find that it was only available for the Kindle & wasn't a physical book at all. I then discovered Alice's blog, Dulwich Divorcee, emailed her & asked if she could send me a copy for review. She wasn't able to send me an ePub copy but I read it in Word. If you do have a Kindle, you can download Hot Chocolate at Amazon.

Gentlemen, Your ad in the Saturday Review of Literature...

84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff is another of my favourite comfort reads. I’ve read it many times since I first discovered it over 20 years ago. It’s the story of the correspondence between Helene Hanff, a writer living in New York after WWII & Frank Doel, a bookseller working at Marks & Co, a bookshop in the Charing Cross Road in London. The correspondence begins in 1949,

Gentlemen:
Your ad in the Saturday Review of Literature says that you specialize in out-of-print books. The phrase “antiquarian bookseller” scares me somewhat as I equate ‘antique’ with expensive. I am a poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books and all the things I want are impossible to get over here except in very expensive rare editions... I enclose a list of my most pressing problems. If you have clean secondhand copies of any of the books on the list for no more than $5 each, will you consider this a purchase order and send them to me?
Very truly yours,
Helene Hanff

Helene Hanff’s taste in literature was formed by reading Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s lectures on English literature (a journey she describes in Q’s legacy). She had grown up in Philadelphia & moved to New York to be a playwright. She wrote plays, TV scripts & also worked as a script reader as well. She lived frugally in a one-bedroom apartment but her one luxury was books. She wanted to read essays by Robert Louis Stevenson, Leigh Hunt & Walter Savage Landor. She wanted to read John Donne’s Complete Sermons & George Bernard Shaw’s letters to Ellen Terry. She didn’t want to read fiction because, “ I never can get interested in things that didn’t happen to people who never lived.” Helene is a sassy New Yorker, not shy in venting her wrath from 20,000 miles away,

WELL!!!
All I have to say to YOU, Frank Doel, is we live in depraved, destructive and degenerate times when a bookshop = a BOOKSHOP – starts tearing up beautiful old books to use as wrapping paper... You tore that book up in the middle of a major battle & I don’t even know which war it was.
Then there was the incident of the Pepys’ Diary,

WHAT KIND OF A PEPYS’ DIARY DO YOU CALL THIS?
This is not pepys’ diary, this is some busybody editor’s miserable collection of EXCERPTS from pepys’ diary may he rot. I could just spit. Where is jan.12 1668, where his wife chased him out of bed and round the bedroom with a red-hot poker? ... i will make do with this thing till you find me a real Pepys. THEN i will rip up this ersatz book, page by page, AND WRAP THINGS IN IT.

Frank is more reserved at first, but finally decides to drop the formality of Miss Hanff after three years of correspondence & she also received letters from the other staff at the bookshop & from Frank’s wife, Nora.

Helene found a kindred spirit in Frank Doel & the other employees at Marks & Co. She sent them food parcels when she discovered the meagre rations the British were surviving on after the war. They sent her a book of Elizabethan poetry & a beautifully embroidered linen tablecloth. They became friends even though they had never met. Helene’s plans to visit England for Elizabeth II’s coronation were foiled by her need to have a lot of very expensive dental work. By the time she was able to get there, in the 1970s, Frank had died & the shop was closed. Helene wrote about her trip to England, paid for by the book, in The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, where she was amazed by the generosity of so many strangers who had read & loved 84 Charing Cross Road. The letters were written with no thought of publication but after Frank’s death, an editor who heard about the letters, encouraged her to make a book of them. The book was an immediate success, a Cult Book as Helene calls it, & has been made into a play & a film.

This is another example of a film being as good as the book. Anne Bancroft’s husband, Mel Brooks, bought her the film rights as a gift because he knew how much she loved it. Anne Bancroft & Anthony Hopkins are just perfect in the film along with a cast of wonderful actors in minor roles. Maurice Denham never fails to move me in his few brief scenes along with Ian McNeice & Judi Dench. I also have the audio book read by Juliet Stevenson & John Nettles.

The beautiful illustrations are from my Folio Society edition & are by Natacha Ledwidge. I love her work. She also illustrated the Folio Society editions of Dorothy L Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey books.

Helene’s enthusiasm & love for English literature is what makes this book so special. Her voice is so distinctive & her passion for books is so strong that book lovers everywhere can identify with her love of learning & her desire to read the great writers. Anglophiles everywhere love this book & I’m happy to be one of them.