Sunday Poetry - Christmas

Oh Come, Oh Come, Emanuel is one of my favourite carols. I listen to Christmas carols for weeks before Christmas, I've always loved them, especially the older, medieval ones. This one always makes me think of angels (picture from here). The words are joyous but the tune is melancholy. I don't know all the words, but I just hum along & join in loudly on Rejoice! Rejoice! Whether it's in English or Latin, this is one of the tunes that stays in the mind long after the CD is back in its case.

Oh, come, oh, come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to you, O Israel!

Oh, come, our Wisdom from on high,
Who ordered all things mightily;
To us the path of knowledge show,
and teach us in her ways to go.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to you, O Israel!

Oh, come, oh, come, our Lord of might,
Who to your tribes on Sinai's height
In ancient times gave holy law,
In cloud and majesty and awe.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to you, O Israel!

Oh, come O Rod of Jesse's stem,
From ev'ry foe deliver them
That trust your mighty pow'r to save;
Bring them in vict'ry through the grave.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to you, O Israel!

Oh, come, O Key of David, come,
And open wide our heav'nly home;
Make safe the way that leads on high,
And close the path to misery.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to you, O Israel!

Oh, come, our Dayspring from on high,
And cheer us by your drawing nigh,
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
And death's dark shadows put to flight.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to you, O Israel!

Oh, come, Desire of nations, bind
In one the hearts of all mankind;
Oh, bid our sad divisions cease,
And be yourself our King of Peace.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to you, O Israel!

More than Love Letters - Rosy Thornton

This is Rosy Thornton's first novel, published in 2006, & it has all the humour & romance that make her novels so much fun to read. More than Love Letters is an epistolary novel, quite an unusual choice for a first novel in the 21st century. As well as letters, there are emails, newspaper articles, minutes of the meetings of WITCH (Women of Ipswich Together Combating Homelessness) & extracts from Hansard.

The main correspondence is between Margaret Hayton, a 24 year old teacher & her MP, Richard Slater. Margaret writes to Richard about the VAT on sanitary towels, the missing zipwire at the local playground & the lack of bins for dog waste at the local park. Richard thinks she's a pest, an old woman with a fixation on dog faeces, & sends her form letters in reply. Richard is a discontented MP, out of favour because of his opposition to the Iraq War, & desperate to find some way back into the Leader's good books. His friend & fellow MP, Michael Carragan, is on hand to offer advice & a drink. Michael advises Richard to get himself in the news on an important issue. Once Richard meets Margaret at a Constituency surgery though, he suddenly decides that the tax on sanitary towels is the most important issue of the moment.

Margaret is a passionate & socially minded young woman. She's just moved to Ipswich where she lodges with Cora whose husband works on an oil rig. Margaret immediately gets involved in WITCH, a collective running a women's refuge. She writes long emails to her best friend Becs, a teacher in the North who's working her way through the alphabet looking for the perfect man. Margaret also writes long letters to her Gran, who's recovering from a stroke & has trouble getting to the phone in time. Through Margaret's letters we meet the other members of WITCH. Alison, super-organised & competent; Pat & Pat, a lesbian couple who hope to be able to marry; Susan, Ding & Persephone. The women at the refuge are escaping from violent husbands & abusive fathers & the collective support the residents as well as previous residents who still need their help.

Margaret & Richard's relationship begins with misconceptions & continues with some comic misunderstandings as well as many moments of real connection. Richard is immediately attracted to Margaret when they meet but she believes that his sudden interest in dog litter bins & children's playground equipment is a sign that he has a social conscience. Their correspondence with each other remains on a businesslike level while Margaret's emails to Becs & Richard's to Michael tell a more romantic story. Richard agrees to help Nasreen, an Albanian refugee seeking asylum who's staying at the refuge, & this is when his self-serving attempts to impress Margaret become more serious & he stops playing at being an MP & starts taking his job seriously. When Nasreen disappears, Margaret & Richard are drawn together in the search for her.

There are parallels with Elizabeth Gaskell's novel, North & South, in More than Love Letters. Margaret shares the heroine's name & she's also the daughter of a vicar. Both Margarets have a social conscience & they have an influence on the social consciences of the men they love. Gaskell's novel is mentioned several times & Margaret is a lover of 19th century fiction, a love she shares with her grandmother. The warm, loving relationship between Margaret & her grandmother is very touching. Gran gives Margaret all the love that seems to be missing from her relationship with her parents, too busy with parish concerns.

Margaret's kindness touches everyone, from her landlady, Cora, who plants a garden for the women's refuge & starts taking herbalism courses, to Helen, a young woman at the refuge who relies on Margaret for support. There are tragedies as well as humour in the book & the story is involving from the beginning. More than Love Letters is a romantic story with a serious undercurrent. A Condition of England novel for the 21st century as the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell were in the 19th.

Christmas short stories by Trisha Ashley, Katie Fforde & Elly Griffiths

I love reading books about Christmas at this time of year. This year, I have three treats to read in a spare moment with a cup of coffee as three of my favourite contemporary writers have published short stories on a Christmas theme - & two of them are free.

Katie Fforde's story, Staying Away at Christmas, is available as a digital-only story from Amazon. So, you'll need a Kindle or Kindle app to read it. It costs $1.52US & includes the first chapter of her forthcoming book, A French Affair. Miranda is a single mother setting off to spend Christmas in Devon with her two daughters. Miranda is taking stroppy teenager Isa & young Lulu to the holiday cottage they'd loved in summer but will it have the same charm in the middle of winter? When they arrive, they discover that widower Anthony & his two children, Dan & Amy, have also arrived for Christmas thinking that they had booked the cottage.  Anthony is aggressive & prickly & Miranda is anxious enough about Christmas without dealing with these complete strangers. Will Christmas be a disaster or a delight?

Trisha Ashley & Elly Griffiths have given their fans a Christmas present with a free short story available through their websites. Both are PDF documents so you can read them online, print them off or download them to your e-reader (I did this with Calibre).

Trisha's story is called A Christmas Wish & it's available here. A young Chloe Lyon from Trisha's novel Christmas Wishes sees an angel. Trisha also includes some yummy Christmas recipes from her books as well as a few new ones.

Elly's story, Ruth's First Christmas Tree, is available through the Quercus website. Just register here & you'll be sent a link to the story. Ruth is determined that her daughter Kate will have a proper, traditional Christmas, including a Christmas tree. Her plans don't quite work out but thanks to Cathbad & Nelson, Kate & Ruth have a Christmas to remember. I'm looking forward to reading Elly's new novel, A Dying Fall, when it's published early in the New Year.

Sunday Poetry - Thomas Hardy

Christmas is almost upon us so my last poem by Thomas Hardy has a Christmas theme. It's not his best known Christmas poem, The Oxen, but one I hadn't read before I discovered it in my Selected Poems this week. In Yuletide in a Younger World, the speaker is looking back, with a melancholy eye, to Christmases past & remembering the wonder that Christmas used to bring.

We believed in highdays then,
And could glimpse at night
On Christmas Eve
Imminent oncomings of radiant revel - 
Doings of delight:-
Now we have no such sight.

We had eyes for phantoms then,
And at bridge or stile
On Christmas Eve
Clear beheld those countless ones who had crossed it
Cross again in file:-
Such has ceased longwhile!

We liked divination then,
and, as they homeward wound
On Christmas Eve,
We could read men's dreams within them spinning
Even as wheels spin round:-
Now we are blinker-bound.

We heard still small voices then,
And, in the dim serene
Of Christmas Eve,
Caught the fartime tones of fire-filled prophets
Long on earth unseen....
-Can such ever have been?

Millions Like Us - Virginia Nicholson

The subtitle of this book is Women's Lives in War and Peace & that's exactly what it encompasses. Millions Like Us tells the stories of many women & how they lived through WWII & the years afterwards. Nicholson focuses on about a dozen women who we get to know well during the course of the book, including writer Naomi Mitchison, housewife & diarist Nella Last, 17 year old junior housemaid Jean McFadyen & debutante Patience Chadwyck-Healey. Their lives are revealed through interviews, letters & diaries as well as memoirs they wrote in later life.

The women worked in all the armed forces as ambulance drivers, nurses, clerks, telegraph operators & code breakers at Bletchley Park, at home & in all the theatres of war. There are women trying to run a home during the Blitz, helping others bombed out of their homes, working in the Land Army or Timber Corps or looking after evacuees. It would be impossible to tell even a fraction of the stories told so well in Millions Like Us & the voices of the women in the book are so important that I think it's better to let the women speak for themselves. These are just a few of the passages I marked as I read.

Mollie Panter-Downes wrote a weekly column in the New Yorker about the experiences of Britain at War. The imposition of the blackout & the closure of theatres was one of the first effects,

With, on the whole, astounding good humor and an obedience remarkable in an effete democracy, they have accepted a new troglodyte existence in which there are few places of entertainment, no good radio programs, little war news and little to do after dark except stay in the cave...'So we'll go no more a-roving so late into the night' has taken on a significance that Byron never intended.

Young women like 17 year old Cora Styles became quite matter of fact about the horrors of the Blitz,

When I went to work in the mornings you'd see piles of brick rubble, perhaps with an arm sticking out or a leg - I got so that blood, guts and what have you didn't have much effect on me. I knew a man who would go round with a  basket collecting the bits, trying to put them together. He picked up somebody's head and the eyes were open; it nearly landed him in the loony bin.

Not all the stories are as horrific. For many women, the war was an opportunity to get out of the rut that habit or class or their families had thrust them into. They were able to get an education, learn new skills & experience the excitement that responsibility & doing a worthwhile job can bring. For all the stories about young women being bullied in factories or forced to put up with the dirtiest jobs an irate farmer could devise, there are other stories about friendships & romances that changed their lives.

Isa Barker was a Land Girl in Scotland & found the social life & staging charity concerts more stimulating than the work,

We found out that we had a couple of beautiful singers; and there was one girl who was very adept with poetry recitations, and could make people laugh. And I had been in a tap dancing troupe for five or six years when I was younger... We didn't go to bed till about two in the morning because of people enjoying themselves. And on Saturday mornings you'd get up and think 'Och, we've got to lift manure.' Well, we could hardly lift the fork, never mind the fork with the manure on it!

The end of the war brought joy & relief. Marguerite Patten had been a domestic science demonstrator during the war & went on to become a well-known cookery writer. She remembers her joy when the war ended.

Victory! We couldn't, couldn't believe it  really had come. It was wonderful... The sheer joyousness of that day! I kissed more people that day than I kissed in my entire life. We danced and we sang... and of course we all got as near to Buckingham Palace as we possibly could. You can't exaggerate the joy of that day. And we could go home in the dark and not worry about an air raid! And people could leave their curtains undrawn!~No, the feeling of joy on that day was something to remember the whole of your life.

The end of the war didn't bring joy to everyone. It was hard to celebrate when your husband or son wasn't coming home. When the troops were demobilised & the prisoners of war were released, the men who came home had changed & the women they came back to had changed as well. Many marriages foundered & divorce rates increased. Many young women had become engaged to American GIs & set off to a whole new life in another country. Others had to leave jobs that they had enjoyed because the work was no longer there or the job was reserved for a returned serviceman.

The stress of adjustment to peace was severe. Especially as life didn't automatically change for the better. Rationing didn't end with the war & shortages of food, clothing, housing all made life difficult without the feeling of necessary sacrifice that came with the war effort. The final chapters of Millions Like Us are quite sober. News of the concentration camps & the dropping of the nuclear bombs on Japan shocked everyone. The new post-war world would take some getting used to. Millions Like Us is an absorbing book. Virginia Nicholson has done an excellent job of describing the war experiences of so many different women yet by the end of the book, the reader feels that we know them all intimately. The personal interviews are especially important as the generation who lived through WWII begins to disappear. It's all the more crucial that their experiences are not forgotten.

Overflowing with blessings

What to read next? So many lovely books have come into the house in recent weeks that I'm having a hard time deciding what to read first. I spent last weekend reading Millions Like Us by Virginia Nicholson, one of the books I didn't get to last year & wanted to read before the end of this year. I loved it & I'll be reviewing it soon. Another of the books on that list was Georgette Heyer by Jennifer Kloester but after reading Captive Reader's review, I'm not sure I'm in the mood when there are so many other books clamouring for my attention. My copies of the beautiful Virago reprints of High Rising & Wild Strawberries have arrived.

Then, there's this pile of new books from the library. The Pinecone by Jenny Uglow, about Sarah Losh, a remarkable woman who was an antiquarian & architect in a period when a woman wasn't supposed to be either. These Wonderful Rumours! by May Smith, the diary of a schoolteacher during WWII. Serving Victoria by Kate Hubbard, life with Queen Victoria by members of her household including doctors & ladies-in-waiting. Thomas Wyatt : the Heart's Forest by Susan Brigden. Wyatt is one of my favourite poets & I'm interested in Brigden's interpretation of his melancholy life. A Question of Identity by Susan Hill is the new Simon Serrailler mystery. I always look forward to this series & I can't wait to see how Simon deals with his new love affair. The Sea Garden by Marcia Willett. One of my most anticipated comfort reads each year is a new novel by Marcia Willett. Set in Devon or Cornwall, her books are always full of atmosphere & family drama. The Fishing Fleet by Anne De Courcy, about the young women who went out toi India in search of husbands in the days of the Raj. Lifting the Lid by Claire Macdonald is the story of the author's life at Kinloch Lodge on Skye. Macdonald may be better known in the UK but I hadn't heard of her. The book is the story of how she & her husband created the Kinloch Lodge Hotel, brought up their family & became a well-known cookery writer.

I've known about Girls Gone By, the publisher specializing in reprinting classic girls school stories, for ages but hadn't bought anything until recently. I didn't read school stories (except Enid Blyton's Naughtiest Girl series) or books about pony-mad little girls when I was a child so I'm not interested in reading them now. However, I discovered these books on their list about young women & couldn't resist buying them. Margaret Finds a Future by Mabel Esther Allan, The Bartle Bequest by Dorita Fairlie Bruce & The Scholarship Girl at Cambridge by Josephine Elder.

The new edition of Brontë Studies will be arriving any day now &, having seen the Table of Contents & noticing that many of the articles are about Anne's Agnes Grey & Charlotte's The Professor, I feel that I should reread both before I read the articles to refresh my memory. It's been years since I read either of them.

I've also been tempted by Dani's plan to read Fanny Burney's Camilla & I've decided to read along. I've downloaded the free copy from Girlebooks but I've also borrowed the OUP edition from work so I can read the notes.

My next book should probably be one of the library books as I know I can't renew some of them. It's a difficult decision & I think a cup of tea & some soothing music (I'm listening to lots of Christmas carols & choirs at the moment) will be needed to help me get there.

Sunday Poetry - Thomas Hardy

This is a late poem by Hardy, written in 1927. The speaker is looking back to a time when he still had the energy to climb a hill to look at the moon rise. It's melancholy but with a touch of humour at the disadvantages of age.

We used to go to Froom-hill Barrow,
To see the round moon rise
Into the heath-rimmed skies,
Trudging thither by plough and harrow
Up the pathway, steep and narrow,
Singing a song.
Now we do not go there. Why?
Zest burns not so high!

Latterly we've only conned her
With a passing glance
From window or door by chance,
Hoping to go again, high yonder,
As we used, and gaze, and ponder,
Singing a song.
Thitherward we do not go:
Feet once quick are slow!