Huntingtower - John Buchan

Dickson McCunn is a well-to-do Glasgow grocer who wakes up on the morning after he retires from business & decides to take a walking tour. His wife is on one of her regular visits to a hydropathic spa & Dickson is at a loose end. He sets off in high spirits to explore Carrick but soon finds himself involved in adventures he could never have dreamt of.

Dickson meets John Heritage, a Modernist poet who is drifting at a loose end, dreaming of a beautiful Russian princess he knew slightly when he was stationed in Rome during the War. The two men arrive in Dalquharter, a village near the coast & find lodgings with Phemie Morran after being rebuffed by a surly innkeeper. Exploring the area, they come across a large, modern house with a much older derelict tower called Huntingtower. Heritage is amazed to hear a voice he knows singing a song he's heard before. It's the Russian princess, Saskia, & Heritage & McCunn soon discover that she's been kidnapped by henchmen of her great enemy who has been chasing her all over Europe. Saskia has been helping the opponents of the Bolshevik regime & she has a fortune in jewels to pass on to a man she has come to meet. The owner of Huntingtower had been her friend in Rome &, although he's now dead, he had told her of his remote house in Scotland & so, when she needed a bolt hole, she headed for it. Her fellow conspirator, Alexis, is on his way but unfortunately, there's no sign of him yet &, in the meantime, she must hold out against the threats of her captors as they wait for their leader to arrive.

Heritage & McCunn decide that Saskia must be rescued & they're aided by the Gorbals Die-Hards, a group of Glasgow street kids who have formed their own irregular scout troop. Led by their Chieftain, Dougal, the Die-Hards have scraped together the money for a field trip with the help of various Glasgow beneficiaries, including McCunn. The Die-Hards are an efficient fighting force with Dougal having absorbed everything he possibly can about military strategy & tactics. Their hardscrap lives on the streets of Glasgow are perfect training for reconnaissance missions in the Scottish countryside. McCunn & Heritage are sworn into the troop with an oath & Dougal tells them what he's discovered about the mystery at Huntingtower & his plans to rescue Saskia. The plan culminates in a battle between the Die-Hards, Heritage, McCunn, local landowner Sir Archibald Roylance & his staff of war wounded men & Mrs Morran against Saskia's jailers & the reinforcements who arrive in a Danish brig with their leader, Paul Abreskov, who wants not only the jewels but Saskia herself.

Huntingtower is a great adventure yarn. Buchan is so good at this type of story with a fast moving plot, international conspiracies, evil villains & heroes motivated by honour & the rules of fair play. Dickson McCunn is a very sympathetic hero. He is drawn to Saskia because she reminds him of his long-dead little daughter & he surprises himself with his stamina trekking through the countryside & his readiness to break the law in a good cause. I love the descriptions of the countryside in Buchan's novels. Scotland is always a major character & his Scots characters (even when their dialect is almost impenetrable) are always wonderful. Mrs Morran is a delightful woman, practical, intrepid & very definite in her opinions. She's also an excellent cook. Sir Archibald only has a minor role but he's a fully realised & very sympathetic character. A man who served in the Royal Flying Corps & was badly wounded just before the war ended, he's now lame & frustrated with it. John Buchan's novels are similar to his sister, O Douglas's, novels in this portrayal of life after WWI. There's a sense of melancholy in the lives lost & the very different future for the men who came back wounded.

I was prompted to read Huntingtower because it features in a new series of podcasts by Kate Macdonald at Why I Really Like This Book on books published in 1922. You can download the podcast or listen to it here. There are two more novels featuring Dickson McCunn & the Gorbals Die-Hards, Castle Gay (1930) & The House of the Four Winds (1935) & I'm looking forward to reading them.

I read Huntingtower on my e-reader so I didn't have this beautiful cover (picture from here) on my copy.

Mrs Miles's Diary - ed S V Partington

Constance Miles was a housewife living in Shere, a village near Guildford in Surrey, during WWII. She was a writer who came from a literary family. Her father was William Robertson Nicoll, founder of the periodicals The Bookman & British Weekly. Constance was in her late 50s when the War began. Married to Elystan Miles, known as Robin, in 1909, they had two sons, Harry & Basil. Robin served in the Royal Artillery during WWI &, after he resigned his commission, they owned a chicken farm in the 20s. Robin loved an outdoor life & one of the themes of Connie's diary is Robin building an air raid shelter or pottering about, gardening & fixing things. They moved to Shere in 1928 & bought a large house which they divided in two, living upstairs & letting the lower floor to tenants. Connie's writing was always important to her, whether it was the reviews & articles she wrote to supplement Robin's army pension or the diary she began to keep in August 1939. The diary stops briefly in April 1941 as paper rationing had began & Connie seems to have become discouraged by the progress of the war.

Not too much to eat; our income tax about to drain our pockets; life docked of happy travel and happy meetings, the necessary machinery of a million households cracking. Girls of twenty conscripted - what a chaotic business; its humorous side apparent to every woman, and to no man.

The diary resumes, however, eight months later & continues through to 1943. Connie donated a copy of her diary to the Imperial War Museum in 1947 and in the letter that accompanies the donation she writes, "May it be of use some day!". In recent years there has been several diaries written by "ordinary" women published or reprinted. Best known are the diaries of Nella Last which were written for the Mass Observation organization. My favourite would be Vere Hodgson's Few Eggs and No Oranges, reprinted some years ago by Persephone. Vere is so bubbly & unflappable. She worked as a social worker in Notting Hill & kept her spirits high during the Blitz even while walking past piles or rubble from the last raid after yet another sleepless night.

Connie Miles lived an ordinary life and that's the value of her diary. It begins in the period of the phoney war, when nothing really seemed to be happening. Mothers & children were being evacuated from London for fear of raids & Connie describes the arrival of the evacuees & the fear that their downstairs flat would be commandeered for the newcomers. Later on, it's the ARP who threaten to take it over.  There is lots of information here about the effects of the war on a small community. Rationing was naturally a huge concern & what was available & how to get hold of it was a constant source of speculation.

The fishman was very scornful when I asked if he had any fish below one and sixpence a pound today. Cod was two shillings a pound. Imagine being in his power! It was take it or leave it, and you're damned lucky if you secure a piece of anything. Finally I got enough for one person for one-and-fourpence, fresh haddock, and also a little bit of cat's fish as a tremendous favour. 
February 8, 1940

Robin wanted to be doing something for the war effort but all his offers to help in training the Home Guard were rejected. He was constantly frustrated that his efforts to teach (when they were accepted) were met by apathy by his students. Robin's tart comments are an expression of his frustration but he was obviously annoyed by what he saw as the lackadaisical attitude of many on the Home Front who weren't taking the possibility of invasion very seriously.

Connie's son, Harry, was invalided out of the Army due to ankylosing spondylitis ( a bone disease) & eventually went out to Rhodesia to work on his uncle's tobacco farm. Basil was a doctor & joined the Royal Army Medical Corps. He was badly wounded in North Africa at El Alamein but survived to return home. Connie also had friends in London & in the US whose letters kept her up to date with events far away. One of her friends was Barbara Bowers, better known as Barbara Euphan Todd,who wrote the Worzel Gummidge books & Miss Ranskill Comes Home, reprinted by Persephone. Another close friend, May Browne (later Sinclair), worked for the BBC.

As always, the interest I have in reading diaries of the Home Front is in the juxtaposition of everyday life & the big events of politics & war. Connie's diary is fascinating reading and although my favourite WWII diarists are still Vere Hodgson with her optimism & poor nervy Nella Last with her impossible husband & endless contriving with food, Connie's diary is full of gems like this that portray life as it was during those years.

I was aghast at being asked on the telephone this morning to become Billeting Officer - I am considering it; as there are 8-900 children in the village it would be no sinecure.
Went to London. Coming down in a crowded carriage with two men standing, a Canadian soldier turned on his small wireless set and the whole packed carriage listened gravely to a fairy story from the Children's Hour about Grimalkin. So English were we, we made no sort of response or comment, or thanked the Canadian. But I suspect we all enjoyed it, jogging through snow-covered fields. Returned much elated, and gave Robin the gift of an apricot tart. Tried not to think about Malaya and the increasing danger there.
January 13, 1942

Sunday Poetry - Eileen Newton

It's Remembrance Day tomorrow so this will be my last poem from the Virago anthology. There's no information about Eileen Newton in the Notes so all I know is that this poem, Last Leave (1918), was published in Lamps in the Valley in 1927.

Let us forget tomorrow! For tonight
At least, with curtains drawn, and driftwood piled
On our own hearthstone, we may rest, and see
The firelight flickering on familiar walls.
(How the blue flames leap when an ember falls!)
Peace, and content, and soul-security - 
These are within. Without, the waste is wild
With storm-clouds sweeping by in furious flight,
And ceaseless beating of autumnal rain
Upon our window pane.

The dusk grows deeper now, the flames are low:
We do not heed the shadows, you and I,
Nor fear the grey wings of encroaching gloom,
So softly they enfold us. One last gleam
Flashes and flits, elusive as a dream,
And then dies out upon the darkened room.
So, even so, our earthly fires must die;
Yet, in our hearts, love's flame shall leap and glow
When this dear night, with all it means to me,
Is but a memory!

When I first read this poem, I thought there might be a hopeful ending for this love story. I know the title is Last Leave & there's a melancholy feeling to it but it is 1918 & it's autumn so maybe it was the soldier's last leave because the war ended & he came home safely.

But then, I read the next poem, Revision (for November 11th), also published in 1927 & I'm afraid that the soldier never did come home. Although in this poem, it's April & springtime so maybe this was the last time of that leave not the last, last time? Maybe Last Leave was written in 1918 about an earlier time? I know poetry doesn't have to be autobiographical but all the poems in this anthology seem so very personal that I can't help drawing that conclusion even though I'm now quite confused. This is still a lovely poem about memory & loss, no matter the circumstances in which it was written.

In those two silent moments, when we stand,
To let the surging tide of memory fill
The mind's deep caverns with its mingled flood
Of joys and griefs, I shall not think again,
As I was wont, of the untimely slain,
Of poppies dipped and dyed in human blood,
Of the rude cross upon the ravaged hill,
And all the strife which scarred that lovely land.

My thoughts shall seek, instead, a hallowed place - 
The little, leafy wood where you and I
Spent the last hour together, while the breeze,
Lulled every nodding daffodil to rest;
And from the flaming ramparts of the west
Shone bars of gold between black stems of trees,
Till dusk crept softly down the April sky,
And Hesperus trembled in the sapphire space.

Remembering this, my heart, at length set free
From gyves of hate, its bitter passion shed,
May hear once more the low, caressing call
That so entranced it, seven sad years ago.
Then, in those poignant moments, I shall know
That pain and parting matter not at all,
Because your soul, long-risen from the dead,
Is crowned by Love's immortal constancy.

The Ashgrove - Diney Costeloe

'Who do you belong to, I wonder?' she asked aloud. There was nothing to indicate whom each tree commemorated... or that the place was a memorial at all. She moved from tree to tree until she had rested her hand on each trunk, and thought of all the young, fresh-faced men who had gone so jauntily to war, never to return to their homes here in Charlton Ambrose. Such high hopes they must have had. The adventure of fighting in a war, seeing a bit of the world, before settling down to their humdrum lives here in the country. Rachel thought of the pictures she had seen of the trenches in Flanders, the mud and the squalor, the cold and the rats. She shuddered, and drawing her coat more closely around her, walked out on the far side of the grove where the allotment hedge barred her way.

Rachel Elliot is a reporter working for the local Belcaster Chronicle. She has been sent to cover a meeting in the Charlton Ambrose village hall to discuss a proposed housing development. She expects it to be a routine assignment but it's the beginning of a quest that will lead her into the past & to discoveries about her own family history. The developers are brought up short when an elderly woman stands up & accuses them of planning to demolish the Ashgrove, a group of trees planted in 1921 as a memorial to the local men killed in WWI. Cecily Strong's brother, Will, was one of the men commemorated &, even though the metal plates have long since gone, there are still local people who know what the trees mean. Rachel is intrigued by this new angle on the story & visits Cecily to find out more.

Cecily's long term memory proves very helpful & a trawl through parish records & the newspaper archive fills in more of the gaps. Eight local men, including the Squire's son, Freddie, were killed. Squire Hurst paid for the trees & the metal plates but he died the same year & so the stones that were meant to replace the plates as a permanent memorial were never erected. There's also a mystery because there are nine trees, not eight, in the Ashgrove. The ninth tree was secretly planted soon after the dedication & the Rector, Henry Smalley, who had served at the Front, convinced the Squire to let it stand as a memorial to the Unknown Soldier. Rachel also discovers that the Squire's daughter, Sarah, went to France as a nurse & was killed when her hospital was shelled. She decides to try to trace the descendants of the other soldiers to see if they can convince the developers to find some other way to build the access road they need & plans a series of articles for the newspaper on the Ashgrove & the men who died.

Rachel is surprised to discover a personal link with Charlton Ambrose when she visits her grandmother, Rosemary, & hears that she lived in the village when she was a child. She was born illegitimate & her mother had been unwillingly forced to return to her parents.When Rosemary's mother died soon after, she lived with her grandparents for some years. Rosemary's mother's diary & a sealed packet of letters that she has never opened, take Rachel back to 1915.

Rosemary's mother, Molly, is a housemaid at the Manor. Sarah Hurst is determined to nurse in France & is desperate to overcome her father's disapproval. Sarah's aunt is a nun in a French convent hospital & reluctantly agrees that Sarah's help would be useful if she can get her father's approval. Sarah asks Molly to go with her &, because Molly is frightened of her abusive father who has insisted she leave service & work for higher wages in a munitions factory, she agrees. Molly's diary tells of their journey to France, their work at the hospital & her meeting with Tom Carter, a soldier who has been brought in with his best mate, Harry, who is Molly's cousin. Molly & Tom's friendship turns to love although their relationship must be kept secret from the disapproving nuns. Tom returns to the Front just before the Battle of the Somme in July 1916 &, although he survives the battle, the confusion afterwards & his desire to get back to St Croix to marry Molly, who has become pregnant, leads to tragedy & an injustice that has only been rectified in recent years.

The Ashgrove is such an involving story. I read it in two long evenings as I was totally caught up in both stories. Rachel's researches were fascinating (I can't resist a bit of digging in the archives) & her personal connection to the Ashgrove is very poignant. Sarah & Molly's story was also totally involving as they become friends rather than mistress & servant. Molly discovers her abilities as a nurse & Sarah is drawn more to the spiritual side of life at the convent which leads to tensions between the girls as Molly's relationship with Tom grows. I've read many WWI diaries & memoirs & I can see how much research has gone into creating this picture of a hospital under enormous pressure. Having recently read Emily Mayhew's Wounded, this novel was the perfect companion read as Diney Costeloe has brought the factual accounts to life in a very moving way.

I should declare a personal interest here as Diney is a friend & fellow member of my online reading group. She asked me if I would like to review The Ashgrove as she is hoping to give it a bit of a relaunch with Remembrance Day coming up. She kindly sent me e-copies of The Ashgrove & the sequel, Death's Dark Vale, which continues Sarah's story & takes us up to WWII. I'm looking forward to read it very much. Both books are available as paperbacks & Kindle editions.

The King's Grave : the search for Richard III - Philippa Langley & Michael Jones

The discovery of the grave of Richard III in the church of the Greyfriars in Leicester has been the story of the decade for those of us interested in history & archaeology. For those of us who are members of The Richard III Society, it's been an exciting time as we followed the Looking for Richard project every step of the way through regular updates from the Society as well as following the newspapers, blogs & websites speculating about the identity of the remains. Since February, when the remains found in the grave in the Social Services car park in Leicester (formerly the Church of the Greyfriars), were formally identified as being those of Richard III, the last English king to die in battle, the interest & attention has been intense. The current legal fight by a group called the Plantagenet Alliance (collateral descendants of Richard's family) to overturn the plans to bury Richard in Leicester Cathedral means that Richard III has barely been out of the headlines for over a year.

The Looking for Richard project was the passion of Philippa Langley, a screenwriter who became interested in Richard III, joined the Society & then became obsessed with finding his grave. Traditional stories described the hasty burial of the king after his death at the battle of Bosworth, the erection of an alabaster tomb over the grave ten years later (paid for by the victor of Bosworth, Henry VII), the destruction of the Church of the Greyfriars at the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s & Richard's remains being thrown into the river Soar while his coffin was used as a horse trough at a local pub. Langley's research led her to doubt most of the traditional narrative & she became determined to find Richard's grave & ensure that he was given a dignified reburial in consecrated ground.

Other members of the Richard III Society supported her quest, including Annette Carson, author of Richard III : the maligned king & John Ashdown-Hill, whose research into the location of the Greyfriars Church as well as the DNA profile of Richard would prove crucial in proving that the remains discovered during the dig were, beyond doubt, those of Richard III. The King's Grave is Langley's account of her quest, from the spooky moment when she stood in the Leicester car park & felt that she was literally standing on Richard's grave to the long period of gathering funding for an archaeological dig (including an eleventh hour international appeal to the members of the Richard III Society to contribute when crucial funding was lost) to persuading Richard Buckley & the University of Leicester of the validity of her research & through the two week dig itself & the media storm that followed. Searches for named individuals are rarely undertaken by archaeologists & they are rarely successful. To find the right person in the right place with only a few trenches dug & on the first day of a two week dig was amazing - a million to one chance indeed.

I was surprised how suspenseful this was, especially as I knew the outcome & I'd followed the whole process as closely as was possible from the other side of the world. I've also seen the documentary The King in the Car Park that was filmed during the dig & read everything I could find from newspaper reports, the very informative Ricardian Bulletins & the scholarly articles that have been published so far. Langley's emotional highs & lows are vividly relived. Skeletal remains were discovered in the first trench dug on the very first day & she was immediately convinced that Richard had been found. Although she respected the archaeologist's desire for context & evidence, her belief never wavered. She was proved right as the skeleton was excavated & the damage to the skull & the curvature of the spine were revealed.  The Carbon 14 dating later placed the remains at the right historical period & the DNA research confirmed Richard's identity by matching his DNA with that of two descendants. The scene where she sees the skeleton displayed in a lab & listens to the professionals describing the extent of the scoliosis of the spine & the brutality of the battle wounds is very moving. This was one of the most powerful scenes in the documentary, as well.

Alternate chapters of The King's Grave have been written by historian Michael Jones. Jones fills in the background on Richard's life & times & discusses the main controversies of the reign - how & why Richard took the throne & the fate of the Princes in the Tower. Jones believes that Richard feared that his rule as Protector would not last long once Edward V was crowned & he feared for his future when the young King's Woodville relations resumed their influence over events. He believes that it was the discovery of a plot to rescue the Princes from the Tower that forced Richard's hand & led to him ordering their deaths. Philippa Langley doesn't agree with this interpretation & there's an Appendix that sets out the arguments for & against Richard's involvement in their disappearance. The alternate chapters work well in heightening the suspense of the dig & the scientific tests afterwards as well as filling in the background for readers who are not familiar with Richard's life.

The King's Grave is an excellent account of the search for Richard III & a useful introduction to his life. It's the perfect taster for the many scholarly articles that will follow & the research that will result into the man & this most controversial period of English history.

Sunday Poetry - Anna Gordon Keown

Anna Gordon Keown was a novelist & poet who is now almost completely forgotten. The introduction to her Collected Poems, published in 1953, was written by Siegfried Sassoon, so she obviously had a reputation in her lifetime (she died in 1957). Looking her up, I find that she was married to Dr Philip Gosse (son of Edmund) & she wrote a comic novel called The Cat who Saw God (1932), about a cat possessed by the Emperor Nero who goes to live with a fussy English spinster. Has anyone read this? It sounds wonderful!
I also discovered that this lovely sonnet, Reported Missing, is often studied in schools in the UK, although this is the first time I've come across it.

My thought shall never be that you are dead:
Who laughed so lately in this quiet place.
The dear and deep-eyed humour of that face
Held something ever-living, in Death's stead.
Scornful I hear the flat things they have said
And all their piteous platitudes of pain.
I laugh! I laugh! -- For you will come again -
This heart would never beat if you were dead.
The world's adrowse in twilight hushfulness,
There's purple lilac in your little room,
And somewhere out beyond the evening gloom
Small boys are culling summer watercress.
Of these familiar things I have no dread
Being so very sure you are not dead.

The Lost Stradivarius - John Meade Falkner

Halloween always seems to be the right time to read a few ghost stories. The Lost Stradivarius was the choice of my 19th century book group &, although I'd read it before, I enjoyed revisiting it at this ghostly time of year. Although, having said that, Halloween is in the middle of spring in Australia rather than autumn with that lovely sense of the year drawing in so it doesn't feel particularly ghostly. However, my reading focus is mostly toward northern hemisphere writers so I can feel autumnal no matter what the weather.

I think ghost stories work best as short stories or novellas. It's too much to expect a reader to keep up that suspension of disbelief (if you do, in fact, disbelieve) over hundreds of pages. The Lost Stradivarius is a very tidy 160pp & is in the form of two narratives. The first is by Miss Sophia Maltravers. Sophia is writing to her nephew, Edward, a student at Oxford in 1867, about events that happened some 30 years before. Edward's father, John, died young & his life was very unhappy at the end. Sophia wants her nephew to understand his father & so decides to tell him what she knows of his life & the strange events that led to his death.

John Maltravers went up to Oxford, to Magdalen Hall, at the age of 19. He loved music & was a violinist of some talent. He especially enjoyed playing duets with his good friend, William Gaskell.  Mr Gaskell visits Rome during his vacation to study piano & returns with some manuscript music bound into a volume. The young men begin to play a suite by Graziani for violin & harpsichord  & they are pleased with the result. However, John becomes almost obsessed with this suite & they play it every time they meet. One night, when he is practicing the piece alone, John hears a creaking sound, as if someone had sat down in the wicker chair in the corner of his room. He turns around but can see no one. When he finishes playing the suite, he hears a sound as if someone had risen from the chair but again, sees nothing. This phenomenon occurs whenever the piece is played &, one night, John does see the figure of a man rising from the chair & walking through the wall of his room.

At the place in the wall where the ghostly figure disappears, John discovers a secret cupboard & inside it, he finds a violin. The instrument needs restringing but is otherwise in good condition & the label inside proclaims it to be by the great Stradivari. John takes the violin to an expert for an opinion & when the man assumes that the violin belongs to him, John doesn't enlighten him. This first untruth is the beginning of John's downfall. John becomes consumed by the violin & becomes possessed by the malignant spirit of the original owner, Adrian Temple. Temple lived in the same rooms 80 years before John, had traveled to Italy to study music & led a dissolute life. He disappeared in Rome in mysterious circumstances & his body was never found.

John falls in love with Constance Temple, a friend of his sister's &, coincidentally, a member of the same family as Adrian Temple. On a visit to Royston, Constance's family home, John is so shocked by the sight of a portrait of the man he knows only as his ghostly visitor, that his health collapses. John & Constance marry & John insists on traveling to Italy for their honeymoon. John's behaviour grows stranger & his obsession with the violin & Rome results in estrangement from Constance. Eventually he returns to live in Rome alone under the malign influence of Adrian Temple, in the very same house Temple lived in at the end of his life. His identification with Temple becomes so strong that his health completely gives way & Sophia goes out to Italy to try to bring her brother home.

The other narrative is by William Gaskell. He attempts to explain the decline of John Maltravers's health in a more scientific rational way than Sophia who is convinced of the supernatural influence of Adrian Temple. He also explores the events of Temple's life in more detail & muses on the philosophical influence of certain pieces of music on a susceptible mind.

The Lost Stradivarius is an atmospheric tale with some very shivery, Gothic moments.  Constance tells the story as she heard it from her brother as well as from her own observations (her journey to Italy is wonderful as she experiences the strangeness of John's behavior & the foreignness of her surroundings) & what she discovers afterwards. John Meade Falkner only wrote two other novels. Moonfleet is a story of smugglers & adventure, written for children & The Nebuly Coat, which is a mystery set in Dorset where a young architect goes to supervise some restoration work in the local church. I have copies of both & would definitely like to read them one of these days.