The Twelve Days of Christmas - Trisha Ashley

Holly Brown doesn’t celebrate Christmas. It’s never been a happy time of year. Her mother died at Christmas giving birth to her. She was brought up by Strange Baptist grandparents who were kind & loving but didn’t do the secular side of Christmas. Holly married Alan & discovered the joy of Christmas trees, paper chains & silly games. Then, eight years ago, Alan died just before Christmas. He fell through the ice trying to rescue a dog. Holly has given up on Christmas. She restructured her life to avoid it. She caters for posh house parties most of the year but during winter, is a house sitter, choosing the most remote locations possible.

This year, the job she had lined up in the Scottish Highlands falls through & she takes on a last minute emergency post in Lancashire. Jude Martland is in the US, avoiding Christmas at his family home, Old Place, after his brother ran off with his fiancée last year. Holly takes over from Jude’s regular house sitters at the last moment to look after the house, Merlin a gorgeous old lurcher, Lady, an ancient horse & Billy the goat. Holly doesn’t bargain on the rest of the family & the weather conspiring to revive her Christmas spirit. Holly & Jude get off to a bad start with grumpy trans-Atlantic phone calls that cut out with the bad reception. Their spiky, bad-tempered conversations are a delight. This is a romantic comedy so we know where the relationship is headed but it’s a lot of fun seeing how these two people who have been hurt in love, get over their mutual antipathy & become friends.

The rest of the Martland family are delightful. Noel & Tilda living in the Lodge, with their granddaughter Jess staying for the holidays. Becca, the horsey, kind-hearted aunt who helps Holly with the horses. Old retainers, Nan & Richard living in almshouses in the village. Somehow, Holly is convinced to provide the traditional family Christmas house party for the family, including Guy & Coco, the model & aspiring actress he stole away from Jude the year before. Guy turns up to freeload when he hears Jude is away but Jude’s sudden return to stop Holly taking advantage of his aging relatives changes everything. Holly has also been reading her late grandmother’s diaries about her work as a nurse during WWII & it turns out there’s an intriguing connection to the Martland family. Holly & Jude continue sparring with misunderstanding piled on misunderstanding until Holly is the only one who can’t see that she & Jude are made for each other.

This is a gorgeous book. The setting, in frozen Lancashire with the house cut off by snow; the wonderful characters- gentle Noel, bossy Tilda, charming, untrustworthy Guy & selfish Coco; the humour and the food. I haven’t mentioned the food yet. This is one of the things I love about Trisha Ashley’s books. She is obsessed with food. Holly is a fantastic cook & we’re treated to descriptions of roast dinners, stuffed pike, egg & bacon muffins, Christmas cake, chocolate cake in a mug, & a Christmas dinner with all the trimmings. This would be the perfect book to read on a winter’s afternoon with a pot of tea & some chocolate at the halfway mark. But, I couldn’t manage that in Melbourne. Luckily it’s been a cool weekend for summer & I could still have the tea & chocolate while I wallowed in this lovely romantic story.

A Lewes Diary 1916-1944 - Mrs Henry Dudeney

I love the serendipity of discovering books. I was allocating a trolley of Large Print books at work the other week & started browsing through The Country Diaries edited by Alan Taylor. This is an anthology of diary entries by authors from Beatrix Potter to Dorothy Wordsworth arranged by date to take the reader through the year. This is the entry that grabbed my attention,

26 November 1924
At lunch no Ernest. I waited till half past one, worried myself into a fit of acute indigestion, kept looking out the window for an ambulance: actually (how mad it seems!) went to the outside lavatory to see if he had hanged himself. Then remembered that he had said he was going to Brighton.

I don’t know about you but that last sentence just took my breath away. I quickly got hold of a second-hand copy & I’ve been absorbed in Alice Dudeney’s Diary all week. Alice wrote under her married name, Mrs Henry Dudeney. She was a very famous novelist in her day but I’d never heard of her. She was a friend of Sir Philip Sassoon & was often invited to his country house weekends. She was compared to Thomas Hardy & thought superior to Edith Wharton. The list of her novels in the front of the book runs to over 40 titles written from 1894 to 1937. The editor of the Diary, Diana Crook, says that Alice would be astounded to know that her work is completely forgotten. Titles like Married When Suited, What a Woman Wants, The Maternity of Hariott Wicken & Puff Paste, sound intriguing, I wonder if she’ll ever be rediscovered?

The Diary begins in 1916. Alice’s marriage to Henry (Ernest) Dudeney has been a stormy one. Ernest was also a writer & was famous for his books of mathematical puzzles. He also wrote for some of the many magazines of the time, including The Strand. Alice was 18 when they married in 1884. In around 1913, Alice had taken their daughter, Margery, left Ernest & moved to Sussex. She was having an affair with a married man, David (the editor has not revealed his full name to avoid embarrassing his descendents). However, by 1916, Margery has gone to Canada to be married & Alice has reconciled with Ernest & they are living in Lewes. There are no diaries for 1914 & 1915 so the exact circumstances of their reconciliation are unknown. From later entries, it’s obvious that, although David loved Alice, he wasn’t prepared to leave his wife for her. After Margery left, Alice may have been lonely & it is known that she wrote to Ernest asking him to live with her in Lewes.

Their marriage is one of the fascinations of the Diary. The relationship swings from vicious arguments & cold rages to considerable affection. Money seems to be one of the triggers for discord. Ernest seems upset by any expenditure at all & it’s not clear how much each contributes to the household. Alice buys up several historic properties in Lewes over the course of the Diary & she always speaks of her money, her lawyer, her agent. Until her novels fell from favour in the late 30s, she seems to have made a comfortable living from her career. Ernest’s failing health shocks Alice into feeling more tenderness for him than she had felt for years.

8 April 1930How am I going to remember all the sharp details of this time. How every morning I put a fresh little jug of flowering currant in his room, because he loves flowering currant. And how, this very day, I have folded up and put his suit away, for he no longer gets up. And locked away his ring, which for months he’s kept in his waistcoat pocket, because his finger got so thin.

However, these elegiac moments are few & far between. Far more characteristic are the sometimes spiteful, catty entries she makes about friends & acquaintances. After Ernest’s death, David’s wife, Ida, gets in touch with Alice & they begin a curious friendship. Ida knows about the affair although it’s never mentioned, & she becomes a sort of go-between, relaying messages to & from David to Alice. David also comes to visit, without Ida, & , although Alice revels in the nostalgia of their earlier relationship, she soon finds herself bored with David's protestations of devotion, & irritated by his clothes & his little ways. Alice is never fond of visitors & she lets out her frustrations in the Diary during one of Ida's visits,

27 June 1934
Really, visitors are a nuisance. Winnie (maid) comes in to my room and announces that Ida can’t get up: so ‘giddy’. Elderly women should stay in their own homes. I do. Told Ida she’d better stop in bed all day. Said she would – might she have another pillow? Yes, she might. And got it. Might she have some brandy? Hadn’t got it, but went out and bought a half-bottle – 8/9d! Which I really grudged, but I suppose it ought to be in the house. Gave her some and she felt better. Chicken, not much, and ice cream for her dinner: complained that the ice cream melted too soon!
28 June 1934
She is up thank goodness, but fussy, as always. An egg ‘lightly boiled’ for breakfast. “You will see, won’t you, Alice, that she doesn’t hard boil it?” Alice (curtly): “She never does.”

I must admit that I almost gave up on this book before I’d really begun. I thought it was an impulse buy that had gone wrong. The early entries are very bitter. It’s the middle of WWI, she’s trying to re-establish her relationship with Ernest, she’s having problems finding reliable servants, she’s still in love with David & she’s missing Margery. Once she has bought & moved into the Castle Precincts House, a beautiful historic house in Lewes, Alice’s excitement in making her home seemed to overcome some of her unhappiness & I suddenly couldn’t put the book down.

Her love for her dalmations, Nelson, Emma & Spangles, is also very moving. As is so often the case, she gave her dogs all the love she couldn’t give anyone else. Her long walks with the dogs & their love & companionship become very important to Alice as she finds other areas of her life lacking. Diaries can be difficult to read. Often, they are only written in when the diarist is unhappy or needs to vent anger or disappointment. There’s a lot of anger in Alice’s Diary. Friends & family fall in & out of favour. But, there is also a lot of happiness when Alice is working hard on her books or her houses, thinking of Margery & her grandchildren or walking on the Hills with the dogs. The entries written during WWII are also fascinating. Life on the Home Front, with all the rumours, rationing & privations. As always, diaries written in the middle of a conflict really reveal the anxieties of people living through them, often without accurate information. She can also be very funny,

13 October 1938
I bought myself a 6d Penguin book to read. Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies. Filthy and blasphemous. Shall burn it (but finish reading it first!)

Alice Dudeney left her diaries to the Sussex Archaeological Society with the proviso that they not be opened for 25 years. However, it was thought that, even then, the Diaries still had the capacity to hurt people living in Lewes so the Society closed them again until 2000. This ban was relaxed when a writer researching Ernest’s life applied to read them & so the editor was able to put together this volume which was first published in 1998. One of my more successful impulse buys.

White nights - Ann Cleeves

Martin Edwards was discussing the pros & cons of reading a mystery series from the first book through to the end on his blog recently. Does it really matter if we jump in at Book 5 or 15? Some series, the classic puzzle type of mystery for instance, had very little character development so it didn’t matter where you started, the detective was very much the same. Modern detective series involve a much greater investment from the reader & we expect more than a cardboard cutout for a detective. I know I become fond of my favourite detectives, their colleagues & families. I want an update on Reg & Dora Wexford & their daughters or Kinsey Millhone & her neighbours. I’m on tenterhooks about the relationship between Daniel Kind & Hannah Scarlett in Martin Edwards’s Lake District series & I’m always happy to catch up with Wes Peterson & his boss Gerry Heffernan in Kate Ellis’s books. If the author is doing their job properly a new reader will soon find out all they need to know about a protagonist without regular readers becoming bored with the repetition of basic facts. Of course, it can be a little disconcerting to read the last book in a series first where there’s a dramatic climax to the stories of several major characters & then go back to the beginning & pick up Book 1.

Well, that’s what I’ve done with Ann Cleeves’s Shetland Quartet. I read the last book, Blue Lightning, first. I loved it so I went back to the beginning & read Raven Black. I’ve just finished White Nights & I have Red Bones on the tbr pile. Knowing the end of the story hasn’t spoiled the enjoyment of the earlier books. This is a wonderful series. Ann Cleeves deserves all the awards & praise she has won. The plots are great but, for me, it’s the setting & Detective Jimmy Perez that are so beguiling.

Shetland is a major character in these books. The weather, the landscape, the way of life of people who have lived there all their lives & the visitors & incomers who have just arrived. In White Nights, it’s summer. The sun never quite sets & in the white nights, people go a little crazy. Jimmy Perez attends the opening of an exhibition at a gallery, the herring House, in Biddista, a small village. Bella Sinclair, local identity & famous artist is exhibiting along with Fran Hunter. Fran & Jimmy’s relationship has moved from detective & witness in the first book to friendship & now, they’re ready to take the next step. Fran is English, divorced & living in Ravenswick with her daughter, Cassie. At the gallery, a stranger walks in, looks at some of the pictures, then collapses sobbing on the floor. Jimmy tries to find out who he is but he has no ID & he vanishes.

Next morning, the stranger is found hanging in a nearby shed. It looks like suicide, but the doctor confirms that it’s murder. Jimmy’s investigations are helped & hindered by the fact that he’s a local. He grew up on Fair Isle so he knows these people. The few families living in the area close ranks & Jimmy finds it hard going. His frustrations include having to work with a team from Inverness, led by Roy Taylor, an abrasive Liverpudlian who left his family’s expectations behind to join the police force & move as far away from home as possible. Taylor & Perez have worked together before & have a wary friendship. Taylor is frustrated by Jimmy’s slow, careful way of investigating but has to admit that he would get nowhere on his own. When a second murder is committed, Perez realises that the solution lies in the past.

I think anyone who enjoys a classic murder mystery would love this series. I was probably the last mystery reader in the world to catch up with Ann Cleeves but now I’m sorry I only have one more Shetland novel to read.

Christmas reading, listening & watching

Christmas is one of those times of year when I find myself reading, watching & listening to old favourites. I've collected a lot of Christmas books, CDs & movies over the years & they nearly all make an appearance over the next few weeks as Christmas approaches. I've been a member of the Folio Society for many years & they often produce a Christmas anthology. Ghosts & murder seem especially appropriate to Christmas, well, many authors have thought so! As well as the Folio books, I also have an anthology of Clerical Crimes for Christmas that has stories by classic authors like Agatha Christie, Edmund Crispin & Cyril Hare. The Virago Book of Christmas is also a lovely anthology to dip into. It has a short story by Stella Gibbons, Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm, that takes place before Flora Poste arrives.

It's impossible to think of Christmas without Charles Dickens & A Christmas Carol. It probably doesn't surprise you to learn that I have several copies of this classic Christmas story. On the left, the beautiful annotated edition by Michael Patrick Hearn. Instead of reading the story in a couple of hours, I can take days to read it along with all the fascinating notes in this edition.

On the right is the Folio Society edition. Here are the gorgeous front endpapers. I also have Penguin & Oxford Classics editions & audio books read by Geoffrey Palmer & Miriam Margolyes.

I love the Hesperus Press editions of the special Christmas editions of Dickens's journal, Household Words. I have the latest, The Seven Poor Travellers, to read this year.

Traditional Christmas carols are among my favourite pieces of music. Here's the cover of the Folio Book of Carols, a collection of carols from medieval times to the present. The cover of the book is the same as the cover of the book the carol singers above are using. I'm just as fascinated by the origin of the words & music of the carols & I have a couple of books about this too.

Every year I find myself buying more CDs of Christmas music. Handel's Messiah, traditional carols sung by choirs, soloists & folk singers.This year I've ordered Annie Lennox's Christmas CD & Bryn Terfel, one of my favourite singers, has finally released a Christmas album. I can't wait for them to arrive although I have plenty to be going on with. I've started listening to them already as I made my Christmas cake & pudding.

Christmas movies are dominated by many versions of A Christmas Carol, including the Muppets version which I'm very fond of. Alistair Sim is my favourite Scrooge. Everything about that production is right. The black & white cinematography, the music, the way so many of the scenes are closely based on John Leech's original illustrations. Kathleen Harrison's performance as Mrs Dilber is a scene stealer. A less well-known movie is The Holly & The Ivy starring Celia Johnson & Ralph Richardson. Christmas in the 1950s in a cold Norfolk parsonage where family secrets are revealed. Wonderful cast including Hugh Williams, an actor I like very much. His son is Simon Williams who was so good as James Bellamy in Upstairs Downstairs. The resemblance btween them is especially strong in this movie.

To end the Christmas roundup, I always enjoy a wintry romance at Christmas & this year I've bought Twelve Days of Christmas by Trisha Ashley & Last Christmas by Julia Williams. Look at those gorgeous covers. Snow, Christmas trees & glitter. What more could I ask for in the middle of a Melbourne summer? What are your favourite Christmas books, music & movies?

The Magnificent Spilsbury & the case of the Brides in the Bath - Jane Robins

I don’t read modern true crime or read the many forensic mysteries published these days or watch any of the CSI TV shows. But, I do love historical true crime. A nice domestic poisoning or unexplained death is just my cup of tea. Preferably Victorian or Edwardian. Jane Robins’s new book about forensic pathologist Bernard Spilsbury & the Brides in the Bath murders ticks all those boxes with a little social history thrown in.

Spilsbury was the first Home Office scientist who became a star witness for the prosecution in many murder cases during the first half of the 20th century. He was a meticulous man who performed thousands of autopsies, writing his conclusions on index cards & building up an unrivalled knowledge of death in all its forms. One of the first cases he gave evidence in was that of Dr Crippen, accused of murdering his wife, dismembering her body & burying her in the cellar. Famously Crippen tried to escape to America with his mistress, Ethel le Neve, & was the first criminal caught using the new technology of the telegraph. Spilsbury examined the remains found in Dr Crippen’s cellar & decided that there was no doubt that they were the remains of Cora Crippen. Although he wasn’t the senior pathologist on the case, his confidence on the witness stand impressed police & lawyers & his career as an expert witness had begun.

The Brides in the Bath trial of 1915 was one of the most sensational cases of the early 20th century. George Joseph Smith was accused of marrying three women, taking out life insurance on them, coercing them into making a will in his favour & then murdering them in their bath. However, there were no witnesses, the deaths were initially thought to be natural & there were no marks or signs of a struggle on the bodies. Smith used aliases & chose women who were living independently of their families or who had little contact with their families.

Bessie Mundy, Alice Burnham & Margaret Lofty were all in their 30s & would have been resigned to being unmarried. This was a period when marriage was considered essential for a woman. An unmarried woman had no status, and, unless she went out to work, was dependent on her family. There were few careers open to women at the time and the problem of the “surplus women” had been discussed since the mid 19th century. Bessie, Alice & Margaret all married Smith after a short courtship. The pattern of the relationships was very similar. Smith would encourage his fiancée to run away & marry him secretly without letting her family know or he would meet the family &, if they seemed suspicious of his motives as Alice Burnham’s family were, arrange for a secret wedding & move far away from any possible interference. Smith would take out life insurance on his wife & they would make a will in his favour. Then, on their honeymoon or shortly after, they would take lodgings. The new bride would complain of headaches or some minor illness which resulted in Smith consulting a local doctor. Shortly after, he would go out to buy something for dinner & when he returned, he would find his wife dead in her bath. He would send the landlady or a servant for the doctor or police & the death was attributed to the slight illness the wife was said to have, combined with the effects of a hot bath resulting in heart failure or fainting & subsequent drowning. Smith would telegraph his wife’s family giving brief details but they usually arrived too late for the inquest or the funeral, which was as cheap & nasty as possible. Then, after promising to keep in touch with his in-laws, Smith disappeared, with his wife’s few belongings & owing rent. He would collect the insurance & move on.

Alice Burnham’s family had been suspicious of Smith from the beginning but they could prove nothing. However, Mr Burnham saw a newspaper article about Margaret Lofty’s death & thought that the description of the bereaved husband could fit the man he knew as John Lloyd. The circumstances of Margaret’s death were identical to Alice’s. He went to the police & the case was taken up by Detective Inspector Arthur Neil in London. Neil’s meticulous investigation finally revealed that Lloyd & Smith were the same man. As the case gained publicity, other women came forward, claiming that Smith, under a variety of names, had wooed them & robbed them of their savings. Neil found out about Bessie Mundy’s death & eventually the three women’s bodies were exhumed & Bernard Spilsbury performed post mortems to try to ascertain the cause of death. The scene was set for a sensational trial where the scientific evidence was of great importance. That the three deaths were natural & it was all an unfortunate coincidence, strained credulity. But, with no marks noticed on the bodies at the time & the fact that they were now in a very poor state of preservation, could Spilsbury discover the cause of death?  

The Magnificent Spilsbury is as exciting as any detective novel. The trial caused a sensation. Women were fascinated by Smith & travelled long distances to attend the trial. There were more revelations about his private life that raised questions about his psychological state. Smith protested his innocence throughout but the verdict was never in doubt. Not for the first time, the jury were swayed by the scientific evidence. Nobody had much doubt about Smith’s guilt but in Spilsbury’s later career, doubts were raised about the validity of some of his conclusions & there were fears that he’d become too fond of his fame.

Robins tells the story well with the domestic details that recreate the lower middle-class world of lodging houses & rented rooms. The chilling description of Smith playing the harmonium & singing Nearer My God to Thee as Margaret Lofty lay dead in the bath next door is quite horrible but gives an idea of the cold cruelty of the man. The voices of the landladies, servants, doctors & policemen involved gives an immediacy & poignancy to the sad story of the unfortunate women who met & married George Joseph Smith.

Romantic Moderns - Alexandra Harris

When I think of the artists of the 1930s, I think of the Modernists. Art Deco ceramics & jewellery, angular, minimalist architecture & pictures. Alexandra Harris has broadened my knowledge & my definition of modernism in her new book, Romantic Moderns. The subtitle sums up the theme of the book, English Writers, Artists & the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper.

England in the 30s was seen as a bit of a backwater of the Modernist movement. The most innovative work was coming from Europe & the English were portrayed as being in love with the past, especially the rural past. The critic, Roger Fry, was immensely influential in this period. He had organised the famous Post Impressionist exhibition of 1910 & was responsible for shaking off the Victorian past. He was a member of the Bloomsbury Group & Virginia Woolf wrote his biography after his death. The Bloomsbury artists lived in the country & found their inspiration in their houses as well as decorating them with their art & the products of the Omega workshop, another Fry initiative.

The theme of the book that I found most interesting was that these artists & writers were recording their vision of England. As the 30s drew to a close & WWII began, the desire to connect with the landscape was very powerful. As well as the abstract artists who were paring their vision down to the barest & most modern minimum, there were also artists recording their joy in traditional scenes of rural life but with a modernist twist. Stanley Spencer’s pictures of Cookham have recognisable portraits of real people but also fantastic scenes like his vision of the Judgement Day when the dead will rise from the parish churchyard. Poets like T S Eliot & John Betjeman wrote of country villages & the London suburbs. Vita Sackville-West’s poems, The Land & The Garden, were celebrations of home & a reimagining of Milton’s Eden. Her retreat to her garden as war approached was a return to Eden as opposed to Milton’s Paradise Lost. During the war, she was planning the White Garden at Sissinghurst, a little bit of defiance in the face of wholesale destruction.

The 1930s really were the last opportunity for the past to be recorded & conserved before WWII swept away so many aspects of traditional English life. Florence White was collecting the traditional recipes of England that were rapidly disappearing in an age of convenience food. Her book, Good Things in England, has been reprinted by Persephone, & is full of regional specialities that may have disappeared altogether if not for her work.

This is a very inadequate review as there is so much in Alexandra Harris’s book. I’ve just picked out a few of the artists covered in chapters on subjects like the Church, the English weather, village life & the search for a home. I haven’t even mentioned John & Myfanwy Piper, Eric Ravilious, Paul Nash, the Sitwells, Evelyn Waugh & the many other writers & artists with walk-on parts. As well as fascinating reading, the book is beautifully produced, with dozens of illustrations in the text. I want to read Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts & T S Eliot’s Four Quartets & more Evelyn Waugh. It’s that kind of book that sends the reader off on to new reading paths. Romantic Moderns is a fascinating look at a neglected aspect of English Modernism.

Dove family update

I posted here about the doves who have been nesting in my back porch every spring for the last few years. I had never seen any chicks in the past but this year, there are two chicks in the nest. I'm very excited because I had felt so sorry for the doves building the nest, returning each year but never hatching any young ones. It's been difficult to get a decent photo as the nest is in a really awkward spot.

This is the best photo I could get of mother dove with the chicks. I spied one of the chicks running along the porch with a parent at the other end either encouraging it or trying to get it back into the nest. They both look very healthy & it shouldn't be long before they all take off. Abby is fascinated by the nest & its occupants but she can only watch, she can't get anywhere near them.