As a stepping stone back to the present from the distant past, a memory from not quite so long ago . . .
It was my good luck that, in the early sixties, when I came to work in the editorial department at André Deutsch alongside Diana Athill, Jean wasn’t famous. Bequeathed to Diana by that remarkable truffle-hound Frances Wyndham who had in truth rediscovered her, she was no more than a name on the list of five ‘outstanding options’ which I inherited from my predecessor and which became the bane of my life.
With Frances Wyndham now long gone, the name Jean Rhys sparked no interest in anyone in the office except André, who raised it and those of the other malingerers at the editorial meeting every single week. He had paid her £50 and if that meant sending someone down to Devon to get the long-overdue novel out of her, so be it. And the person who went, as no one else offered to go, was me.
Deutsch editorial meeting c. 1965
Briefed by Diana, who told me nothing about Jean except that she was old, in a muddle, drank too much and couldn’t type, I was happy to take a couple of days off from my own shaky marriage, packed my little Olivetti typewriter and took the train down to Cheriton Fitzpaine, where Diana had arranged for me to stay at the vicarage.
At the time the Reverend Woodward, a kind and scholarly man – one could imagine him playing cricket in his youth – was not yet a part of literary history as he and Mr Greenslade, the taxi driver, were to become in the excitement that followed Jean’s re-discovery: the initial boom now a cult, but still producing occasional works of real scholarship.
Be that as it may, I had a warm welcome at the vicarage and before long the Reverend Woodward – the one person in that benighted villages (as it seemed to Jean) who could understand her – was walking me down to the wretched little bungalow where she lived.
I will never forget the first sight of her as she opened the front door: small, fragile, quavery, her huge eyes downcast. She did not look long for this world.
In fact, she was to live for another ten years, but those days as her amanuensis (which I have described elsewhere) were to be the entirety of my role in her life. This was lucky for both of us: she needed someone more like herself, not someone with no taste for alcohol and no interest in pretty clothes, I would have been entirely out of place in the world she was about to enter.
But I feel lucky to have met her and to have had the privilege of typing out, at her dictation, several handwritten pages of Wide Sargasso Sea.
I may have discovered (or, rather, been the first to recognize) a few writers, but my grandfather discovered a gold mine. Well, not actually gold but oil shale which for many years has been one of Estonia’s largest industries and, though now a denigrated substance, is still exported by them and used throughout the world.
It happened something like this: born in a small town in Belarus but orphaned at an early age, my grandfather was raised by an uncle and aunt in nearby Tallinn, and soon speaking some Estonian as well as Russian and Yiddish. English was to be added when, to escape the mandatory twenty years of military service (Estonia was then part of the Russian empire) he made his escape intending, we believe, to go to New York but – could he possibly have thought he was already there? – never getting further than England. There he found work as a tailor and, before very long, had not only married and started a family, but had his own shop.
But, though as English as could be in appearance, with his trilby and plus fours, he still drank his tea with jam, Russian-style, and dreamt of home. And as soon as his girl children were old enough to be left in charge of the shop he went back to Estonia, not just on short fur-buying trips – for the shop now sold furs as well as ladies’ outfits – but on a mission to help it achieve independence. He had already arranged for Estonian flax to be shipped to Scotland. He was now on the look-out for something bigger . . .
Some hundred or so years earlier, according to legend, the villagers of a small parish in Estonia had found that the soil with which they were building a protective wall around a camp fire was combustible. They called the substance Burning Stone.
‘Burning Stone’
Perhaps it was this which set my tailor grandfather off on prospecting trips with his friend, Gerhard Lukk, a mechanical engineer who would have provided the know-how which my visionary grandfather did not have. Be that as it may, before long they had found the site which was to become the giant mining complex where my mining engineer father was to spend the next twenty years.
My grandfather on the site that became the Vanamoisa mining complex
I have seen Vanamoissa only in photographs: when, in the early 1960s, I first went back to Estonia, where I had lived for most of my first five years, foreigners were not allowed to go to the mining area or, indeed, anywhere else. It took endless meetings with officials to get permission to visit the family graves. We shouldn’t have bothered. The graveyard had been razed*. There was nothing left to see.
But photographs tell me as much as I need to know about Vanamoissa and this happiest time of my father’s life, when he was doing the work he was cut out to do and had no idea what lay ahead.
My father (seated on chair with arms and legs crossed) at Camborne School of Mines
My father (with cigarette) down the mine
What lay ahead for everyone, was World War 2. What lay ahead for my grandfather, back in England for good now, was a peaceful old age. It was very different for Gerhard Lukk. He had been (I quote) taken away from his home by the NKVD in an official black car as his five children looked on.
This, and the date of his abduction – June 18, 1941 – I was to learn only relatively recently when an Estonian film-maker, Tiina Soomet, living in Canada, got in touch with me after reading an article which I had helped to translate** on the Estonian Jewish Archive website. These were the words that had drawn her attention:
in 1919, two mining engineers, Alexander Menell and Gerhard Lukk (about whom, alas, we know very little) approach the Estonian government for permission to carry out a surface examination.
Thanks to Tiina, I learnt that Gerhard Lukk’s five children all survived the war and ultimately settled in the UK, Canada and the United States. One of Gerhard Lukk’s granddaughters had become a particular friend of hers and enlisted her help in piecing together what had become of her grandfather. In this they received invaluable help from the Netherlands Baltic Association, for it turned out that my grandfather’s friend had been not only an engineer but also Consul General of the Netherlands.
Gerhard Lukk
Further information began to emerge and we find that in 1942 Gerhard Lukk was sentencedby the Special Board of the NKVD to 10 years in a Labour Camp. No more is known about the last years of his life but, In June 2001, it appears he was rehabilitated (posthumously) by ‘the resolution of the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation.’ Small comfort.
But, happily, the story does not end there. In 2022, at an official state ceremony on June 14 (the National Day of Mourning***) a plaque with his name on it was unveiled on Tallinn’s Memorial Wall to the Victims of Communism, and his granddaughter was there to see this happen.
View of the dazzling 200 metre long corridor showing the section where 22,000 honeybees represent the number of victims
How little has changed. The town in Ukraine where my grandfather was born is a battleground. The country where he grew up and which he so loved is in imminent danger of being invaded, once again, by its powerful neighbour.
I am glad my grandfather doesn’t know this, nor that his granddaughter can’t sew on a button. The one time I did this it was sewn on so tight it wouldn’t button or unbutton.
Received last Christmas from one of my relatives still living in Tallinn
*The Germans overran the country in the first year of the war. Only eight Jews of the original 4,000 survived the occupation. The other Baltic countries, which had large Jewish populations, became killing fields.
**Burning Stone by Mark Rybak in the Estonian Jewish Archive
*** This day commemorates the victims of the June 13/14, 1941 mass deportations of Estonians to uninhabitable parts of Russia.
Although my last blog post had been written for my own amusement, I did, in fact, send it to The Oldie and it came winging back the very same day as being ‘not quite right for us’.
Having rejected some thousand manuscripts myself, I had never been quite as quick as that, allowing even outlines to spend a few days on the hallowed premises of a publisher’s office, affording these would-be authors a few days of hope.
Perhaps it would have been better to stifle hope, but who wants to be responsible for nipping talent in the bud? And one could be wrong. I still remember the occasions on which I came across reviews of books I remembered having turned down.
Of course it is now more than fifty years since three old codgers in the English faculty at Cornell decided that my husband’s PhD thesis* was not worth publishing, thus shattering his belief in himself, which was only restored when a year or two later his landlady (me) came across her lodger’s dog-eared typescript (what was I doing poking about in his room?) and loved everything about it, that is to say the qualities – above all the wit – which, along with rarefied scholarship, were to be his trademarks.
Narrow-mindedness is, of course, a requisite of regular academics and it was inevitable that R’s brother, a well-respected art historian, should throw up his hands in horror at the lack of specificity in his older brother’s books.
That, some years later, R was invited to spend a year at Cornell as a kind of honoured guest is the equivalent of the way in which, in the publishing world, the obscure origins of a prize-winning author who once fought to get anyone’s attention are long forgotten.
Forgotten by the publishing world – including the agents who, as they trawled our catalogue, now ‘discovered’ these writers they had, of course, seen before – but seldom by the writers themselves. I treasure the continuing friendship of many of those I helped to get started and am amused by the inscriptions of the ones who preferred to forget:
But I don’t, of course, wish I hadn’t taken them off those piles of un-agented manuscripts known as the Slush Pile, which no longer exists but was the life blood of the pre-digital publishing world. And I am left with no regrets about those I had to turn down because no one liked them as much as I did, or André took against them: Eva Figes, Peter Carey and Carl Lombard among them. They soon found a home, as did my husband’s book which is seen in the photograph in its American edition (our own budget didn’t run to using an Atget photograph).
*Industrial Diamonds: The Working Class in English Fiction 1840-1890
It is good luck, while I am feeling out of sorts, to be able to recycle something written long ago for my own amusement. The model for it and a few others like it (Jean Rhys among them) was the ‘I Once Met’ column in The Oldie and it happens to fit with the concluding lines of my last post: ‘You only have to live long enough to become of interest because of the people you have known.’ In this case it is the writer V.S. Naipaul.
It had been my good fortune that Naipaul had, albeit briefly, fallen out with his long-time editor, Diana Ahilll, and I had the honour (as he would certainly have considered it) of editing A Bend in the River which arrived during this spat.
So nervous was I of displeasing our most important author that I put everything else aside and read A Bend in the River in one long sitting. Compared with his early novels and brilliant non-fiction this was dull stuff, but admiration – whether genuine or feigned – goes a long way and when, in the course of the phone call that followed, he heard I was going to be spending a week not far from where he lived, he invited me and my husband to supper.
The evening did not begin well. It was Vidia who opened the door to us and, all nerves, I thrust the bottle of wine I had bought that morning into his hand. I had made a special trip to Marlborough to get it and, knowing nothing about wine, just chose one with an appealing label.
His very first words, as he slid the wine out of its wrapping were: This isn’t fit to drink.
With the speed of lightning his wife, Pat, took the bottle off him, saying it would be perfect for cooking. Even as she spoke I could see a table laid with three glasses beside each plate and, in the far corner of the room, a stack of Wine Society cartons. And I had wondered if, as a Hindu, he drank at all . . .
I was soon to find out how wrong I had been as he squatted in front of me – I was seated by now – and, like an overly concerned nursery-school teacher, proceeded to give me detailed guidance on what to buy, what to pay and what to drink with what.
Amazingly enough, after that inauspicious beginning, and thanks to the presence of my husband, to whom he could not condescend, we had a pleasurable rest of the evening. When he was not focussed on his own importance, it was enthralling to spend time in his company and, difficult though he was in so many ways, I am left admiring him, not only his own works but also for allowing his biographer a free rein to expose him as the monster he was and knew himself to be.
I heard the other day that cassettes are coming back into fashion. For me, they never went out and I find myself ahead of the game, just as I used to be at school when, being so slow on my feet, I was always in the right place when the game turned.
Photo: State Government Photographer, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
How could people, I wondered, keep discarding one precious thing after another, as long-playing records took over from 78s and then more and more sophisticated electronic devices allowed a person to carry about more music than they could possibly find time to listen to, secreted in one small electronic device.
I was horrified when R, who was pretty much immune to shopping, bought himself one of those gadgets, and pleased that before long he had forgotten where he had put it and didn’t try to find it.
We went on listening to our records, CDs and the radio, sitting down beside the ‘music centre’ which had been our first major purchase. And, when away from home, I took my cassette player with me and always had just three or four cassettes which have remained, for ever, connected to the place where I listened to them most often. The ‘green record’ shown directly below (Mozart Trio K563) will always take me back to the Outer Hebrides.
Then, of course, there were those cassettes bought wherever we happened to be: Bruno Venturi in Naples, Georges Brassens in Paris, in Portugal Amalia Rodrigues and, from a rack in a Spanish petrol station, Nina de Antequera belting out some wonderfully coarse flamenco.
Less entirely pleasurable to listen to but wonderfully exotic are the Turkish dervish music from Konya and the cassette chosen for me – it was his favourite – by a boatman on the Nile.
Now that I seldom travel further than the local high street, these memory-laden tapes serve as time travellers and, ropey as most of them now are, become more precious with age. So, it seems, do I. You only have to live long enough to become of interest because of the people you have known: a kind of living relic.
All publishers, past and present, have stories about authors theyhave missed out on, but not many will involve having the soon-to-be-successful writer on their premises. I was reminded of this by coming across one of Andrea Newman’s novels in a charity shop the other day . . .
The first thing I had noticed about Andrea was her ring. Which would have pleased her. For she had bought the large diamond for herself.
The two of us were in a kind of mini-bus along with several other people who had been on the flight from London to this Majorcan resort and were now being dropped off at the various hotels.
Hers, reached before mine, was on the front, and I did not expect to see her again nor think that, with her bouffant ash-blond hair and diamond ring, we would have much to say to each other. It was a surprise, therefore, when the next day, as I looked down from the promenade, I saw her lying flat on the sand, reading what looked like a very long poem . . .
Andrea, it turned out, was a writer who, unlike most published writers, was sensibly hedging her bets by taking a further degree. She did not take it for granted that she would complete another novel or have the film rights of it bought if she did, and it was Paradise Lost she was reading on the sand.
From now on she, who had come to recover from a broken love affair and I to get a good night’s sleep while my baby son kept his father awake in my stead, spent a lot of time together and, thanks to the tour company preferring not to have people dining alone, it was arranged for me to have all my evening meals with her at her seafront hotel.
It was thanks to this that Andrea discovered that though I knew more about Milton than she yet did, there was a subject about which she knew a lot and I knew nothing, and that was alcohol. It made no difference when I told her I didn’t like the taste. Every evening she would try me on something different till, in despair, she ordered a very sweet liqueur . . .
It would have amused her to know that some years later, Henry McNulty, the suave anglicised American who was drinks editor of Vogue, complained that I had a ‘child’s palate’, though he did congratulate me for my contribution to his book. I had invented names for many of the extravagant concoctions in his Vogue Guide to Cocktails.
I was never to edit Andrea, though I might have done had André paid more attention when I brought her round to see his office. This was by way of research. She was planning a novel in which the main male character was a publisher. Had André turned on his charm, we could have published Bouquet of Barbed Wire which, when adapted for television, had 20 million viewers.
It is also not impossible, for Andrea liked older men (well, actually, she liked all men), that she might have brought the book to life. Although an early marriage to a local boy in the provincial town where she was born allowed her – with her strict Catholic upbringing – to have early sex, that marriage didn’t survive what London had to offer. I listened raptly to her tales of group sex, and was shown photographs, both lewd and sentimental, taken by the rich lover who had recently deserted her but who would soon be replaced.
Not only a sexual adventurer but also an astute and self-taught businesswoman, Andrea was in many ways ahead of her time.
And though our friendship ended in tatters, as her friendships with women always did, I remember her with affection and some admiration. She not only wrote well but, for all her metropolitan success, did not forget the past. She remained a dutiful and loving daughter, though what her pious mother made of the novels she typed up for her daughter and then put in the fridge for safe-keeping, we can only guess.
Whilst every news item tells of the horrendous war raging in the Middle East, I am taking shelter down memory lane, taking a last look at R’s papers before I hand them over to the archive*. Amongst them I rediscover the several hundred bad-tempered letters (there were letters in those days) I found waiting for me, some thirty years ago, when I returned to the office after a week’s holiday.
At the time I was working on R’s guide to parish churches, and the last thing I had done before leaving was write to the vicar of every church which had an entry enclosing the relevant text and asking him (or her) to let me know of any factual errors; at the same time, offering a discount, should they want to order a copy. And, in the hope of averting irrelevant comment, I ended by saying we hoped they would be happy with the description of their church and pointed out that it had been singled out from a stock of more than 18,000.
Among the flood of replies – every one of which enclosed an order for one or more discounted copies – a half-dozen were friendly and appreciative. The others ranged from disgruntled to enraged. One vicar had simply scrawled UGH! beside a common contraction. Another slashed out ‘remarkable’ (in relation to bench ends) and substituted UNIQUE. Yet another accused our author of ‘slapdash work’, though every one of his myriad complaints showed we had both Nicolas Pevsner and the RCHME on our side.
These good men of the cloth (they were mostly men) were up in arms. One actually had one of his parishioners re-write the entry and demanded payment for it, while another asked, more politely, but firmly, that his church be omitted. Yet another asked to be paid for answering and, most un-Christian of all, was the vicar who (his alarmed lady secretary rang to warn me) was planning to sue us.
Is it any surprise that most of the wars we have experienced or learnt about when we were at school have their origins in one religion or another?
But best not to forget that so many of the world’s greatest buildings and works of art, share the same foundation.
The Creation of Adam, Michelangelo, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
*The Archive of British Publishing and Printing, which also has a copy of the slightly enlarged edition of the guide published by that radical newspaper The Daily Telegraph.
I should have remembered my decision never to visit a popular destination again (see Abu Simbel) before making the detour to see Salisbury Cathedral with my son and his family.
The previous few days had been spent in Dorset, where the only crowd we had encountered had been as we queued, with other holiday-making families, in the small front garden of the little fossil museum.
Dinosaurland Fossil Museum, Lyme Regis
I did not realise at the time that all the plants on our left were species which had existed over a million years ago. This was the Jurassic Garden. While to our right were the newcomers in what Steve Davies, the creator of the museum, calls the Cretaceous Garden: plants that flowered and fruited aeons before the building of any cathedral.
It was only later I learnt that every plant had been sourced and planted by Mr Davies (who was also selling the tickets) and that he and his wife had arranged the display of the exhibits in this beautiful old building, once a congregational church. Nor did I know that when the museum first opened it had only eighteen exhibits, and that the present glorious profusion is almost entirely the owner’s own work.
In the little book which tells the story* he writes about collectors past and present, the collection itself, and all the people (including his bank manager) who helped him fulfil his dream since, obliged to give notice to a lot of his colleagues (he had worked for twenty years in the oil industry) he also gave notice to himself.
Mary Anning, pioneer fossil collector of Lyme Regis, Dorset. Oil painting by an unknown artist, before 1842. Golden Cap is visible in the background. Held at the Natural History Museum, London.
How different to that happy morning in Lyme Regis was our stopover in Salisbury a few days later.
By the time we got to there and had parked the car (at no little expense), the place was heaving. Exhausted by the long tree-lined walk from the car park to the cathedral itself, I had to prop myself up against the ancient doorway while we queued at the makeshift ticket stall and I wondered if it was worth complaining, but there were chairs in sight now: rows and rows of chairs, which would not have looked out of place in a kitchen.
Collapsed on one of these,** I watched the clusters of volunteer guides chatting away as they distributed leaflets and directed visitors to the highlights, of which the one attracting the largest crowds turned out to be a late 20th century font with mirror-like qualities that, we were told, ‘lead to some incredible reflective photos.’ No mention of the medieval vaulting which people were, perhaps, admiring on their smartphones.
More like Oxford Street on the first day of the sales than a church, we could not escape fast enough, only to find the cathedral was encircled by a barren stretch of grass which had to be crossed to get to a bench. So, to view this glorious edifice sitting down, you found yourself within feet of the road where a stream of cars was making its way to the exit.
Photo of Winchester Cathedral by Zachariah Whitby, 2023
How lucky that earlier in the week we had been to Winchester Cathedral, as yet unspoilt by the ravages of mass tourism. How lucky too that we had also been to see one of the remote village churches R had visited when he was writing the Shell guide.*** No longer in regular use but lovingly cared for, it was – like the little fossil museum – a quiet celebration, not a noisy desecration, of the past.
*The Time of My Life: what does a palaentologist really do. Available from the Dinosaurland Fossil Museum, Lyme Regis.
**There were, it turned out, some wheelchairs stacked against the wall, which it would have been more useful to have found at the distant car park.
It was hearing that many publishers have pretty much given up editing and possibly reading too, along with news of the Parthenon being closed, that reminded me of the last time I had been in Greece, and of who I had met there . . .
I had been working as an editor at André Deutsch for thirty years when an invitation arrived from the Greek Ministry of Culture to a forum on translations. Like all unsolicited mail for editorial it had come to me, but I could hardly take up the invitation as I was on the brink of retiring. By the time of the conference I would have my bus pass.
To my surprise, when I brought the letter down to the next editorial meeting, no one was interested in going. To decline the invitation seemed ungracious, to say the least, and, deciding it was better for them to have me than nobody, I accepted and, after re-reading the Greek novel I had managed to get onto our list: Alexis Parnis’s delightful, absurdist The Proof Reader, I located a Greek-language bookshop, not far from where I live but, until then, unknown to me. Not long after, I was on my way to Delphi.
It was not the first time I had been there, but things had changed. Before, it had been possible to walk in among the ruins, now fenced off against visitors, and my then-husband and I had stayed in a kind of shepherd’s hut. Now I was to be housed in great comfort and though not one of the six of us – for that was the entire numberof our delegation – knew a word of Greek, all except me were in a position to champion the cause of modern Greek literature, above all one of the publishers among us: the shambling, untidy and generally absent Peter Owen.
Our hosts had laid on a series of lectures which, as we could see, had been well attended by previous guest nations. Mortified by the paucity of our numbers, we all, except Peter, attended every one. What he was doing I don’t know, but I do know that on the plane home, while we were all talking about the previous night’s banquet at the Royal Yacht Club in Athens – enlivened by the screeching arrival of my Greek author on a motorbike – he was quietly reading, not a fashionable novel, not the obscure Greek poet who, I believe, he came to publish (he had not been wasting his time) but Jane Austen.
There are not many publishers like him and though he could be inattentive and also late in paying royalties (one of his authors told me that he was ready to throw a brick through his window) he never gave up reading things for himself.
It is now two years since R died and I had hoped to celebrate his life by printing here something I found recently among his papers: an account of a trip he made to Alaska, at the invitation of an old college friend who, at the last moment, was not able to make it himself. R however, fully equipped for the adventure, thanks to his friend’s generosity (this friend had taken a very different path in life which enabled such excursions) did make it and I have, all these years later, come across what he made of the experience. I have not, however, had the time to make it presentable (there are parts which would be of no interest or might be considered indiscreet) so, instead, I reproduce here a detachable piece of his published writings — the preface from the 1994 Ecco Press edition of Eccentric Spaces — which I treasure, even though it did not, as we had hoped it would, land him a job . . . *
It is now more than ten years since this book was written. My own position in the world has never been more eccentric than it was in the year (1973-1974) in which I wrote it. I was out of work, a condition the book cured me of, not by landing me a job (I am still looking) but by making me think it was the right way to be.
I had come back to America to find work after two idyllic years in England. At first I lived with wonderful friends, who though they had a large family and a small house still made room for me. By the time I moved into the sleazy apartment where Eccentric Spaces was written I had applied for everything I could think of, including a post at the Missouri Botanical Garden, and been turned down.
So here I was living on the fringe of the university (Washington University, St Louis) where I used to teach, not allowed to take books from its library, stuck in a student slum, and feeling like a conspirator when I visited my old friends in the English department.
Writing filled up that empty space in the most miraculous way. I am a far from mystical person, but I was propelled to begin by a dream. I mean one of those events which happen to you in the night, not an ‘idea’. Though it would be self-indulgent to recount it here, I think it would have convinced anyone. From that moment I have not really been capable of the same depths of unhappiness as before. From then onward I could say with conviction that everyone contains his own happiness within him.
Vicissitudes, after that, were provided to give something to rise above. In the third week someone came to reclaim the desk I was writing at (borrowed like everything else in the room. My own things were laid out like a simplified map along the base of one wall).
So the next morning I sat on the floor with my back against the wall and locked myself in with a white plastic coffee table. There were further deflections, including, worst of all, two months in which I couldn’t get a word out and read most of the books treated in chapters five and six. The room was bare except for a series of pictures I borrowed from the local library and stared at when I got stuck. It was in that way through Hunters in the Snow that Bruegel made his way into the book and I realised he was my favourite painter after all.
This all sounds very solitary, which it was, but I had some fathomless support from three people in St Louis and one in London, who are mentioned in the book’s dedication and acknowledgments, and who each in a different way made that year one of the happiest.
If it isn’t already, the story becomes tedious when it comes to the stage of looking for a publisher . . . and it become drearier still when one compiles things like a list of where it wasn’t reviewed. It is a book which has made its way obliquely, not in public channels of communication, but in friends (or strangers) talking to each other. I have met some of the people I value most through its agency, have re-met good friends from the past, and am very glad that this book for which I have a really lamentable fondness can now start on its travels again.
*Not many years previously when R had been granted a Guggenheim Award, he had been tactfully described by that august body as ‘an independent scholar’.
This post was written before the catastrophe of the Ukrainian dam, the waters of which are drowning villages, displacing whole populations and, as the waters reach the sea, endangering the world far beyond Ukraine itself.
But this tragedy does not lessen the desperate need for clean water.
Too good to keep to myself is the news that I am about to receive compensation for that week without hot water (see previous post Someone Else’s Problem). A friend complained on my behalf and soon £300 will reach my bank account. From the modest amount of this rebate one can only infer that this establishment, which exists to restore the sick to health and provide respite for the weary, considers well over £400 to be a reasonable daily charge for a room lacking the most basic of mod cons.
The story does not end there for, by pure chance, while surfing the net – probably looking for a guide to the latest episode of Succession – I found myself riveted by a sequence of black faces distorted by hideous swellings of monstrous size and I remained spell-bound by a documentary film illustrating the consequences of living without access to clean water: the fate of millions of people in other parts of the world than ours.
It is not that there is no water – though that can be a problem, and I have never forgotten our geography teacher telling us never to complain about rain – but what is and should be the source of life, is the frequent cause of slow, disfiguring and painful death.
Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink . . .
For a long time now I have been saying to unknown callers as I nervously unchain the front the door: ‘Sorry, I already have my charities’. Well, at this very late date, I am subscribing to one more. That £300 will be my first contribution to Water Aid.
It was a surprise when I learnt there was a problem with the plumbing in my part of the building.
I had come, at major expense, to a highly recommended clinic for a week’s ‘respite’: that is to say a week in a safe environment in which I would have no responsibilities and I would have nothing whatever to do.
Here I would leave behind all the worries of life – lost door keys, drain flies, tax returns, all dealt with by endlessly patient friends – be no bother to anyone and have a welcome change from my diet of soups made from vegetables on the turn and Charlie Bigham’s Fish Pies.
I had not expected on two occasions to have to wash from a bowl of hot water and for the rest of my stay (apart from immediately after a visit from the maintenance men, which enabled two showers) to have to manage with only a trickle of tepid water from the basin tap.
This was not how we had fared the only time R and I had gone up-market on our travels . That had been when tourism ground to a halt in Egypt after some dreadful event and Bales – the firm that specialised in Egyptian travel – was offering everything at rock-bottom prices. And so it was that we came to stay in the Old Winter Palace in Luxor, where we enjoyed luxury such as never before or since.
Accustomed as I had been in the past to roughing it when travelling – happily washing out of buckets and eating out of pails – I was NOT happy to find myself roughing it at several hundred pounds a night in England’s home counties. But at least – and I took great comfort from this – it was not my problem to solve, as it would have been at home.
My outrage evaporated and, having taken my cue from Johnny Mercer:
“You got to ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive
E-lim-i-nate the negative“
I was soon out in the magnificent grounds which my room overlooked. Here the wisteria and apple blossom had come out overnight, and a red kite circling overhead sent me soaring down memory lane to the little school in Ilkley where this beautiful bird had become my second identity, for we six-year-olds were divided into ‘houses’ named after birds of prey: Eagle, Falcon, Kestrel . . . KITE!
It is more than fifty years ago now that I had a brush with the Tavistock. My five-year-old son, happy and confident during the day, was having night fears of such intensity that – guilt-ridden and fearful, as single mothers are wont to be – I sought help. And, where did one go for help? One went to the Tavistock: the Institute of Human Relations which, as it happened, was (and is) close by.
What a mistake that proved to be! I had come to ask for advice: things like whether I should get into bed with him or, maybe, set up a camp bed beside him, whether to use phenergan or . . . ? But, within no time at all, the doctor’s attention (for she was a doctor: of something, anyway) turned from him to me and was advising me to come to the Tavistock on a long-term basis not to talk about my child but to allay my own ‘deepest fears’.
When I told her that my ‘personal life’ was unusually happy and my ‘deepest fears’ would only prove to be about dying, and that I thought anyone not frightened of dying must be mad (I was awaiting the result of a biopsy at the time) her immediate response – I wrote it down at the time – was: ‘Ah! So you are frightened of going mad.’
One more visit and the psychobabble became intolerable. I never went back. As for the nightmares, they were treated with long readings aloud from the more soporific poets and soon came to an end.
It was hearing the other day about the goings-on on the Isle of Man – where, it is rumoured, eleven-year-olds are being alerted to sexual practices which, whether considered deviant or not, definitely rate an X certificate – that I remembered my experience at the Tavistock.
Who, I have been wondering, can have come up with this new curriculum which is being served up in some Isle of Man schools as part of the well-established and nationwide RSE (Relationship and Sex Education) programme, generally welcomed by parents and teachers alike?
My guess is that whoever provided the sensational new input will have the same skewed mindset as the practitioner at the Tavistock who deemed me – neurotic, certainly, but far from mad – a suitable case for treatment.
What is it with these giant corporations? Why don’t they provide an address you can write to or could give to a taxi driver . . .
For example, the friendly letter from Thames Water inviting me to extend my permit to use a hose pipe had obviously been written by someone who knew many of the recipients wouldn’t know how to use ‘online’ and it gave a phone number. But none of the options offered by some robot fitted. They never do. I gave up and prepared to write a letter back. But there was, of course, no street address.
Thames Water HQ
This mattered less than not having been able to reply to the long and effusive apology I got, online, from British Airways after complaining about failures in their Assisted Travel programme. I have no idea how to collect the £100 voucher intended to compensate me, but I could have given it to a friend. And they could surely have guessed, knowing my age, that I was unlikely to be doing much more flying and wouldn’t choose British Airways if I did.
As if it wasn’t frustrating enough that so many of the organisations we have to deal with don’t let us know where they are (presumably because they don’t want letters arriving in their soulless, paperless offices), worse still is the alternative they offer – the dreaded options – to those who are not computer savvy, or who (imagine that!) don’t even own a computer and have to use the phone.
In ‘the old days’ options were not primarily a list of random possibilities delivered by a mechanical voice that one has to sit through before being either cut off or, if lucky, transferred to ‘an adviser’, but a word used either in business dealings (as it still is) or, as in my world, having to do with meaningful choices.
‘Keep your options open’ was, for instance, every parent’s appeal to a teenage son or daughter ready to throw everything up to follow some passing enthusiasm or extravagant whim.
More serious were the options – the choices – that could present themselves in adult life. How, I wondered, had Alan Turing dealt with the stress of knowing every single day that, having cracked the ‘Enigma’ code, alerting more than one target would risk the enemy realising that we had gained access to their plans. Like the thoughts that must go through the minds of those who take their own lives – To be or not to be: those are the options – life and death decisions.*
Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing in The Imitation Game
But to end on a lighter note, though this too is a war memory: my father chose the option of sleeping upstairs while my mother slept with us under the kitchen table. ‘No Jerry,’ he said, ‘is going to get me out of bed.’**
Nor did they.
* See that brilliant film The Imitation Game, made in 2014, but still easily available.
**Disappointed at being too old, this time, for active service, my engineer father spent the early years of the war in Yorkshire, working on the Lancaster bombers which were manufactured there. But got back to London (with us) in time for the V2s and the buzz bombs. He was now doing a desk job at the air ministry which morphed, at the war’s ending, into turning the aluminium used in the manufacture of planes into the building of prefabs. Many are still lived in today and I often wonder why more are not being erected to house today’s homeless.
In order to collect my late husband’s American pension from those long ago days when he had taught English at Washington U, where his very novel interpretation of Romeo and Juliet had (among other things) shocked the older members of the faculty, and he had failed to get tenure, I had to get a document notarised on American soil.
And so it was that I was back in New York, staying with my son and his family: my English son having done as his stepfather had done, but in reverse. For him, New York is now Home as London had been for R, and he knew just where to go to get the document notarised: a kiosk, a few streets away, where it was done within minutes and cost something like five dollars.
Not long before, in London, where lawyers have a stranglehold on this simple procedure, notarising does not come cheap. I had paid £400 for the same thing*.
There is a lot to learn from this wonderfully brash and friendly upstart of a nation which, when it wants to, can copy us to a T. I hadn’t on previous visits been in Gramercy Square which is as lovely, leafy and tranquil as any in Canonbury.
All the more surprising then to find Union Square – New York as we know it from the movies – such a short distance away. More surprising still the sight of a giant rat looming over the parked cars on the far side of the square.
I did not know then, as I was to learn from the man who had erected it, that these inflatable rats are seen quite often in this country – not crippled by good taste and ancient by-laws – and that they denote something rotten in the building they are parked outside.
Our informant, who turned out to be a member of the Union of Carpenters, told us the owners of this building were engaged in negotiations which would deprive him and his fellow members of badly needed jobs.
How long, I wondered, would my two ex-employers have been able to put up with such public shaming? The first had threatened to close the firm down when we tried to join a union, but was not as absurdly pompous and concerned about self-image as his successor who had, as it were, sold the family silver, and then departed.
What I can be sure of is that neither of them, on their frequent trips to New York, would have taken the commuter ferry from which, on a glorious spring-like February day, we wove backwards and forwards across one stretch of water after another, dazzled by the strange beauty of this city which reaches for the sky, one building after another, in its contortions defying the rules of gravity.
It was not till looking for photographs of British cathedrals to send to my grandson, that I was reminded that building high long pre-dates those computer-generated structures.
GB. England. Winchester Cathedral. (Cathedral Church of the Holy Trinity and SS Peter, Paul and Swithun)
From ‘The English Cathedral’, a Book published by Merrell in October 2012. Between 2010 and 2012 Peter Marlow photographed the Nave’s of all forty two of England’s Anglican cathedrals using only natural light at dawn. Marlow’s photographs are accompanied by his commentary on the project, including sketches and preparatory shots; an introduction by V&A senior photography curator Martin Barnes on the tradition of church photography in England, and a concise summary of each cathedral interior by architectural historian John Goodall.
2012
As for the faith which inspired the creation of those cathedrals, it now hangs by a thread over here and Mammon – the god of skyscrapers and Canary Wharf – will soon be all we are left with. Not so over there, where the god of material wealth is in deadly harness with a warped form of the old Christian faith, and you can see exhortations like this on any street corner outside the soaring banking sector, without needing to travel to the Bible Belt.
*The U.S. Embassy had withdrawn its notarising service, perhaps because of Covid, and with no information as to when it would resume.
For a very long time, maybe two years, my husband worked away in the scaled-down version of a house at the end of our garden, on a book about SCALE. I never really understood what scale was, though the word seemed to rouse interest in architect friends and, much against my wishes, R had accepted a commission to write the wretched thing.
The Passion of Creation by Leonid Pasternak
The idea for the book had been his. But a momentary enthusiasm, once a delivery date has been set and money has changed hands, cannot be easily discarded. As it ought to be. No wonder that all the books I value most from my years in publishing emerged from that heap of manuscripts known as the slush pile: books written because they demanded to be written, often by authors with very little knowledge of the publishing world.
Of course, great works, especially works of non-fiction, can be written to order, but being locked in to any schedule or expectations other than one’s own still seems like a straitjacket to me: not unlike being in debt, something of which I have a particular horror.
And so it was that R was toiling away at a project in which he had really lost interest while I, whenever I had the time, was writing short pieces, to no one’s order but my own, which my friend Nicky was posting every month on the website she had given me as an 80th birthday present, at a time when I did not even know what a blog was.
THERAPY FOR US OLD PEOPLE is what Effie had said when she gave me this splendid pig who became our household god.
She had made the pig (I can still see the streaks of glue where she had slightly misfired as she stuck on the teats; it is a lady pig) at the nearby Charlie Ratchford Centre (see link below for how the Centre looks following its recent transformation by Camden Council) when she lived across the road from us in a pretty little house that had been provided for her by her ex-employer. She had been his housekeeper.
Of course Effie, still irresistible in advanced old age, must have been more irresistible still in her youth and, now that I am as old as she was, I appreciate even more her liveliness and the kick that creating that felt pig had given her.
And so it was that while Mrs Pig looked on from her post at the top of the stairs and I was enjoying writing about anything that came into my head, R was wrestling each day with a subject that had gone dead on him.
The answer was obvious. He should give up on books and turn to shorter forms.
What about the Essay?
Had he not implored me to read Montaigne, a pocket-sized edition of whose essays I carry around as a kind of mascot, but have yet to read?
Had he not loved Emerson and Thoreau? Did he perhaps prefer to forget that many readers found his thinking and his prose impenetrable and, thus, best taken in small doses? We could both remember his Aunt Eunice — a Methodist preacher’s daughter, as he was a Methodist preacher’s grandson — saying she was going to finish his first book if it killed her.
Why not make it easier for his loyal readers as well as for himself and, above all, why limit himself to one subject?
And so, after a long and difficult birth, his blog was born (link below) and the wasted years forgotten as this healthy child, which had been waiting impatiently in the wings, took flight . . . Rembrandt, Soutine, Cy Twombly, Shakespeare, Artaud, Ruskin, of course . . .
How right Effie was: making IS the best therapy of all.
A recent health scare has made me angrier than ever at the way you are not allowed to die when you want to. Of course, you can commit suicide, but what a sad and messy — dangerous hardly seems the right word — route that is likely to be.
Why does anyone, unless they have a strongly-held religious belief, refuse others the right to die? Are our current MPs really such a deeply religious bunch?
Whatever their reasons, I have to remember the arguments I had with the matron of a wonderful (and wonderful entirely thanks to her) old people’s home. She was fiercely opposed to sleeping pills which K, a friend of mine then in her eighties, craved. Some two years later — with us having won the argument — K marshalled a stash of pills and a plastic bag (which proved unnecessary) and, after locking the door to her room, lay back on her bed and ended what had become for her a life no longer worth living.
When the police were called in to deal with this crime scene, it was not long before they found K’s cuttings about the right to die. A rebel all her life, and a rebel to the end.
Now, all these years later, I found myself in danger of being in a situation I did not want to be in. It was only after a few days of mounting horror at the thought of becoming a permanent invalid that I remembered there was a way out. It did not have to be a home-made hit and miss affair: given the funds, and if I could keep my nerve, I could turn to Dignitas. It is no exaggeration, to say that the sudden and strangely belated realisation that I could take charge of my own death rendered me, momentarily, euphoric.
This is not the place to go into the complications of using this service. A Guardian article A Trip to Switzerland in Search of a Good Death tells you what you need to know, which is that while still in your right mind, sufficiently determined and sufficiently mobile, this can be achieved. But, beware of involving anyone else in helping to navigate this maze: assisting someone to kill themselves remains a criminal offence in the UK, punishable by up to fourteen years imprisonment.
But why on earth should it be considered less acceptable to help dying people to an easy death than to assist them (as, thankfully, we still do) not to give birth to babies they are not ready or able to look after?
When someone learns they have an incurable disease and knows the dying is likely to be long-drawn-out, painful and expensive, it is understandable that they might prefer to set their affairs in order, finish whatever book they are reading, say their goodbyes, and then let go.
We don’t all have the courage and genius of Tony Judt, whose rapturous essay The Memory Chalet was written when, in his own words, he lay ‘. . .trussed, myopic, and motionless like a modern-day mummy . . . ‘
As for me, I was given a reprieve. The whole episode proved to be no more than a dress rehearsal.
Unable to blog for the past two months and not wanting to miss November too, I am borrowing something written by a friend which I would love to have written myself.
Its author is not a writer but an artist. I only wish I could paint as well as she writes, but I have no talent whatever in that direction and still cringe at the memory of my School Certificate ‘Still Life’, even though it got me a Pass. The examiner must have been half asleep.
My recollections of Vicars Bell by Sandra Oakins
Such an odd christian name we all thought as children: Vicars, in fact it still is. His nickname was Ticky Bell. He was tall, looked like a hawk with a beak of a nose, a large pale mole on one side of it and grey hair that stood up like a shoe brush. He wore what I now know as a Harris Tweed jacket, hand-knitted jumpers in unremarkable natural colours and a kind of silk cravat — yellow or red. And sensible walking shoes. His wife Dorothy played the piano for our country dancing lessons, until she got tired of the repetitions (The Dargason usually got to her) when he would take over by singing the piano part. She had eyes like blackcurrants and took no prisoners. She had a large handbag that was set down by the piano, wore dresses or more precisely frocks which went below her knees, cardigans and a string of amber beads. Her straight white hair was cut short, and her fringe severe, so unlike the hair of all our mothers whose perms and curls were the thing, and every one of them kept a shoebox of hair rollers in a cupboard. The school was open house, other grown ups would come and go, we knew them too. Geoffrey Tandy, Dorothea Patterson were two. The ‘Gaddesden Society’. By name and by nature.
Mr Bell could not abide Enid Blyton, comics and make up. And television—and—the hymn ‘When I survey the Wondrous Cross’ with a vengeance. Sentimentality was not on his agenda. He gave me my very first lesson in sexism. It was at church. Quite a few of us sang in the choir and before one morning service I went into the vestry to get some hymn books, he was there in his cassock and surplice and so were the choirboys. He came up to me and told me that women (and girls) had no place in the vestry. I dare say they were allowed in there to clean but at that time I would be about 12, so that didn’t cross my mind. I couldn’t really see why I shouldn’t go in and he didn’t say why.
The other side to this was that he expected us, both girls and boys, at the age of seven onwards, to have the intellectual capacity to be able to ‘get’ Shakespeare and poetry (and I mean poetry and not verse). Dickens, T H White, H G Wells, G K Chesterton were his writers and Walter de la Mare, Edward Thomas, John Masefield, Rudyard Kipling, Ralph Hodgson, James Stephens, Hilaire Belloc, D H Lawrence, W H Davies his poets of choice. He expected us to be able to look at things we had produced with an eye to making changes. We had poetry read to us every Friday morning for about an hour. Every so often we were allowed to write our own poetry. When we thought it was finished we had to go up to his desk and show it to him. He taught us to recognise derivative ideas and how to choose the words for what we meant. We also had to write descriptions and make up stories in our ‘Rough Writing ‘ book. Once I took my description of ‘The view from my bedroom window’ to show him and he took out his Osmiroid fountain pen and carefully drew a a circle, in brown ink, round the word ‘nice’ (another of his pet hates) each time it appeared in the piece I had written. There were quite a few circles by the time he got to the end. He said “I was thinking the other day how well you used words but nice…nice, nice means ‘neat’, is that what you meant to say?” I think I did get to buy my own Osmiroid pen, from Mr Ward’s Post Office, they were about six shillings. And I think we used them in school.
Mr Bell was the only bell in the school, time was called by him, and literally so at the end of playtime. Lessons were elastic and so was the learning space. Outside was as good as inside, especially if the weather was good. There was a kind of timetable, but I never saw it written down, lessons just came and went. In them we were often given the benefits of his thoughts and experiences. The days started with a bit of bible or common prayer and included reading, writing, painting, weaving, potting (in an asbestos shed), dancing, singing, gardening, walking in the woods, writing with italic dip-in-the-ink pens, spelling (that word ‘necessary’) and, in the school hall, music and movement. This was thanks to the BBC and it was about the only thing we had to do ON TIME. A radiogram in a blond coloured wooden case on legs and castors was wheeled out and plugged in, we sat cross-legged on the wooden floor then performed. Possibly the radio was supplied by the Council. They also sent, on a regular basis, large wooden crates with black painted hinges and fastenings, full of library books, that we could borrow and take home.
His teaching methods went back to basics, fundamentals. We had abacuses in Miss Taylor’s infant class. Long division and fractions were taught from first principles and then there was mental arithmetic, even my father remembered having to do mental arithmetic. We worked in groups to write and produce a ‘play’, and there were these so-called games. For one he would stand at the blackboard with a piece of chalk in his hand and he would pick an object, say a bus, and we would have to tell to him how to draw it on the board. He did precisely what we told him, with hilarious results. This was really a lesson about using words and it fooled us into being precise. He knew of course that the idea of getting the better of your headmaster was always a game with great potential as far as we were concerned.
School dinners, like music and movement and jumping over the ‘horse’, a nightmare apparition of padded brown leather and splayed wooden legs, with Mr Bell standing by to catch us, were taken in the School Hall. This pale green painted prefab building with French windows along one of the long sides, was, in wet weather, a short sprint over the playground. It had a small lobby with coat hooks and there were murals on the end walls of the actual hall, painted by Geoffrey Drewitt, a previous pupil, village scenes I think. Separate tables seating about 6 or 8 were laid out. The teachers not only served us, they sat at ‘our’ tables. We walked through the kitchen in an orderly queue and held out our plates, Oliver Twist fashion and they spooned out dinners from aluminium trays, cooked by Mrs Rogers and Mrs Bunting.
Vicars and Dorothy lived in one of the middle Ashridge Cottages, at the far end of the village next to the council houses and he cycled to work on a dark green bicycle. The house was a small and basic, to the right of the front door was his ‘study’, to the left the sitting room and at the back a scullery/kitchen. Dorothy had a wooden hut in the garden where she slept because of her having had TB. Vicars went on walking holidays, alone.
I have found that there is a black and white photograph of him writing at a desk, in the National Portrait Gallery archive. It was taken in 1948 and put there in 1996 (I wonder who by). He also has a Wikipedia entry, I wonder what he would have made of that. As John Rogers once said “He taught us common sense.” I think he would have been pleased to have us think of our education that way.
It was on one of the hottest days of the year that I made it to the cashpoint only to have my request rejected because the amount I entered wasn’t a multiple of ten. I didn’t know what a multiple of ten was. I still don’t.
It all began a long time ago, this problem with numbers, and though I have just found out there is a name for this condition* and that it is just as common as dyslexia, I haven’t yet looked into it and cling to my own theory which is that it all began because I missed a few days of school when I was six years old.
At the little school in Ilkley, while bombs were falling on London and many of the major cities, we were knitting scarves for ‘our brave servicemen’ (see above) while learning to read and write and ‘do arithmetic’.
The key to the reading and writing was the alphabet and I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know my ABC, but I still don’t have the Times Tables – key to the universe of numbers – at my command. We learnt the tables by rote. I missed a few days and never caught up. That SEVEN TIMES SEVEN IS FORTY-NINE I can still hear in my head but, beyond that, all is silence. The doors that open onto fractions and decimal points have remained for ever closed.
But when one door shuts, another opens. In their majesty, Oxford, Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin, were prepared to consider me when none of the other universities were open to someone who had failed to matriculate. To matriculate, you had to pass three subjects. Maths was one of them.
So it was being innumerate that led me to Oxford and from Oxford to a job where Reading and Writing were the only requirements. Even so, there are times when Arithmetic raises its ugly head, but they can usually be managed by the time-honoured practice of counting on my fingers.
And there is always help at hand. There are friends. There are accountants. There is Google. And just one block down from that cash machine – tucked away, at the back of a gift shop – the remains of a Post Office. The bank, of course, closed long ago.
*Dyscalculia: a condition, according to Google, that makes it hard to do maths and tasks that involve maths. Not as well known or as understood as dyslexia .
One of the many things I didn’t know about dying and death is that you can’t scatter ashes just anywhere and it was enough for me to hear from the funeral director that I would need permission to carry out my plan to go to a spot in Regents Park which R particularly loved, for me to drop this idea, and to ask no more questions. I don’t therefore know if what we did the other day was illegal. All I know is that it didn’t feel illegal and couldn’t possibly have done anyone any harm.
My son was in England. So was my daughter-in-law, who has a wonderful voice and would have sung a traditional lament as we said our final goodbyes, but we feared attracting attention as we scattered the ashes in the churchyard of one of the little parish churches that R had so loved and that he and I had visited together.
Far from London, where he had lived most of his life, and further still from his birthplace but, as I comforted myself and told my young grandson, not far at all from his ancestral home, just across the Scottish border . . .
It was on a very wet Sunday morning that we had arrived in Selkirk, some twenty years before. The town square was empty except for a statue of Mungo Park.
Desperate for a cup of coffee, we tried a few side streets. Not a sign of life. Back in the main square, we noticed an open side door in the one grand building.
Inside we found an office and a helpful lady who explained this was the Court House and told us that Walter Scott had been the Sheriff here for almost thirty years. Surrounded by files and with a computer, which seemed strangely out of place in this mausoleum, it didn’t take her long to establish that the Harbisons had once lived in this town and she told us we would find their gravestones in the churchyard.
On some other day, we might have found them but by now the rain was bucketing down. The sodden grass was knee-high, the inscriptions on the ancient tombstones hard to decipher, and a light had gone on in a window in the town square. We turned back and headed for it. And there, in a tea room as spartan as the British Restaurant that my mother used to take me to during the war, we had a comforting hot drink of something like coffee.
No wonder the Harbisons had fled all those years ago from this rugged little town whose townspeople were permanently at war with their English neighbours.
The ferocious Battle of Flodden would still have been a relatively recent memory: a memory vividly recalled in the little museum we came across, in a cobbled side street, when we had warmed up and dried off.
Housed in a plain but beautiful old building, the very best example of civic pride, here we learnt the war-torn history of this place, now a quiet backwater, but once the scene of endless strife.
I wish I could remember exactly when R’s family had left. I think it was mid-eighteenth century; anyway, long enough ago for one of his ancestors to get herself captured by ‘Red Indians’, an experience she survived and wrote about in an account which, like other captivity narratives, still exists.
So, I am able to tell my grandson, who is proud of his own Native American blood, that his much-loved grandfather was not the first Harbison to be a writer and his memory, like that of his intrepid Scottish predecessor, will live on.
For more of this kind of thing see Esther Menell’s memoir, Loose Connections, available at £13.95 (including UK postage) via the link on the CONTACT page.
