Cornflower Books

Books in brief x 3

       You don’t have to be knowledgeable about cricket to enjoy Peter Pan’s First XI. Kevin Telfer’s account of JM Barrie’s extraordinary collection of players - Arthur Conan Doyle, PG Wodehouse, AA Milne, to name a few - evokes an era and a literary milieu as well as showing Barrie through the lens of his sporting obsession.

    Ursula Buchan is to be commended for her research and her writing in A Green and Pleasant Land: How England’s Gardeners Fought the Second World War. Fascinatingly detailed and an excellent read.

    Bizarre but nonetheless compelling, Margery Allingham’s Traitor’s Purse sees Albert Campion save the world in wartime. Very slick, and not a word wasted. More on it here.

Dreaming dreams

    "She was explaining that she hadn't actually done any gardening yet, because in Gower Street one doesn't garden, except window-boxes [...]; but this hadn't stopped her from reading nurserymen's catalogues and studying manuals, and planning what flowers she would grow if ever she got the chance, - a weakening literature, she admitted, and one she hadn't indulged in very often, because it made her dream dreams instead of attending to her duties. Those luscious descriptions of exquisite flowers - what was the use, she asked, [...] of reading them, and getting all stirred up and excited? Her duty lay indoors among ink and paper, and no good thinking of what was going on in places where there were roses. But each year, towards the middle of April, a lilac-bush in the next door backyard, a single lilac-bush left over from days when God still had some sort of say in Gower Street, began to bloom, and it was amazing how difficult this made it for her; not difficult to stick to her post, because there was never any thought of being able to leave that, but difficult, exceedingly, to concentrate on what she was doing. Fortunately, father never would have the window open, so she was spared the intoxication of the scent, the divine scent that had drenched all the spring mornings of the world since the first lilac flowered in Paradise. Father, who wrote about April so beautifully -"

From Father by Elizabeth von Arnim (delightful, so far!)

The picture is Mme. Lemoine, the lilac outside my window, in her May splendour.

Dangerous Women

    I've long been interested in the creative process, in any medium, but especially in the writing of fiction. I find the genesis of ideas fascinating, how a story grows from seed to full bloom, how it leans to the light, as it were, what determines its shifts and shapes. It's often the case that a writer can't clearly identify the source of their inspiration, but for Adèle Geras writing as Hope Adams in her new novel Dangerous Women, that starting point was a quilt.

    One of the exhibits in the V&A's hugely popular 2010 show Quilts: 1700-2010 was the Rajah quilt, now in the National Gallery of Australia. Made by a group of female convicts being transported from London to Van Diemen's Land aboard the Rajah from April to July 1841, it's a large coverlet of patchwork, appliqué and embroidery, and when Adèle saw it in the exhibition she knew it would be the basis for a novel.

    In Dangerous Women she uses the making of the quilt as the background to dramatic events on board the ship, constructing a 'locked room' mystery which brings out the past history of those involved in the quilt's creation, telling their story in scraps and snippets, piecing and stitching them together with different narrative threads and repeating patterns, as the women ply their needles and sew themselves into "a patchwork of souls".

    Superintending the making - having been sent out as matron to the women under the auspices of prison reformer Elizabeth Fry - is Kezia Hayter, generous, kindly, believing the best of her workforce even when this trust appears misplaced. For her the voyage will be a rite of passage in more ways than one. As to the women themselves, with respect to their descendants Adèle has given them all invented names and makes clear that while her story's framework is factual the events at its heart are entirely fictitious.

    Towards the end of the voyage Kezia considers the quilt, "... the design has come together but the true glory lies in the work," she thinks. "Every one of the women she'd chosen had stitched most diligently. The very act of coming together every single day, of sitting quietly, sewing, one next to another, of knowing that what they were achieving was something of beauty: ... that was what had transformed them into a sisterhood [and] each one would remember this spread of flowers and leaves, colours and stripes, dots, lozenges and her own broderie perse in the middle, with its bright birds and posies. They'd remember their contribution to its making."

    So it is that in a compellingly episodic narrative peopled with outcasts who are themselves often victims, a shared piece of handwork and the compassionate heart and creative mind behind it become the cohesive, redemptive embarkation point for a new life for all.

    Adèle has used her raw material with flair and skill, fashioning her story with respect for its unique origins and using its potential to the full.