Cornflower Books

Inspiration

 

    "Connie visited [artist and designer] Norman Wilkinson at his riverside home Strawberry House, by Chiswick Mall ... As she explored and admired the house, Connie came across something that suddenly jogged her memory: hanging in the sitting-room was a copy of Richard II Holding the Red Rose of Lancaster, the painting that she had seen as a child in The Studio magazine. She explained how she had been so excited by it, the lavish richness combined with austere formality: 'I remember to this day', she wrote, 'the parterre of delicate, exquisite even strange flowers: flaked and ticked pinks, curious foxgloves, panachée roses ...the minute and elaborate detail of the smallest flower.' She told Wilkinson that this painting had inspired in her a creative interest in all kinds of flowers, whether wild, exotic, rare or commonplace. The artist was pleased when he heard that she had liked it so much because, he told her, it was he who had painted it when he was very young. He quoted some lines of Milton from Lycidas which had inspired him:

    Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,

    The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine,

    The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet,

    The glowing violet,

    The musk rose, and the well-attired woodbine,

    With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,

    And every flower that sad embroidery wears. "

    From The Surprising Life of Constance Spry by Sue Shephard.

    A lovely example of links in the long chain of inspiration, and if you're interested in flowers and the wider social scene in Britain from the 1930s to the '50s I'd recommend the book warmly.

Diary of a Young Naturalist

   

    "Over the years, a wall of stone and beautiful ivy has grown up around me, and only family and wildlife are allowed in."

    I've been reading Dara McAnulty's Wainright Prize-winning Diary of a Young Naturalist, an account of four seasons of his young life. Still only sixteen but wise beyond those years, Dara's autism informs a deep and sustaining knowledge of and relationship with the natural world in his native Northern Ireland and beyond. Reading his words, you're struck by his intense sensory engagement with weather, flora, fauna; the energetic shifts of land-, sea- and cloud-scapes as backdrops to the flight of birds, the industry of insects, the essence and purpose of a single blade of grass or a giant, ancient oak.

    While the press and pull of people and the manmade world can make it hard for Dara to find his place and point of balance, nature's stimulus opens his heart and mind. Wildlife is his refuge but also his purpose, and capturing his experiences and concerns on the page not only lets him relive them - an important processing function for him - but allows the reader, irrespective of where they live, to see what is around them.

    His depth of feeling comes from a place far beyond 'mere' observation but rather an exquisite and deeply forged connection to the natural world which amounts to almost a symbiotic relationship. As both a loving guardian of our planet and an eloquent advocate for its natural treasure and its necessary protection, Dara's is a voice to heed and his example one worth following.

It was a wonderful room to wake up in ...

    "... Dreamless nights came to an end with no harder shock than that of a boat's keel grounding on a lake shore. Sunlight streamed in through the three tall windows and, as I lay in bed, all I could see was layer on ascending layer of chestnut leaves, like millions of spatulate superimposed green hands, and the crystalline sky of October framed by the thin reflected blue-white, or thick milk-white, or, where the sun struck, white-gold surfaces of the walls and window-arches and embrasures."

    From A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor.

Looking forward to re-reading ...

    ... Random Commentary, a compilation of Dorothy Whipple's notes and diaries from the 1920s to the 40s. I found it in the library a few years ago and enjoyed it very much.

Books in brief: Travels on my Elephant

 

    One of those 'Mad dogs and Englishmen ...' memoirs, the late Mark Shand's account of a trek across India with his elephant Tara is vivid, lively, and not without emotion. 

    A man who led a colourful life, Shand turned his adventure into a cause, eventually founding the conservation charity Elephant Family which establishes wildlife corridors, protecting habitats so that animals can thrive.

    I found the book fascinating, for its portrait of India, for what I learned about elephants, and for what it says about how to live.

    Hankies at the ready!

Purchases and presents

    Good reading ahead.

Opening up

    

    "Give people access to books, possibly for effectively the first time in their lives, and many of them will find within themselves an interest and a cultural capacity they perhaps never thought they had."

Tim Waterstone, The Face Pressed Against a Window

Sisters

    See also this post.

Books in brief: The Long Weekend

 

 

    The Observer reviewer of Adrian Tinniswood's The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House between the Wars found it "fantastically readable and endlessly fascinating", and so did I.

    If you've read Mitford letters and biographies or the works of Anne de Courcy*, say, you'll be familiar with the general milieu described, but this book looks behind the façades - in all senses of the term - and shows you the full picture. I recommend it wholeheartedly.

*See also

Byatt on Heyer

   

    Some years ago A.S. Byatt wrote an article entitled 'Georgette Heyer is a Better Writer Than You Think'.

    " ... it was the first article to offer a serious appraisal of Georgette's novels and to ask: 'Why is she so good?' For Byatt the answer lay

        in the precise balance she achieves between romance and reality, fantastic plot and real detail. Her good taste, her knowledge, and the literary and social conventions of the time she is writing about all contribute to a romanticised anti-romanticism: an impossibly desirable world of prettiness, silliness and ultimate good sense where men and women really talk to each other, know what is going on between them, and plan to spend the rest of their lives together developing the relationship. "

    From Georgette Heyer: The Biography of a Bestseller by Jennifer Kloester.

                                                   ~~~~~

    There's a book group post on Georgette Heyer's A Civil Contract here (preceded by this one), and in the 'did you know...?' camp comes the fact that Booker McConnell were able to fund the Booker Prize from their investment in the copyrights of three authors: Georgette Heyer, Ian Fleming and Agatha Christie, none of whom, as Jennifer Kloester points out, "wrote the sort of fiction likely to be considered for the Booker."

    Another piece of trivia: this was Miss Heyer's favourite holiday destination.

Did you know ...

    ...that Maxim was originally called Henry? 

       And when Daphne du Maurier sent the manuscript of Rebecca to her publisher she said 'the ending is a bit brief and a bit grim ... too grim to be a winner.' Her editor read it in two days and begged to differ: "the book contains everything that the public could want". The rest is history.

Helping hands

 

   Two rather nice anecdotes from current reading:

    Julie Summers's Our Uninvited Guests: The Secret Lives of Britain's Country Houses 1939-1945 includes a chapter on Melford Hall, home to Sir William and Lady Hyde Parker, which was requisitioned by the army on the outbreak of war.

    With a new baby, and her husband recuperating after surgery following a dreadful accident, Lady Hyde Parker knew they must move out of the Hall - now overrun with soldiers - but had nowhere to go. She rang her husband's cousin Beatie who told them to come north to her at once. When they arrived at Beatie's Lake District home, Castle Cottage, so shocked was she at Sir William's condition that instead of putting them in the local inn as planned she handed them the keys to her other house, "the place where she went to be quiet when she needed peace," where they spent the next year "and benefited from the outdoor life in that beautiful corner of Cumbria." Cousin Beatie was none other than Beatrix Potter, and her retreat, Hill Top.

    Mr. C. is reading Pillar of State, the second volume of Elizabeth Longford's biography of the Duke of Wellington. In his 60s, and by then Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, the Duke had time "to indulge his lifelong affection for children, one of his great charms."

    "Any child in distress could count upon the Duke," Lady Longford writes, "A tearful boy who had to leave his pet toad behind when he was sent away to school received regular notes from Field Marshal the Duke of Wellington to say that the toad was well; a girl despised for snob reasons by her fellow pupils at a smart Kensington day-school was presented with a bouquet of flowers from F.M. the D. of W. who had driven up personally in his carriage to deliver them."

    The Duke delighted in playing with children, and cushion fights, football, or games of chase round the ramparts at Walmer Castle were common pastimes. "You are a very nice little fellow," he said to one child playing in the garden, "when you are old enough I will give you a commission in the Guards." "But I'm a girl, Mr. Dook," replied the future Lady Spencer Walpole."

The biographer in the garden

    An interesting talk by Victoria Glendinning.

March past

    A look back through the reading diary reveals some highlights from Marches past:

    Diaries, 1942-1954, James Lees-Milne

    Cakes and Ale, W. Somerset Maugham

    Waiting for the Albino Dunnock, Rosamond Richardson

    Robertson Davies: Man of Myth, Judith Skelton Grant

    The Warden, Anthony Trollope

    The Dead in their Vaulted Arches, Alan Bradley

    The Nine Tailors, Dorothy L. Sayers

    Kept: A Victorian Mystery, D.J. Taylor

    All Kinds of Magic, Piers Moore Ede

    Tea Time for the Traditionally Built, Alexander McCall Smith

    Mrs. Miniver, Jan Struther

    A Month in the Country, J.L. Carr

    Links are all to posts (of one sort or another), if I have them, and the list does not include anything on the gloomy or distressing side.

What to read next?

    Today's is a 'current reading' post for these troubled times which comes with our hope that wherever you are in the world, all is as well with you as it can be.

    As we carry on as normally but also as prudently as possible, Mr. C. is racing through the charming Miss Buncle's Book with great enthusiasm, so much so that I'm inclined to re-read it when he's done.

   While I wait for him to finish I might turn to Elizabeth Goudge whose wisdom and good heart is never not needed; I have the third volume of her  Eliots of Damerosehay trilogy to look forward to - click through for posts on The Bird in the Tree and The Herb of Grace - and she hasn't failed me yet.

    Then again, Laura Freeman's The Reading Cure might be a book to re-visit, both for its own sake and for the inviting reading trails it opens up, and let's not forget T.H. White's advice which Laura passes on with the suggestion to "plant roses so that thistles may not grow" - I'm sure your shelves are as well-filled with suitable material as are mine.

    Please do share any good reading, if you have a moment, and let's stay connected for moral support. Our best to you.

Friday reads: Chewing the Cud

    I've been reading Dick King-Smith's autobiography Chewing the Cud, a book of great charm and good heart. It's a concise account of his life, with particular emphasis on his years as a farmer - excellent in the care of his animals but, by his own admission, having no head for business. His writing career started late but was nonetheless stellar, culminating in his Guardian Children's Fiction Prize for The Sheep-Pig, the book which became the hit film Babe.

    What is evident on every page of his memoir is Dick King-Smith's amiability, good humour, positive outlook, and joy in small things, and a such it was a great pleasure to read. Also, what dog person could fail to be taken with Dick's dachshund Dodo (above)?

I popped back ...

    ... to Topping & Company this morning, and with fewer customers than on Sunday there was more space to browse (and have coffee by the window in 'Fiction', should you choose). 

    The range of the stock is astonishingly large and good so choosing is hard, but I came away with these two.

To be read - 2

    "A hugely important addition to the literature of what can be done to restore soil and soul," says the Guardian of Isabella Tree's Wilding: The return of nature to a British farm, while Adam Nicolson's verdict is "... truly the most magnificent and inspiring book."

    "Forced to accept that intensive farming of the heavy clay soils of their farm at Knepp in West Sussex was driving it close to bankruptcy, in 2000 Isabella Tree and her husband Charlie Burrell took a spectacular leap of faith and handed their 3,500 acres back to nature. With minimal human intervention, and with herds of free-roaming animals stimulating new habitats, their land is now heaving with life. Rare species such as turtle doves, peregrine falcons and purple emperor butterflies are now breeding at Knepp and biodiversity has rocketed.

    The Knepp project has become a leading light for conservation in the UK, demonstrating how letting nature take the driving seat can restore both the land and its wildlife in a dramatically short space of time, reversing the cataclysmic declines that have affected most species elsewhere in Britain over the past five decades. Part gripping memoir, part fascinating account of Britain's rural ecology, Wilding is, above all, an inspiring story of hope."

    The book was shortlisted for The Wainwright Prize (awarded a couple of days ago to Robert Macfarlane's Underland).

Thought for the day

    "Adults tend to forget - or perhaps never appreciated in the first place if lifelong non-readers themselves - what a vital part of the process rereading is for children. As adults, rereading seems like backtracking at best, self-indulgence at worst. Free time is such a scarce resource that we feel we should be using it only on new things.

    But for children, rereading is absolutely necessary. The act of reading is itself still new. A lot of energy is still going into (not so) simple decoding of words and the assimilation of meaning. Only then do you get to enjoy the plot - to begin to get lost in the story. And only after you are familiar with the plot are you free to enjoy, mull over, break down and digest all the rest. The beauty of a book is that it remains the same for as long as you need it. It's like being able to ask a teacher or parent to repeat again and again some piece of information or point of fact you haven't understood with the absolute security of knowing that he/she will do so infinitely. You can't wear out a book's patience."

    Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

Off to a good start

 

     "Was your first crush on Dickon instead of Johnny Depp? Do you still get the urge to tap the back of a wardrobe if you find yourself alone in a strange bedroom, or keep half an ear out at midnight for the sound of Hatty in the garden?

    If so, this is the book for you. But then, most books are. You are, like me, a bookworm."

   

    From Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading by Lucy Mangan.