The Harp in the South Trilogy

 Like most readers, I wasn't very impressed with the first book of the trilogy "Missus", and it doesn't fit with the second and third in style or content. By content I mean the treatment of the characters. In the first book they are treated seriously and examined minutely and in the second Hughie has changed so much for the worse that it's difficult to find the person he was. The same with the young woman who has changed dramatically into "Missus". 

In "The Harp in the South" and "Poor Man's Orange" the focus is on their daughters and their chances of escaping the Sydney slums they live in. We feel for them as Ruth Park takes us to the most intimate details of their experience.

Ruth Park never lets up with her descriptions of the living conditions which are dirty, because there are factories nearby and smoke belches out ceaselessly so there is not much point in cleaning. The personal washing conditions are difficult too. She describes the effect of bed bugs, the constant presence of cockroaches and most horrible of all, rats. And as the story goes on you feel how wrong it is that any people have to live this way. She describes the price of rental property going up and up until the aged have nowhere to live but flophouses which are no better than tents. Food is cheap enough and plentiful, so the people survive and at least Sydney is not very cold in winter. She describes endless pungent smells. 

Warning: the language used to describe people of ethnicities other than Irish is very racist and there is no getting away from the fact that people used to say abusive things about native Australians, Jews and Chinese. (It isn't as though the other nations never said the Irish were dirty, drunken, and lazy.)

I think this book is intended to be an eye-opener. Ruth Park doesn't pull her punches about what Hughie resorts to to get out of his mind, how the baby's clothes are black from the street, and the nappy smells, what the young people do for entertainment, and how it all seems to Dolour who is strong and disapproving due to the influence of Catholic teaching about the significance to God of all we do and the wonderful Sister Theophilus.

Although Dolour missed out on her exams due to the sheer bad luck of getting infections in her eyes (the family is either not given medical care or it is always botched), one feels that there is always hope that she will find happiness and fulfillment. Ruth Park has quite a repetitive style in that she warns you about the beginnings of people's feelings and then revisits them repeatedly to tell you they are growing. 

I really want to give this 5 stars because giving us a good read about these circumstances is such an amazing achievement but I can't because it leaves such a bitter taste - the taste of the poor man's orange.

Dinner at the Homesick restaurant.

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I re-read the same little Penguin book that I first read in 1987. All this time I've been thinking I will re-read it. It's about a family, over time, and I am sure that the first time I read it I was full of judgments about the characters. I thought, they mustn't forgive their mother, she's awful! I thought, they mustn't forgive their father, he left them! But the writer isn't in the judgment business. She's in the business of writing families that are psychologically true. The sins of the father are visited on the children (in the form of psychological damage) and what's more, on the grandchildren, and this will happen to any of us unless we make real efforts to make sure it doesn't! And perhaps even then! I found some of the parent/child conversations, where the mother has the chance to have a meaningful talk with the child in her care but fails to connect, making silly jokes instead, unbelievably painful and frustrating. I wish sometimes, that Tyler would spell out, this is how to talk to children and this is how not to, but she doesn't comment.

Pearl is a bitter person and a bad mother, and Beck is a shallow and selfish person, and the miracle of the children is that they are any good at all. But they are. The family is a family which has absorbed its painful experiences, continues to try to function, and somehow carries on, and we care about that.

In the hands of a less ambitious writer, Pearl could have been a one-dimensional woman but Tyler follows her character right up to her old age and death, so we learn much more about her than her painful struggles as a mother.

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Normal People by Sally Rooney

I think maybe it's difficult for people to be sexually happy these days - to say this sex is good, that sex is bad - because they think maybe being hurt or choked is "normal" sex. Marianne is very submissive within sex and invites hurt, but Connell hates the idea - maybe because he has a good honest relationship with his mum. He loves his mum, she loves him back, there are no hidden issues. He doesn't hate any women, which puts him in a minority of men these days, it seems to me. His mum calls him out about his behaviour when he needs telling. He knows her values are based on kindness and honesty.

Marianne has an awful mum who doesn't love her and no father. She seems to be emotionally frozen but she is highly sexually aware of Connell. He is her connection. Sadly, very sadly, he betrays her trust.

The time that Marianne goes to Stockholm she gets involved with a man from the BDSM scene who seems to think tying her up and abusing her is what she wants and that he can manipulate her by saying "I love you" in this context and she is going to be grateful. She might have been, but she knows that what she had with Connell is love and so she is not deceived. How many women are? Oh, this is love, they think, while they are being choked or attacked. Really? It might be very edgy but is it love? No, it isn't.

I have some difficulty in believing in Connell as a character though I do believe in Marianne. Connell's problem is that he doesn't state what he wants, which is inconsistent with his character:- he is very intelligent and can make people like him. He knows Marianne very well, and he loves her. Why can't he tell her what he wants? When he finds himself travelling in Europe, writing long emails to Marianne, but having short facetime sessions with his girlfriend, he should realise how much more Marianne means to him than Helen, but if he notices he does nothing about it. But these two are young and what motivates them is projecting an attractive image in the wider social group (Normal People). This is truthful about the young. For Connell, it's great to have a wholesome medic girlfriend. It projects a good image.

There were two details that made me sad in this novel. One is that some characters went on a protest about something in Dublin and there was drumming and chanting. The right to drum and chant in the context of a protest is about to be removed from the people of the UK, and so the Irish will have those rights but the English will not, unless they protest more effectively than they are doing as I write. Another was that Marianne went on the Erasmus programme to Stockholm. Students in this country will not have access to the Erasmus programme because the UK government removed our students from it.

I liked that the students (particularly Marianne) were interested in all kinds of issues and not just their own lives in their own country. 

Mostly we go for walks...

... to break up the monotony and it's the only thing we're allowed to do, but the odd thing is that one's congenial friends have become less congenial as time has gone on. For example, one group of four walkers has now split into two people who like walking together and refuse to change partners, and a pair who don't much like each other but are forced to walk together even though they are quite bored. This is me of course, and K. I have never really found the right group to mix with. I have wondered if the problem is one of class. The "girls" who chat easily together come from a secure middle-class background and I don't, even though I talk as though I do. 

The quiz group has worked better because there is not much of an opportunity to chat. It is good-humoured. 

The old school chums are on Zoom tonight and I am looking forward to seeing them, but since Brexit I am much more aware of the differences between us. One friend has to tone down her pro-Brexit and anti-socialist views. One friend talks about nothing but herself and her own doings and looks down on me as a lesser person, her voice is scornful when she refers to me. 

(When my daughter came home last we talked about the more middle-class girls she is living with and how they parcel up neat little stories of their life experience in order to entertain each other over dinner. I am pretty sure she enjoyed this at first - and I am sure she was able to hold her own - but now she finds it a tiresome obligation. She wants to be able to talk in a discursive way and talk about ideas, which is the best kind of conversation I think. Or just to be desultory if you feel like that. )

As well as walking with the skiff girls, I have walked with Judith the mum figure, Jane the bees, and Martin my brother - as well as my husband, A. I don't walk on my own, except to the shops or to the allotments. I am quite lazy.

I have just had a total meltdown over the allotment business and seem to have been removed from group emails, and that's OK. They had started to cause me too much emotional pain but also I had depended on them for mental stimulation. Now I shall release myself from this pain and look again at the writing work I was doing before. 

I am also quite keen on improving my French. It's something I can do with Carlye and Amanda and I love essayer de parler en francais, lire en francais and ecouter en francais. I have started doing Inner French with the likeable and intelligent Hugo. Not used to it yet, but giving it a go. 

On Monday we are going skiffing with Robyn at 9.15. It will be very exhausting after so long. 

Miserable Britain, but hope in the USA

Now, what do you call a long walk? I think with me anything under 5 miles is a short walk. Between 5 and 8 miles, it’s an average to longish walk and over 8 miles is a long walk. On Monday Karen and I walked from Walton bridge to Home Park and around Home Park, a quick trip into Bushy Park, and back to Walton which was 14 miles and was long. I am feeling it today and must not forget to do Yoga with Adriene when I have recovered from my lunch.

 I suppose it might be a long time before my friend gets her birthday book because of the Brexit mess. That might go on forevermore. I wouldn’t mind, you know if I thought it was all an innocent mistake, but I don’t think it was. I think it’s a conspiracy so that the City can carry on laundering money as the EU tightens up on that, let the rich off paying their taxes, as the EU tightens up on that too, and screw the workers as their rights are taken away from them, e.g. the working time directive. That’s going. But the working-class votes Tory anyway. In spite of their rights being taken away and the country being poorer. Facebook targets them with scare stories about foreigners because their profile shows them to be uneducated and gullible.

 There is to be a new TV station owned by Rupert Murdoch, and the BBC News is too boring to watch as it only reports on Covid. You would think, from the BBC news, that there is no other country but ours, or that we were the only nation-state hit by Covid. It’s all internal news and uncritical of any member of the government. All the government have shares in the firms that make the vaccines. Isn’t that insider trading? Oh, nobody cares about that anymore. (Most people don’t know what it is.) ITV is now my news channel of choice. The presenters seem amazingly honest and concerned compared with their BBC equivalents. Laura Kuenssberg called the Chancellor's allowance "generous" on radio 4 the other morning. I didn't hear it but Twitter was full of it. 

 I wrote all this before news came from the USA that Biden's administration is going to tackle money-laundering, which of course has been carrying on like merry Hell under Trump. He wants to look at the international money-laundering patterns and find ways of regulating it, i.e. taming it. I have not been so happy in a long time! Dear old Biden! Not so sleepy, is he? Probably he will get poisoned. Let's hope the Secret Service in the White House can keep the old boy safe. Nothing like this is going to happen here under a Tory government. Johnson is in the grip of the Russians. I believe his girlfriend is constantly on the phone to the oligarchs and passing on the instructions!! 

There is a house in the middle of Home Park that's privately owned. Sarah S, who knows everything about Hampton Ct, said that this large house is owned by a Russian who owns a newspaper and it's guarded by a genuine wolf! K told her in no uncertain terms that this is illegal and couldn't be true. But I believe that if it's a Russian owner the law doesn't apply. Maybe it's a wolf. 

Meanwhile, Navalny tries to lead some kind of opposition to Putin, but everybody knows he will just get bumped off, as every other opponent of Putin does, and the Russians are too used to corruption. It's what they expect. Things are different here. People don't expect it and eventually, they won't stand it. 

Dim days and Covid volunteering

 All last week the days were dim and I would have just hibernated, but now I have the answer. It's a bright LED therapy light. I put it on one side of my desk and I am not looking at it but I am very conscious of it. The idea is that you have it on for about 2 hours a day in the morning, but I just put it on when I need it because the day is dull. So far it has helped a lot with my sleep patterns. 

Last week we volunteered every morning at the Woking vaccination centre. On the second day (Wednesday) we had to do lateral flow tests (putting a stick up our nostrils and twirling -ugh!) and they were negative, but as we all know the tests are only 75% reliable. The first day we were there was extremely busy and we were quite overwhelmed with trying to manage the flow of patients. No one took much of a break for the 4 hours we were there. (8am -12noon) It was strange to get up so early - still dark when we got up. One of our fellow volunteers was a guy called Alex we liked a lot as he was so willing to clean everything - and so good with wheelchair-users. There were 4 wheelchairs that had been supplied from here and there and must have been in a dusty cupboard. So the wheelchair users had to go in at the exit, which was a ramp, and someone inside has to sign to the exit volunteer that someone is coming up the ramp. On the third day, we got the jab ourselves because there was some terrible glitch in the bookings system and we just didn't have enough oldies coming. Our administrator got in touch with the Bustler drivers (very jolly people) and NHS receptionists and schools that could send teachers in the evening - also staff from Sainsbury's - anyone who would benefit rather than throw away the precious fluid - it was the Pfizer vaccine which apparently only keeps for three days out of the freezer. Eventually, more oldies started to come and in the evening, apparently, it was a pile-up with a long queue out of the door. 

After the four mornings, we were beginning to feel like a team, and the doctors/nurses/administrators were all treating us like regulars, which of course we were. But the jobs are quite boring and we were ready for a break, so the next week we signed up to one shift each, and mine was at Walton.

At Walton we had a shift lead, Rachel K whom we know well because of rowing, there to brief all the new people about what to do, how to keep the flow of people organised. I felt quite sorry for the vaccinators - three at Walton, as we sent along one patient after the other with no respite for hours. At Woking, there were four vaccinators and they took turns to go into a side kitchen and make hot drinks, which they had at their desks. The slowest part is having the patients wait for 15 minutes after their injections to see if they have a funny turn. We got quite a pile-up of people, and their chairs (we had a good supply of chairs) got steadily closer together. I tried hard to keep them 1 metre apart. 

I was not able to sanitise the chairs of the 15-minute waiters as they were taken so quickly but I was busy sanitising other chairs and they could see I was doing my best. The guidance has changed a bit. Now we are only supposed to sanitise the chairs after every fifth bottom or thereabouts. This because we were running out of virus-killing wipes. This will stop the volunteers from cleaning like mad as there was quite a competition to see who could be the most fastidious cleaner of chairs. 

At Walton, where there is plenty of space upstairs for the volunteers to have time out, there is also a competition to see who can be the most benevolent volunteer. One volunteer brought in a cake. Another brought in a coffee machine. Another retaliated with a microwave oven. Rachel K went and got a discount from a coffee shop for all the volunteers. And so it goes on. They have What's App groups for both venues so I know what's going on, and it makes me smile, but today I thought, in these awful times when we have so little in the way of a community, people are desperate to form a community, a sisterhood even. But what I didn't much like about Walton was the other volunteers being young and rather superior women. One of them took my Hi-Viz gilet off me although I had brought it with me. These young women are very forceful and I just have to do what they tell me. But, in revenge, I don't like them.

All this is being done through the NHS and they are doing it really well, unlike the private companies which did Test and Trace and basically didn’t Trace anyone. £18 billion to Serco, apparently, for f. all. 

Gloucester Crescent

 If you've seen "The Lady in the Van" you know Gloucester Crescent a little bit; you have a little idea of the kind of people who live there - like the kind woman who tries to give Miss Shepherd some home baking, and the cross man (Roger Allam) who opens her jar, the children who play piercingly on the recorder and drive her nuts, and Alan Bennett himself. You know that the houses are tall and Victorian, possibly 😏, and have tiny little front gardens and large basement kitchens.

This seems to be a historical shot of the street, and Miss Shepherd's van, before they were famous.

If you read the Nina Stibbe book "Love Nina" you find that the family she was the nanny for - the Frears, and Mary-Kay Wilmer - lived opposite Alan Bennett. Jonathan Miller, with his wife and family, lived up the road, and they borrowed his saw to cut up a Christmas tree. Claire Tomalin, busily editing literary pages for a Sunday paper, and writing a biography possibly, lived close by, and with her a playwright called Michael Frayn. Mrs Ursula Vaughan Williams lived in the street, and later on, so does Debbie Moggach, another writer. Nina was absolutely thrilled by the comings and goings and the artiness of everyone in the street. She writes home to Leicester to tell everyone about it and she reports conversations verbatim, which makes her seem like a playwright herself. She spots the wit in people, and some of the ridiculousness of the young people she meets at the Poly, and the second time I read the book I laughed a lot. I think the first time I read it I thought - "oh, it starts to flag when Alan's off the scene", but that was just me. The writing has a free-wheeling personality all the way through.

Nina-the-nanny has to cook something for supper every evening, not just for Mary Kay (editor of the London Review of Books) and the boys, but for Alan Bennett as well, and some of her letters are concerned with the trials of cooking and asking her sister for more recipes. Alan is a bit critical of Hunter chicken, saying he prefers it without tinned tomatoes. He brings around milk puddings as his contributions. Sometimes I wondered if he ever went round to see Jonathan Miller, because in Nina's book they don't seem to be on speaking terms. Did they fall out after "Beyond the Fringe"? They must have done. Do they even nod at each other in the street for old times' sake? 

I was concerned about the non-relationship between Alan and Jonathan, and in the spirit of enquiry, I went to another book about Gloucester Crescent which is called "Gloucester Crescent" by William Miller, son of the famous Jonathan.  This popped up on my Amazon feed. So I went for the Kindle version. (I am now deploying this strategy with book-buying: If I want it on my bookshelf I buy the book but if I think of the book as a mere diversion, e.g. a thriller, I get it on Kindle. If it's for my research it's nearly always out of print and I have to get a second-hand version on Amazon. 

So, "Gloucester Crescent" is written by an almost exact contemporary of mine. Whereas I was growing up in the stockbroker belt he was right in the middle of London. His sort of people were the sorts that appeared in the Sunday Paper Magazine. (A Life in the Day of). He writes in a terrible plonking style because he is a small child to start with, and this reflects a small child's sensibility, but it carries on like that. The vocabulary gets better as he gets older. He never really gives you a taste of the fun that must have gone on at his father's dining table, but he does tell you...

That Alan Bennett came round to dinner every night. Every night. And brought milk puddings.  And brunch on Sundays. You can understand how perplexed I am. At no point does Alan seem to stop going to the Millers' and start to go to Mary-Kay's. Did he eat two dinners every evening, and if so why? did he not put on weight? 

What comes across very strongly is William's father's personality and his father's strong opinions. These reject the idea of perpetuating class - the class system. Jonathan went to a public school and onto Cambridge, and spoke with an incredibly posh accent. At Cambridge, he was able to meet a large number of young men and a small number of women just like himself. He could see that the public school system was very wrong and divisive so he decided to send his own children to the local state schools. This is fine when the children are small, and get help at home, but later on his children, especially William, suffered from being with very threatening bullies, and could have achieved a lot more than they did, we infer, if the classrooms not been merry hell. The freedoms that the children enjoyed when they ran around to each other's houses reminded me of the children of the more Bohemian parents at my private primary. They were slightly frightening, because they were too grown-up for children. Their parents were not the protective sort.

But although the Millers went with their principles in the matter of education, they still had a lot of unfair advantages when it came to personal contacts. And so William went into the Meeja through the contacts of his father, and nothing, absolutely nothing changed. He ended up buying a house on the same road. Middle-class children are just not allowed to fail. Their parents couldn't live with it.

Jonathan Miller wasn't a wonderful father, in spite of being a clever and very engaging man. He liked to hear his own voice too much. He never held back from his dramatic suicidal threats out of anxiety for his children. He also liked to have his friends around all the time to the extent that his children must always have felt unimportant. His son says that he always loved him very much, but the book is full of complaints about his parenting.