The Frost and the Fire by Ruth Park

I'm so pleased that you can still get hold of this book. The story is set in the New Zealand goldrush of the 1860s, where veterans of the Californian goldrush mix with the Irish and the Scots, and away off on their own part of the goldfield, the Chinese. It's the wild West, but removed to the South, the landscape is mountainous, rocky and deep-gorged, and the climate is intensely hot in the summer and intensely cold in the winter.

Just as the weather can be extreme, so can the characters: the crowds can get stirred into a mob, the Scots who seem so well rooted even in the thin soil of the mountains may have secret uncontrollable longings, and the Irish are sometimes carried away by their passions into complete madness. This is a story in which people have souls, and suffer the pains of love and loss in epic clarity. When you read a modern story it's entertaining enough but there's no feeling that the story matters as our lives are pretty much like those of battery hens. But here people act out of freedom, greed, emotional need, neighbourliness, adventurousness, and as their consciences square with the tenets of their deepest beliefs. There is scope to be noble.

The story is about Currency MacQueen, the washerwoman's girl, and is told by another girl of her own age: Tatty, the midwife's daughter, and it features prospectors and diggers, fools and wise men, priests and dance-hall girls and a waif of a violinist. Tatty is not the star of her own story, and has to suffer this bravely, and all the characters, with their strengths and weaknesses, are dealt with sympathetically.

In my version (you can get an edited version) there was a paragraph of racism which made me recoil in horror, but I didn't want it eradicated because I know it represented racism as it was, callous and casual, and thank God it is no longer like that.

I don't normally read romantic fiction but this was wonderful escapism. I feel better for having been embroiled in it - so emotional, so large and grand, as the world should be. I wrote before about the vast emotional scope that humans are capable of, and how pitiful it is to be a dumbed-down version. I feel myself to be like this, moved only minimally by sport and shopping, and all our "adventures" involve safety harnesses and little effort.