Earthly Possessions by Anne Tyler

I particularly liked this novel when I first read it, and it has stayed with me for thirty years, and I have just re-read it - it is sparser than I remembered it. It seems to me to have some messages. 

First, there's the folly of having fixed ideas about people. The mother in the book has such fixed ideas about her own child that she thinks that she's taken the wrong baby home from the hospital. I am not sure whether we are to believe that the main character, Charlotte, is the wrong child. She is tall, thin and dark haired, and her mother is blond and very, very fat. Her mother tells her that her own baby just slipped out, whereas Charlotte had a forceps mark on her face. Yet Charlotte knows that her parents love her. All her childhood she believes that she is the wrong child in the unhappy house, living the wrong life. She wants to get away; to escape.

Charlotte wants to be able to be sure that her own child is her own.

Our daughter was born June2 1961, and the Clarion County Hospital, where I refused all anaesthesia including aspirin so I could be absolutely sure nobody mixed her up with any other baby. We named her Catherine. She had fair skin and light brown hair, but her face was Saul's.

From the first, it was clear she was bright. She did everything early: sitting, crawling, walking. She put short words together before she was one, and not much later began to tell herself long secret stories at Bedtime. When she was two, she invented a playmate named Selinda. I knew that was normal, and didn't worry about it. I apologized when I stepped on Selinda's toes, and set a place for her at every meal. But after a while, Catherine moved to Selinda's place and left her own place empty. She said she had a friend called Catherine none of us could see. Eventually she stopped talking about Catherine. We seemed to be left with Selinda. We have had Selinda with us ever since. Now that I think of it, I might as well have taken that anaesthesia after all. 

Now, you might think that is just how it is, but actually it is one of the themes of the book - people from the very start are invested with a feeling about their own character, and they make themselves up, often in ways that startle or disappoint their parents.

But while I am thinking about it, parents also make themselves up, invent themselves in ways that startle and disappoint their children! One crucial character is Charlotte's mother-in-law, Alberta. As a child, Charlotte loves the way that Alberta invests her life with drama. Eventually, Alberta runs away with her own father-in-law, and the family next door - four wayward boys - breaks up. When one of the boys, Saul, comes back, he rents a room with Charlotte and her mama. And falls in love with, and marries Charlotte. They live in Charlotte's huge childhood home, with Alberta's furniture as well as their own. Saul forbids Charlotte to get rid of his mother's furniture. One after another, his brothers come back, and live with them, they have Selinda, and then they have a baby orphan to stay. Charlotte does not expect to hang onto Jiggs (the child) but she loves him unreservedly.

These are the Earthly Possessions of the title. Things we hang onto, ideas we hang onto. Our children are not our possessions. They are ours to love as long as they want to stay. The theme of adoption - either formal or informal - usually informal - is one of Anne Tyler's strongest - her struggle to understand it.

Charlotte retains the idea that she might run away for far too long. But she doesn't try to hang onto other things - she lets Catherine become Selinda. She lets Saul become a preacher, although she doesn't believe in religion. She lets other people come and stay in their home. They see her smiling, as though amused. She's holding on lightly to this life that she believes isn't really hers.

Charlotte has these special circumstances - the chances are good that she was the wrong child - but her attitude is rather like a model for us all. She accepts - perhaps welcomes - the people who come and go, she doesn't try to hang onto them. Her childhood had been lonely and unhappy, but her adulthood is not. Other reviewers think she is unhappy with Saul, because she doesn't understand him, but I think she isn't. I think she doesn't mind the distance between them. 

The story of Charlotte's life alternates with scenes in which she is riding along in a stolen car with a bank robber - she's the hostage. But of course, it's not that simple. The bank robber isn't all that clever, and is very unsuccessful at his criminal career, and the traveling Charlotte does, in the end, is at gun point through areas that are depressed and out of the way. Like all the other people in her life but one, he seems to end up needing her. 

John Updike reviewed the novel in The New Yorker: "Anne Tyler, in her seventh novel, 'Earthly Possessions', continues to demonstrate a remarkable talent and, for a writer of her acuity, an unusual temperament....Small towns and pinched minds hold room enough for her; she is at peace in the semi-countrified, semi-plasticized northern-Southern America where she and her characters live. Out of this peace flow her unmistakable strengths—serene firm tone; her smoothly spun plots; her apparently inexhaustible access to the personalities of her imagining; her infectious delight in “the smell of beautiful, everyday life”; her lack of any trace of intellectual or political condescension—and her one possible weakness: a tendency to leave the reader just where she found him....Charlotte Emory...belongs to what is becoming a familiar class of Anne Tyler heroines: women admirably active in the details of living yet alarmingly passive in the large curve of their lives—riders on male-generated events, who nevertheless give those events a certain blessing, a certain feasibility."^[3]

Yes, Charlotte is passive, but she makes a reasonable contribution to the town of Clarion. One of the things she does is continue her father's business of portrait photography. 

She takes pictures of people without seeming to care how they sit or how they look and she captures some quality of drama or self-realisation in the moment of improvising something, that her father couldn't, because his ideas of photography and how people wanted to be represented, were very fixed. Charlotte says she sees them upside-down in the old camera lens - she sees them wrongly, and she knows it, and she doesn't care too much. One feels, without being told, that some of her pictures are masterpieces, artistic in a non-artistic way, a complete collaboration between sitter and photographer.

Passivity is not her trait only - the kidnapper also quotes his old friend:

"Like I told Oliver: I don't plan it like this. Events get out of my control. But Oliver, oh, he could be such a smart-ass. "Your whole life is out of your control", that's what Oliver said. "Your whole life." Smart-ass."

Now, how many people can say they have their whole life under their control? That they are never going to wake up and find they have been laid-off, or that their spouse has got Parkinson's, that their child has had an accident in a car, or that their best friend is suffering from a crippling depression? Well, I don't think anyone can say that.  Some of your life is under your control - that's all that you can say. 

Then there's that fact that in our actions and our choices, we respond to the events and the personalities of our childhood. Is that having control of your life? You don't even know you're doing it until some psychologist points it out to you.

(Anne Tyler makes you think.)

But in the book, Jake, the robber, is very little in control of his life, so you could say he is just as passive as the female protagonist, Charlotte. She is tied to her father and her mother by bonds of love, then tied to her husband and children by the same.  This is what holds societies together, but out of his far-seeing masculinity John Updike judges her harshly for this. Saul doesn't, though. He knows Charlotte. When interviewed he says, "My wife is a good woman." What confuses him is that she is not a Christian. She hasn't handed her life over to Christ. Her love is acted in the here and now, for her fat fat helpless mother, (acting mother) her picky father so set in his ways, and all the other people who fall into her life and need some nourishment. Even Saul himself. His need of her is (in part) what she responds to. (She also fancies him crazily.) He needs her because his mother ran away. Amos gets his revenge by being the one who always leaves. Saul re-runs his childhood life as an adult with Charlotte and with her help, tries to make it work out better this time. 

So I have read a load of responses to this novel on Amazon, for example, saying: "I didn't like the people. They were old-fashioned." 2 stars. "This isn't one of her best". And I think - actually, this is the most boiled down of her books, it tells all her themes quite brilliantly. 

But I found Jake and Mindy quite dull. Poor old Charlotte having to go on a trip with such a hopeless pair!! But the people who travel don't have all the stories, nor the best stories, maybe.

And remember, "We are travelling, travelling, all our lives. We couldn't stop if we tried."

North Downs Way - parts one and two.

The first part of this walk is the path from Farnham to Guildford, but because of the trains, we did it backwards, and of course it was still lovely. We had coffee in the Watts Gallery, which I wrote about here - some time ago. The cafe has been extended and although the cakes are overpriced it does good coffee!! And the loos are good.

Then we had a beer in a pub called The Good Intent.It's a lovely pub with hops over the bar and good local ales and guest ales, in a village called Puttenham. I wish I lived in Puttenham.Pictures here.

We had lunch in a craft barn in Seale, that had been taken over by Pinnocks coffee shop and was doing a roaring trade. These breaks provided essential interest and it was a lovely day - about 11 miles walking.

We did the second part on Bank Hol Monday. It was 13 miles and went from Guildford to Dorking. The path was mainly up on a ridge and didn't take in much of interest, although the views were good. We stopped at Newlands Corner for an ice cream and coffee, and later, went down into Shere village for a beer and a packet of crisps which added quite a long hill into our route, but it was nice to stop and see something. We ate our sandwiches by the stream in Shere, where there were ducks and children in the water, and cyclists take a break from their long distance cycling. There was much woodland in this walk which protected us from the glare of the sun, and we focussed on the trees and plants - there were some mixed plantings with yew as well as beech and birch  as there was nothing to see of particular interest. 

I must note that we caught a GWR train back from Dorking and there was no way of buying a ticket, either at the station or on the train. I would suggest to GWR they supply some machines because people would pay for their journeys if they could. I think their business model is essentially flawed!

Guildford to Dorking:

This is a "pill-box" a defence from WWII

Guildford Rowing club - we passed here on both our walks.

 Guildford to Farnham:

Plenty of bluebells

Accident in Hardware store: no sense of smell

As I was choosing a new toilet seat in a famous Australian hardware shop, one fell on my face and injured me between my nose and my upper lip. It was a deep cut which has taken a long time to heal. Sadly, I have now discovered that I have lost my sense of smell. But I can still taste my food. I can sort of taste very strong smells, like Jeyes fluid, which seem to go to the back of the throat and I get a bit of the savour of them. 

Things I can't smell: cooking meat from a barbecue, mint (nothing), basil (very faint), roses (nothing), lavender (nothing). I am certainly going to miss my sense of smell! How will I know if the food is cooked? Whether a dish is spicy? Whether there is a gas leak?Recently I entered a baking competition and all the time I was baking those cakes (I practiced) I didn't realise I couldn't smell them cooking and when the family said they liked the smell of the baking I just thought they were being nice or something. I didn't realise I had lost that sense. As usual, I can breathe fine through my nose. I feel sad about it but but hopeful that this state is temporary. 

A smell I particularly miss is the smell of shampoo and toiletries - the smells that waft out of a steamy bathroom. 

Post script - October - still no sense of smell but I got compensation from the shop for the scar. There seems to be no way that my lack of smell is linked with the toilet seat accident. 

Do No Harm by Henry Marsh

Impossible not to read this book at a canter. Each chapter is headed by a different kind of tumour or other trouble that the surgeon might have to deal with - including hubris!

Some of the chapters are about operations that go fairly well, and Marsh describes the miroscopic equipment he uses and how he uses it, but they are also about the patients and their expectations and the medical team and the relationship they have with the senior surgeon - the teaching Q and A. He describes the catastrophic results of a brain bleed or a careless cut. He describes risky operations that can only add a few weeks or months to patients lives, because brain tumours grow back.

In this book we understand that Marsh is highly skilled and has a good reputation, but he also tells us that he has wrecked people, who remain alive in a vegatative state. Knowing this must be terrible, and he prefers not to remember and yet he writes it. Which is brave and remarkable.

He is very critical of the modern NHS which is run by managers who are quite blind to the ridiculous things they do - like sending Henry Marsh on a course to learn what empathy means. (He also had to learn about fire extinguishers, which just might be important one day). A hospital protocol on dress instructs him to remove his watch and tie, although there is no evidence that wearing these items spreads infection. It is simply undressing those self-important doctors, isn't it, to make them kowtow to the management! Because doctors used to run hospitals, and that was probably better. Now they still have a load of paperwork but probably just an audit trail. Like teachers. 


(I met a teacher at a party the other day who complained about getting all the students to write what they had done in the lesson that day and date and sign it - the dreaded diary page. We had to stop the lesson early to do that.  This teacher (also in adult ed) said she had got her students to fill the whole thing in on day one. All twelve entries, pre-signed and dated, saving time to actually teach them in the lessons thereafter. She left adult education and set up privately as the whole thing was ridiculous.)

When the doctors and nurses ran the hospitals they knew the patients on their wards. Now, it seems, the surgeon simply doesn't know where his patients are and has to go from ward to ward tracking them down. The problem is the lack of beds but the truth is that we need a huge number of beds - almost an infinity of beds because every damn person is ill with something or other* and we are all going to die. Tackling the NHS is difficult - I would start reducing the number of operations and procedures carried out on old people and I know that's controversial, but hey, we need to do that. We also ought to allow assisted dying. I digress - these are my opinions not his.

Marsh also questions how greed drives some consultants to carry out unnecessary private operations. Yet the biggest questions he raises are whether we need to perform many treatments that keep people alive, especially when it is just for a few miserable months or with extreme brain damage. He shows operations can take place because doctors and families are afraid to confront reality or hold painful discussions, and says what may seem a “successful” operation can look more like “a human disaster” several years down the line.

Henry Marsh is horribly honest about his bad temper and nasty hissy fits. He almost dares us to like him. OK, I don't like him, but I can see why he has to be that way. What he does is extraordinary. 

And Marsh, at the apotheosis of his career, writes in Admissions: “Each time I scrub up, I am frightened. Why am I continuing to inflict this on myself, when I know I can abandon neurosurgery at any time? Part of me wants to run away, but I scrub up nonetheless … I sit on a stool and lean the back of my head against the wall. I keep my gloved hands in front of my chest with palms pressed together, as though I were praying – the pose of the surgeon, waiting to operate.” Despite the astonishing, near-unimaginable nature of their job, there is evidence from the books they are now writing that surgeons experience – as the glittering career progresses and the life-prolonging operations mount up – a growing sense of humility, a particular amalgam of wonder at what they do and modesty about their achievements.

There, it is hard and frightening but he does it. And he doesn't want to stop.

*I am not ill. However, today I realised that I have recently lost my sense of smell. I couldn't even smell the Jeyes fluid I used on the plant pots today. I could sense it in the back of my throat, only. I couldn't smell roses, lavender, mint or basil. Such lovely smells! Why has it gone?

The Prometheans by Max Adams

The book is about two generations who made a huge impact on Britain. Max Adams calls them "Prometheans" on the grounds that they stole the future from the gods, as Prometheus stole fire from the gods. That's as far as the analogy goes - the men of the early 18th C were not punished for their presumptions. Both the Stephensons were remarkably gifted, so were Humphrey Davy and Michael Faraday. So were both the Brunels, although the father had the edge as he was a true visionary. Charles Babbage was a visionary too, (he is mainly famous for inventing the "difference engine" or mechanical calculator), and wrote about how industry is organised and managed, and was sociable as well as inventive. John Martin, the massively talented painter of enormous dramatic scenes, wanted to join the practical activities of the scientific community with which he mixed by improving the drains and taking away the dreadful sewage of London, and even envisaged the Underground railway (circle line). 

One of the threads of this history is a biography of the Martin brothers, of whom the youngest, John, was (as mentioned above) a painter of apocalyptic landscapes of the early nineteenth century. Some of his works can be seen in the Tate gallery and they are still thrilling to look at, with lightning, explosions, fires and huge mountains! You can buy reproductions of them at All posters and Wayfair; so I suppose he is still popular although you would need to buy a really large poster to get the full effect of his works.

Like the German Caspar Friedrich, he painted marvellous scenes of nature, but man's place amongst it is not contemplative or inspired, but afraid, or awed, and helpless. His scenes have inspired the apocalyptic effects in a number of films. He came from a poor Northern background (the same town as my mother; I wish I had told her that when we first saw his pictures in the Tate) and his mother held frightening religious beliefs, which particularly affected his brother Jonathan, who was on the edge of crazy all his life.

Whether Martin was a millenarian or not is still the subject of dispute. Certainly his eccentric brothers – collectively known as the “Mad Martins” – were, and indeed his older brother Jonathan was also genuinely mad, setting fire to York Minster and subsequently being institutionalised in St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics. Ruthven Todd, Martin’s biographer, unearthed an advertisement from 1848 for a book on the British Israelites (a fringe group of millenarians) “with designs by John Martin”, though neither the book nor any other link has been found. On the other hand, Martin’s friend Ralph Thomas described him as a “thorough Deist” – that is someone who saw proof of God’s existence not in scripture, but in the marvellous workings of the natural world. Martin also devoted the majority of the last two decades of his life to schemes for the betterment of London, particularly its smelly and polluted river;  he made no connection in these projects to his own religious beliefs. Nor, apparently, did he disapprove of London’s industrial modernity, but thought it “the most wealthy, civilised, and enterprising city in the world”.

Whatever Martin’s private convictions – or lack of them – there was undoubtedly something in the air. Random occurrences took on portentous significance. When, in 1815, a giant volcano erupted in Indonesia, the dust cloud obliterated the following year’s entire summer, and street hawkers sold pamphlets announcing the death of the sun. Percy Bysshe Shelley and his teenage mistress Mary fled London for Geneva where they stayed with Byron (much of Mary’s novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was written there). Also, in 1816, Martin exhibited Joshua commanding the sun to stand still upon Gibeon at the Royal Academy. Although received dubiously by the Academy’s members, the painting was a hit among the viewing public, perhaps because its depiction of the prophet, marshalling with raised arms the elemental forces that swirled about him, was a tonic for the helplessness most people felt at the time. Martin became renowned for giving his public what they wanted, and was often derided because of it. He was an accomplished printmaker, and his affordable mezzotints hung in homes all around the world. But he was never elected as a Royal Academician, and was condescended to by the artistic establishment. (John Constable called him a “painter of pantomimes”.) By and large, he rose above such sneers. There is evidence, however, that the ambitious working-class artist was conflicted about his social standing: some, such as the painter Charles Leslie whom Martin once embarrassed at a concert by hissing throughout the National Anthem, saw him as something of a radical. This was despite Martin’s close friendship with Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and even Prince Albert, whom he reportedly received at his house in dressing gown and slippers.

Have to interrupt here and say Martin probably didn't want to sing "God save the King" because there was nothing good to say about George IV, who was vain and silly, but the  Saxe-Coburg-Gothas mentioned were men of sense. Prince Leopold was planted on the throne of Belgium and made a success of it.

Part of his popularity might be attributed to his skill at sanitising the decadent and raw products of Romantic culture. He absorbed Edmund Burke’s theory of the Sublime – that sensation of delightful terror elicited by vast, rugged vistas – and tailored it for mainstream tastes. J.M.W. Turner, fourteen years Martin’s senior and an acquaintance, though hardly a friend, achieved the critical recognition that the younger artist craved. The two men were markedly different: Martin was, by all accounts, a charismatic conversationalist and a snappy dresser; the reclusive Turner, according to Martin’s son Leopold, was “untidy; a sloven and unwashed”. 

 http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/aaaargh

Another of John Martin's brother's was called William, and he was an inventor, but being a dfficult character he never received credit for any of his inventions, although one was a miners' safety lamp much better than Davy's. 

In London, John Martin and his wife Susan made friends with all the notable scientists of the time: Humphrey Davy, Michael Faraday, Wollaston, Babbage, and Marc Brunel, Isambard's father. Charles Wheatstone, who eventually invented the electric telegraph (but not Morse code) was one of the friends. I don't know if they knew other notable engineers, for example, John Rennie. They held parties and loved conversation, chess and cards. 

Here I am, thinking still about the Brunels and the tunnel under the Thames. In the National Archives at Kew I found the responses to Isambard's invitation to dinner in the tunnel in November 1827. It must have been cold! Oh well, perhaps they all had woolly underwear and good coats on. Amongst those who wrote apologies were Michael Faraday and John Martin. Faraday said he was away and never got the invitation but he would have loved to have gone. Martin said a friend arrived and he couldn't come. I should have got those letters copied because it's remarkable to see the writing. Strange to think that Brunel kept those letters somewhere in his files all his life. The occasion was his first formal dinner, and the friends he invited included these notables. He was delighted that Admiral Codrington's son - also a naval officer - accepted his invitation. Isambard had a bit of a crush on the navy, although when you think of the size and the importance of the navy at that time, perhaps that's the wrong way of describing it. Isambard was impressed by the navy. That's better. 

Other Prometheans whose activities are described are Shelley, Caroline Norton, William Godwin, (Shelley's father-in-law), Henry Brougham and the Hunts - political radicals who spoke in favour of universal manhood suffrage - these were also John Martin's politics. Marc Brunel, for one, would not have agreed with this radical stance in politics, as he had a fear of mob violence that came from his experience of the French revolution. Isambard was instrumental in putting down the Bristol riots of 1831 - he had himself enrolled as a temporary constable.

The trouble is, none of these people considered themselves Promethean, this is a theme that the author has hit upon, and the book becomes somewhat ridiculous when the author suggests that Prometheanism was a conscious choice or even a religious sect. Adams tells the story of the Swing Riots of 1830 thus:

 "At the end of August threshing machines, always seen as a threat to employment in the southern counties, began to be destroyed. It was the start of what became known as the Swing Riots, a wave of incendiary attacks and riots across southern England lasting almost until the end of the year, in which the burning of hayricks was an iconic feature. [what does iconic mean in that sentence?] The unrest led to 19 hangings, more than six hundred gaol terms and five hundred sentences of transportation. The use of arson as a weapon of protest, symbolic of revenge, destruction and cleansing, had been psychotically perfected by Jonathan Martin. [i.e. when he set York Minster on fire. Arson, apparently, is a crime than can be perfected, psychotically.] Its deliberate employment to terrorize the government  during the Swing uprising seemed now to fulfil Mary Wollstonecraft's dire prediction of the potential evils of the Promethean myth." [I think he is talking about Frankenstein's monster in the book by Mary Shelley]. 

Then "The opening of 15 September 1830 of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was an event almost impossibly overloaded with symbolism." 

This grand opening was marred by the awful accident of Huskisson being knocked down by the Rocket, his leg severed, and dying of the injuries. What does Huskisson symbolise in that scene? The Rocket might symbolise the future power of the common man (having the freedom to travel further) and Huskisson a privileged and landed Tory, but that is rather complicated because Huskisson was on the more progressive wing of the Tory party and was in favour of Free Trade - which theoretically made food cheaper. The political power of his class wasn't knocked down by democratic forces until the next century.


Isn't this a peculiar way of writing history? It sounds as though Wellington might have remarked to George Stephenson, "I say, my man, there's too much symbolism in the air today!" and Stephenson might have said, "Aye, right enough bonnie lad. There's that mooch meaning in ut steam engine as ud turn us all into representations of oor classes."


There were amazing changes going on at that time, in science, art and politics, however, by lumping a load of different men of talent together and labelling them Promethean merely makes the story more dramatic.

"The perfection of his usefulness" - how beautiful

However, the science is well-explained by Max Adams, I think.

Eddie Izzard autobiography

I read this some time ago. But I didn't write it up because ... I think I found it very moving. I felt there was a message in it for me. 

Eddie's mother died when he was very young, which was very hard on him, and he and his brother were sent to boarding school, which was possibly very difficult at the time but also perhaps quite a blessing. I think it was harder when his father started a relationship with Kate. 

Initially, having a new stepmother who wanted things done her way was horrible and I did a lot of disagreeing. As a teenager, it certainly was not easy to follow new sets of rules, especially during holidays when my brother and I came home from school for our breaks. Dad would be at work and we would be at home, all trying to get along.

During my brother's eighteenth birthday, Kate said roughly this to us: "You've got to understand that you are a cog in the machine. As soon as you understand that, you can fit in and get on with life."

Now, that is an opinion, but there is no way that I agree with it. You could argue that some people in life end up being cogs in the machine, but I would wish them not to feel like that and not to have to live thinking that way. Lots of people work for companies, and I suppose if you are in a company, you are part of a machine. Maybe that's what she was talking about. But I was of the opinion that you should never feel like just a cog in a machine, you should always go for your dreams.

I would have said that even if I were a cog in the machine, I would like to see myself as a cog who is shooting for the stars and could go into any machine I want to and become a bigger cog or a cog shaped like a different cog. I would redefine the whole cog argument, that's what I'd do...

Kate wanted me to be an accountant. When I dropped out of university, she felt I should repay my father the money he'd spent on my education. You can see the logic behind this: so many parents tell their children, "Get a proper job, have a backup career, become an accountant, do something professional. It's too difficult being actor, or a performer, or a musician." But as I hadn't asked to go to a boarding school in the first place, I felt different.

I have a real fellow-feeling here because my father, at one time, seemed to ask that I repay him for the school fees that he paid for my junior school, which is really ridiculous.  But he thought that anyone who loved him should give him money. He had always asked his mother for money and she had nearly always come good.  But after he left us he couldn't manage to send us any money. He hadn't grown up properly. He was irresponsible and had a most convenient memory, that soon forgot how he had left us without a penny. Instead it told him that we had somehow inveigled school fees out of him.

Anyway I have told my son about the cog thing, because he may well become a cog, but I should like him to go for his dreams and I should like him to respect other people who go for their dreams, even if they don't seem to be having much success.

I am going for my dreams but I am also full of self-doubt at present - doubt about my Brunel script, whether the story is strong - like a detective I go in search of the truth, and I find the truth interesting because it is true, but does that mean it is a good story? I can only try to make it fun and interesting and dramatic and hope I have done it. And all writing is re-writing, so I must prepare for a re-write.

People who say Goodbye by P Y Betts, and Hilary Mantel

I was looking for Victorian memoirs and couldn't find any; Perhaps Edwardian memoirs are just more popular? I ordered this one as it said it was funny; I do love a funny book. This one does not disappoint. P. Y. Betts was an indecently intelligent child who never had her originality knocked out of her which is rather surprising, but perhaps this was because her mother was the same. Throughout the book this is the central relationship - mother and daughter sizing each other up through narrowed eyes, and the mother keeping her knives very, very sharp.

Phyllis asks "What happens to you after you die?"
Mother replies "You rot."

We see the neighbourhood of Wandsworth through Phyllis's eyes. How extraordinary; there were fields at the bottom of their garden! It sounds idyllic. But up the road there's a hospital for the war wounded, across the road there's an undertaker and regular funerals, close by there's a lunatic asylum (with joyful loonies). There are sudden attacks of possibly fatal illness, an incompetent doctor, but also some relatives who are made of very stern stuff and seem capable of living for ever. I wish Phyllis had written more.

Another review here

I have also just read Hilary Mantel's book "Giving up the Ghost" which is also a memoir but poles apart in a way. Hilary was also a clever and spirited girl, who would have liked to have been a boy, and enjoyed her grandfather's company. Her parents' troubled marriage is sensed and not explained to the child. Really, their lack of explanations is everything that's wrong with being a child. Then her school is the most backward type of provincial Catholic school which at times employed cruel and stupid teachers. I too, went to a convent school, and was so much luckier because I loved and respected my nuns, which is terribly unfashionable to say these days. Some of them were, I think, thoughtful and disciplined in a good way. Hilary concludes that being a child didn't suit her personality, and I think, yes, I understand, I was rather similar, and as I grew older I grew more able to draw the lines under and move on, which is what Hilary does. But Hilary has a medical condition which must have been such a terrible drawback to her life, as to say, my life is fine, I have a good brain and a strong spirit but I AM IN TERRIBLE PAIN IN ALL MY BODY except, she says, her ankles and feet. She even has to diagnose her own condition. She seems not to meet a single intelligent doctor, or even a concerned and caring one. The insensitivity she encounters in the medical profession is pretty appalling.

I can say that doctors have improved, even in women's medicine, and I am pretty sure that teachers have improved and are no longer allowed to do the stupid things they used to do. Although, when my neighbour was a teaching assistant, she used to tell me about young teachers who would stand up and gabble at the children without pause, not realising that the children had withdrawn their attention after the first couple of incomprehensible sentences. Young people, pah. (I don't mean this, some of you are great, but listen to yourselves!)

Hilary's book is far more ambitious, in a literary sense, she knows how to create effects that will intrigue a reader. There is a strange intuition that I get from reading Mantel's work that she thinks she knows better than we do - your "mother" is feeding you the ideas/information she thinks are suitable for you, carefully knitted into a shape which she thinks is suitable for you. PY Betts has also shaped her information into a story, but she hasn't made it to suit anyone but herself or used fancy stitches that show her knitting skills; it's just what it is, funny and sharp, and smack, there you are. They are both well worth reading. 5 stars.