Monthly Archives: January 2011

South Riding by Winifred Holtby

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South Riding cover

I have to say a big thank you to Virago for sending me a copy of this book. I did read it years and years ago, not long after reading Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth in which Winifred was mentioned as being a great friend of Vera and a very good writer. I intend to re-read it at some point soonish and post a review because I did really enjoy it the first time round.

The new Virago publication has a lovely cover, it’s a Yorkshire Dales British Railways poster and they’re always so stylish and redolent of the 1930s. Shirley Williams (Vera Brittain’s daughter) has written the preface.

Apparently Andrew Davies has done a new dramatization of it for the BBC starring David Morrissey and Anna Maxwell Martin, so that’s something to look forward to.

Again thanks to Virago for the unexpected copy.

Lamingtons

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Nutters – please be aware that this recipe contains nuts!

Back in the dim distant past when Kylie was in Neighbours and I saw it because it was on just before the evening news, the folks in the cafe always seemed to be scoffing Madge’s Lamingtons. I always wondered what on earth they were, never having heard of them before. Some sort of Australian delicacy I supposed. In fact, because of the strong Australian accents I thought it was something to do with lemons!

But I bought an old copy of Marguerite Patten’s Every Day Cook Book recently, I only had her All Colour Cookery book, my husband’s first present to me!! – and – jings, crivens and help ma Boab – there’s a recipe for Lamingtons in it, so I just had to try it out, they’re very tasty and here they are.

5 oz butter or marg.
7 oz sugar
3 eggs
10 oz self-raising flour
4 tablespoons milk

For the filling:
raspberry jam

To coat:
7 oz icing sugar
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
3 tablespoons boiling water

To decorate:
6 oz dessicated coconut

Cream the butter and sugar. Add the eggs gradually. Mix in the flour alternately with the milk. Spread the mixture into a greased 8-inch square cake tin and bake for 50 – 60 minutes at Gas mark 4/350-375 F.

Leave it to cool on a wire rack and then split it through the middle and spread the raspberry jam on the bottom layer. Sandwich the layers together, then cut the cake into 2 inch squares, you should be able to get 16 pieces.

Put the icing sugar and cocoa into a bowl and add the boiling water slowly. Mix to a smooth paste adding more water if it is too thick. To stop the icing from setting too quickly place the bowl over a pan of hot water.

One by one dip the squares into the icing letting any excess drip off before tossing them in the dessicated coconut. Allow to set before scoffing.

The recipe says you should put the squares on a fork or a skewer before dipping in the icing but I couldn’t get them to stay on so I ended up getting my fingers very messy! Finger sucking good though. (Be careful how you say that!)

For a richer flavour you might like to add a few drops of vanilla extract to the sponge mixture.

BTW it’s a very good cookery book.

The Tiger in the Smoke by Margery Allingham

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The Tiger in the Smoke features Margery Allingham’s detective Albert Campion. Published in 1952 Campion is now married to a red-head, Amanda, and she seems to have managed to improve him no end. He’s middle-aged now and isn’t as insipid as he was in his earlier years.

Campion’s cousin Meg was widowed at the age of 20 when her husband had been killed in the war. It’s now five years later and Meg has just announced her engagement to Geoffrey Levett, but she has been sent a blurred photograph in the post and it purports to be a recent photo of her supposedly dead husband.

Then Geoffrey disappears and Campion, who isn’t too sure of Geoffrey’s character thinks that he might be involved in the whole thing. But what’s it all about?

Indeed! Read the book, if you’re into vintage crime you’ll really enjoy it. This is the best Margery Allingham book which I’ve read so far, much better than her earlier ones, perfect bedtime or holiday reading.

At 288 pages it seemed to be finished very quickly, this was a bit of a filler and doesn’t feature in my 2011 reading list. Now it’s time to start The Claverings – which is on the list.

South Bridge, Edinburgh, and Books

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It’s been ages since I had a mooch around a bookshop because there wasn’t any point in doing it due to the fact that I’m not supposed to be buying books until I whittle away at my unread book piles. But today, despite the horrible rain we just felt the need to get out of the house for a while and as I have loads of books that I really want to track down I thought – Edinburgh, Perth or St Andrews?

There’s flooding around the Perth area so we thought it best to give that a miss and as the weather forecast said that the rain was going to clear up in the afternoon around the Edinburgh area – we plumped for capital punishment!

The forecast was wrong and it rained all day plus it was very windy so we were buffeted going over the Forth Road Bridge – not nice. We decided to go to the South Bridge area for a change instead of our usual Stockbridge haunts. It wasn’t very successful, we must have been in about 7 book shops and charity shops and my haul was:

Behold, Here’s Poison – Georgette Heyer.
Duplicate Death – Georgette Heyer.
The Empty House – Rosamunde Pilcher.
Can You Forgive Her? – Anthony Trollope.

and my husband bought :
Ordinary Thunderstorms – William Boyd.

I’d been looking for Can You Forgive Her? because I wanted to read The Palliser series, and I thought that I’d better buy the Heyers in case I don’t see them again for ages. I really like Heyer’s detective novels because they’re very witty too, quite an unusual combination I think, and I’m on a Rosamunde Pilcher kick at the moment, this one is very short at only 182 pages, very unusual for her.

I was looking for books by Angela Thirkell, D.E. Stevenson, Janet Sandison, E.M. Delafield, Jane Duncan – all very retro but I haven’t read them before and much to my amazement they are being read now, I have to see what I’ve been missing!

Now that I’ve tried the shops and been unsuccessful I can order some on-line with an unblemished conscience because I always like to give my custom to small bookshops when I can. Plus it’s nice to have a poke around lots of books but none of the Edinburgh shops are anything like as good or crazy as Voltaire and Rousseau in Glasgow. It looks like you couldn’t possibly find anything you want amongst the piles, but I always do. Must get back there again soon.

After parking the car we had to walk past this hairdresser’s to get to the bookshops today. This place intrigues me because it’s such a throw-back to the 50s. It looks like nothing has ever been changed since then and I’ve never seen it open. What sort of hairdresser is closed on a Saturday afternoon? I know that you always think of Edinburgh for history and Glasgow for style, but I think they’ve taken this a bit far here. Who would use a place like this?

For all I know it might be a fantastic resource for the ladies of Edinburgh of a certain type. Stout tweed skirts, Fair-Isle jumpers and Lisle stockings. Not forgetting the blue rinses.

Anyone for a shampoo and set?!

Coming Home by Rosamunde Pilcher

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School for Love cover

It’s week 2 of the year so this is the second book which I’ve read from Katrina’s 2011 Reading List. It’s quite a chunkster at 785 pages and I was a bit worried that I wouldn’t get through it within the week but the dreich, freezing fog of yesterday meant that I spent a lot of the day reading, much longer than I had meant to actually.

Rosamunde Pilcher has set this book in her native Cornwall, although she has lived in Scotland for most of her life, since marrying a Scottish soldier at the end of World War II.

Anyway, I did enjoy this book, although I think that her book September is still my favourite one so far. Coming Home has such a lot going for it though. Ever since reading Rebecca in the year dot I’ve had a soft spot for books set in Cornwall.There’s also a sort of crazy comfort zone about books set during World War II for people brought up on stories told by parents with first hand experience of that time. Beginning in 1935 it’s the story of 14 year old Judith who is being left behind at a new boarding school as her mother is returning to Colombo to be with her husband and takes Jess, Judith’s 4 year old sister with her.

Aunt Louise has been given the job of looking after Judith during any school holidays but things don’t go to plan and it’s the Carey-Lewis’s of Nancherrow who become Judith’s surrogate family and her whole future is wrapped up with them and the people that she meets through them.

There are lots of familiar themes as Britain is at war and Pilcher goes into great detail about the rationing and wartime life which if you are about my age you will already have heard about from your parents. But there were things in it which were so familiar, like the smiling Border collie which sounded exactly like the one that I had in my childhood, except that our Candy actually laughed, truly!

In another part a merchant ship has a refit in the Brooklyn refit yard, New York. The same thing happened to my dad when he was in the Merchant Navy in the Atlantic Convoys during the war and he spent a wonderful 6 months in peacetime New York, having a good rest from being torpedoed by the Nazis. Well, it was a refit in New York, maybe not that specific yard. We even have a Dunkirk survivor and a Japanese POW camp survivor in the family just as in the book.

What we didn’t have though is the lovely Cornish house, Nancherrow, which is such an important character in the book, just like Rebecca’s Manderlay – which is acknowledged. But houses and the land in general play a large part in the story, which I think is the mark of Celtic literature.

There is a well flagged up incident in a cinema of the ‘something nasty in the woodshed variety’ and having led a sheltered life I have had no such experience. I’d like to think that if some dirty old man tried to take liberties with me I would have had the wit to bat his hand away and stand up shouting a rat has landed on my knee with the usherette’s torch trained on the assaillant I think it would have been obvious what had happened. I like to think that anyway but maybe I would have been frozen too.

So, I would recommend this one as a good read. However, I do think that it was written with an eye on it being made into a film – which I think it was, but I haven’t seen it. There is too much detail in it with not a lot of space left for the reader’s imagination as there is a lot of what I would regard as stage direction with a character’s every movement described.

On a really personal note, I couldn’t help noticing that every time a character wept – there is quite a lot of weeping – it was swiftly followed by them ‘lustily’ blowing their nose, and often not into a hanky. Once it was a towel, a sheet, a shirt tail and even curtains were considered but rejected, thankfully. Possibly nobody else would notice this, but as I waited nearly 10 years after getting married before starting a family and one of the reasons that I put it off so long was the fact that I can’t stand snotty nosed children, you’ll realise that I prefer a snot free zone. Thankfully my kids rarely had that problem or I might have had to take them back to the shop!

A good read, especially if you enjoy long books.

Mary Stewart / Arthurian trilogy

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I found myself in possession of a few small but sturdy boxes recently. Ideal for packing books in I thought because as you well know, bigger boxes are useless for books because they quickly become too heavy to budge.

So I decided to pack some books away in them and started having a rake around bookcases where I have books ‘double parked’ on wide shelves. I had thought that I could take the opportunity to weed out unwanted books to pass on to a charity shop. Some hope!

I think I must have already parted with everything which I’ve read and didn’t want to keep. I couldn’t even part with my old Penguin Classic books, Bronte, Hardy, Eliot and such, most of which I bought when I was about 13 or 14. Since then I’ve inherited lovely old editions of a lot of them, but I had an inkling that charity shops don’t cherish classics, preferring to have best sellers donated to them. So I thought my old books probably wouldn’t be given good homes and decided to keep them.

But I did unearth my copies of the Arthurian trilogy by Mary Stewart –

The Crystal Cave
The Hollow Hills
The Last Enchantment

I remember that I really enjoyed reading those books and others by her way back in the 1970s, I think they’re due a re-read by me. They set me off on an Arthurian phase and I went on to read and enjoy The Once and Future King by T.H. White and being keen on Mark Twain I just had to read A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur, both of which I still have.

I can’t think what else I read though so I suppose I must have got others from the library.

If you’re interested you can read an interview here in which Mary Stewart answers questions about the trilogy.

Although Mary Stewart was born in the north of England, she married a Scot and has lived most of her life in Scotland so I think she can be regarded as a Scottish author.

Hard Winters, the Tories and Narnia

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I bet you don’t think that the three things in the title have anything in common, but they do, well I think they do.

I caught the back end of one of the Narnia episodes which were on TV during the Christmas holidays, it was the wicked queen doing her stuff. We used to be steeped in Narnia here as Gordon my youngest son was obsessed with the books and videos at one point. It always reminded me of the winters of 1979/80/81 which were terribly cold, worse than anything that I had ever experienced before.

When we moved down to Essex the diesel in the removal lorry’s tank froze and the men had to light a fire underneath it to thaw it out, scary stuff. This all coincided with the Conservative party getting into power – in the shape of the dreaded and evil Maggie Thatcher. So you can see why she reminds me of the wicked witch – and vice versa. Evil was stalking the land and so freezing cold winters came along to torment us, just as in Narnia when evil had the upper-hand.

So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that the same thing has happened again as we now have the self-confessed ‘sons of Margaret Thatcher’ at the helm. As before, the freezing winter came just before the Tories got into power, when evil was gaining strength. I predict that as we are in the middle of our second freezing winter on the trot, we’ll probably have another one next year too. I blame all those Old Etonian millionaires. But I’m also reminded of Tom Brown’s Schooldays by Thomas Hughes. Prime Minister Cameron and all his Old Etonian pals in the Cabinet are just exactly like the dastardly Flashman and his chums, except that was set at Rugby. I suppose one English public school bunch is much the same as another.

When J.M. Barrie decided to make his Peter Pan character Captain Hook an evil Old Etonian he obviously knew exactly what he was doing. But I cheer myself up by remembering what was in store for Captain Hook!

TICK TOCK TICK TOCK TICK TOCK

Scottish words: clishmaclaver/having a hing

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Clishmaclaver apparently means ‘gossip’ and I came across this word on the internet quite recently. Despite the fact that I’ve lived in various different parts of Scotland all of my life (apart from a couple of years in the wilds of Essex many moons ago), I’d never come across the word clishmaclaver.

Mind you – it doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue. I can’t imagine anyone saying: “Come away in for a clishmaclaver.”

In the tenement buildings in Glasgow years ago women used to ‘have a hing’. They would push the bottom window of the sash windows up if they saw a friend outside, then lean their arms on the windowsill, rest their bosoms on their arms and have a good gossip, leaning out of the window.

I don’t think the gossip was ever of the nasty sort, more just a way of catching up with other peoples’ family news – and who has died recently!

Women always seemed to be worried about their children and the phrase that you often heard then was ‘ma herts roasted’ and my hearts roasted is what a mother said when she was worried sick about one of her children. Does anyone still have a roasted heart? I haven’t heard that phrase for years.

Lulu lived just around the corner from us in Glasgow and she was in my older sister’s class at school and even after we moved from Glasgow to ‘the country’ we often bumped into Lulu’s mum in our many homesick sojourns to the city. I’m 11 years younger than my sister Helen and Lulu so it always amazed me as a youngster that Lulu’s mum was always ‘that worried about my Marie’. Why was she worried? Well, she was married to a Bee Gee at about that time I think and I suppose that could be a bit of a worry.

Anyway, I’ve wandered quite a bit from clishmaclaver to Lulu but I thought I would add this video of her when she was still about 15 or 16 and singing Shout, which kicked off her career.

Statistics

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I used to work in an Information and Statistics department in the National Health Service,so I’m well aware that things are often very different from what they would first appear.

Which would explain why the Scottish Government is claiming that the influenza rates are much lower than they were at this time last year. The young people in my own family have been hit badly by the flu this year, from my sister’s grandchildren aged 8 and 10 to my own sons who were ill at Christmas and they are in their 20s. As none of the older folks have succumbed we’re presuming that it is the swine flu.

Duncan got it really badly and by Hogmanay most of his friends had it too. They crawled out of their beds to celebrate the New Year at ‘the bells’ but they didn’t have any energy and Duncan ended up coming home not long afterwards, clutching a bit of coal to bring us good luck for the coming year.

Due to the fact that it all happened over the Christmas period nobody has been to see a doctor, so they won’t appear in any statistics. It can take two weeks to get an appointment anyway, unless they think that you might die, so people tend just to stay at home and cosset themselves until they feel better.

So unless Fife has been more badly hit than the rest of Scotland I think we can take the statistics with a pinch of salt.

I’m also annoyed by the weather statistics because the weather people keep telling us that it should be about 2 or 3 Celsius here but my garden is telling me something very different. It’s still frozen solid and it has been like that since November. It was -12 C in Dunfermline during the day not long ago but according to the weather report it wasn’t anything like that cold.

Apparently it was the coldest December in Scotland since records began 100 years ago. I definitely believe that statistic!

The Power House by John Buchan

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It’s week one of the year and what with having been behind schedule with War and Peace I was a wee bit worried that I wouldn’t be able to complete a book from my 2011 Reading List, but I managed. Well it helped that I chose a really short book to read, The Power House is just 130 pages long. First published in 1916 this is another of the many thrillers that John Buchan seems to have written for relaxation purposes and a bit of a hobby, given that he had a very high-flying career as a diplomat and ended up being given a baronetcy.

The story is set in London and Mr Leithen (I don’t think we ever find out his first name) is a Member of Parliament. He was elected in a by-election in which he was supposed to be a forlorn hope and he is still working as a criminal lawyer part-time. Leithen discovers that one of his old friends, Pitt-Heron who happens to be very wealthy, has got mixed up with a lot of strange foreign people and what had been the billiard room in his house has been turned into a laboratory.

When Pitt-Heron bolts suddenly with a large amount of gold which he has taken from his bank, his wife Ethel is at her wits’ end and Leithen and his friend Tommy try to track her husband down for her.

Buchan obviously had a thing about being hunted down because so far every book of his which I’ve read has involved a man-hunt. This one has Leithen being chased across London with people at every turn intent on grabbing him with a view to ‘doing him in’.

This book wasn’t nearly as good as Greenmantle or even The Thirty-Nine Steps, Huntingtower, or Salute to Adventurers but it’s still worthwhile reading if you’re into classic thrillers.

John Buchan was yet another local lad, having been brought up in Kirkcaldy where his father was a minister in a church near where I live. After leaving school he went to The University of Glasgow to study Classics and went from there to Oxford.

He had a very distinguished career and became Governor General of Canada in 1935. Topically, considering that the film The King’s Speech is just about to be released, John Buchan told the British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and Buckingham Palace that the people of Canada would be outraged if Edward VIII married Wallis Simpson.

He was given a baronetcy in 1935 and became Lord Tweedsmuir.

I’m running out of Buchan books to read, the only one I have unread is Witch Wood.