Priorsford by O. Douglas (Anna Buchan)

17 February 2012 23:31

Priorsford is a sequel to Penny Plain which you can read about here. It was published ten years after Penny Plain and the story has moved on just about the same amount of time. Jean now has three children and is living in England at her husband’s estate. It’s years since she has been to visit the folks back in Priorsford (Peebles) in Scotland so when her husband has to go away for the winter with a friend who is very ill, she takes the chance to move her family back to where she grew up so that she can catch up with all her old friends and neighbours. Mrs. Duff Whalley thinks the worst, of course, as that type always does.

I think I enjoyed this one more than Penny Plain which was a wee bit too preachy in parts for my liking. This is an enjoyable comfort read but there are plenty of mentions of the hard times which so many people were experiencing in the 1930s. The problems were all so similar to what’s going on today and I briefly thought to myself that we’ve always had periods of unemployment and poverty – and then I remembered what it was that got us out of the 1930s depression – war! They’re going to have to come up with a better solution this time around!

This excerpt is towards the end of the book when Jock is complaining about his office job:

‘It’s a good opening,’ Betty reminded him. ‘Just think how many there are who would be thankful for it.’

‘Oh, I know,’ Jock agreed. ‘There are dozens of men who were with me at Oxford, most of them better scholars, all of them quicker in the uptake, and they simply can’t get a bally thing to do. And people rave about the youth of our country having lost the spirit of adventure, and asking why they don’t go to the Colonies and carve out careers for themselves. But these men have little or no capital, and the Colonies don’t want them.’

As you can see, Priorsford is more than a comfort book, it delves into the problems of the day, but the inhabitants of Priorsford are much the same as before so they’re all recognisable ‘types’. Jean as a wife and mother is rivalling the mother in Little House on the Prairie books for being mild mannered and almost saintly, the way she puts up with her husband and family!

I’m looking forward to going to Priorsford (Peebles) soonish and I want to go to where the Laverlaw meets the Tweed, local legend has it that Merlin is buried there! Have you heard about that Evee, and did you ever discover the location of The Riggs?

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The Pirate by Sir Walter Scott

4 February 2012 00:10

November's Autumn

I read The Pirate as part of the November’s Autumn classic challenge.
All the nice girls love a sailor, so THEY say – but what sort of girls like a pirate? My sort of course, I’ve always had a bit of a yen for the pirate type, in fiction anyway, which is why I opted to read this book. I can’t even read the word pirate without saying – aarrr Jim lad to myself, that’s Long John Silver of Treasure Island fame of course.

As I said previously this book was a very slow starter and I kept wondering when there would ever be some pirate action. It didn’t come until about two thirds of the way through the book. I was reminded of a heart monitor because The Pirate is very wordy and Scott does quite a lot of rambling for no good reason really, so it sort of flatlines and then there’s the odd spike of interest or excitement. But those bits are good and in the end I was glad that I hadn’t given up on it.

The action is set on Zetland, which is what we call Shetland nowadays, a group of islands off the north coast of Scotland. Mordaunt Mertoun is a young man who has never known his mother and has been brought up by a very cold and unloving father. When Mordaunt sees a ship being wrecked on the rocks near his home he has to save a sailor who is in danger of drowning, despite the fact that the Zetlanders don’t approve of such actions. In a harsh landscape where scavenging for goods from wrecked ships helps the islanders to survive, so they don’t want the complications which shipwreck survivors bring.

The survivor is a young man called Clement Cleveland and as predicted by the Zetlanders he brings no good to Mordaunt, in fact Cleveland turns Mordaunt’s friends and neighbours against him, particularly the sisters Brenda and Minna.

It’s a long book and I’m not going to say much more about the storyline but I have to say that although it dragged along slowly at times I did enjoy the atmosphere and descriptions of Shetland and later Orkney. The story is set not all that long after Shetland became part of Scotland, you might not know that up until the 15th century Shetland was part of Norway but it was given to Scotland as part of a dowry payment from King Christian of Norway on his daughter’s marriage. So there was a big Scandinavian influence and at the time The Pirate is set the islanders see the Scots as foreigners.

Walter Scott has woven Norse mythological tales into the storyline with the result that I want to read more about them, so that’s a plus point I think. I especially liked the character of Norna of Fitful Head who is a sort of white witch/soothsayer and makes a good living selling fair winds to fishermen and sailors, what a great idea! The population is generally wary of her and wants to keep in her good books.

Fitful Head is an actual place and you can see some wonderful images of it here and here.

So as I said before, reading The Pirate was a bit like wading through porridge at times, without the benefit of sugar or syrup but on balance it was worth it, if only to find out about Fitful Head, it might be added to our places to visit list!

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Beatrice Goes To Brighton by M.C. Beaton

27 January 2012 13:36

I had no idea that M.C. Beaton was a Scot, never mind a fellow Glaswegian until very recently, about five minutes ago actually. I haven’t even seen Hamish McBeth on TV, she wrote those books too. I’ve been meaning to start reading her Agatha Raisin/crime series but I want to start it from the beginning and I haven’t got a hold of the first one yet. So when I saw Beatrice Goes To Brighton in the library I thought I might as well give it a go, even although romance is not my favourite thing.

If you’re looking for holiday/bedtime reading or just something which you don’t have to concentrate on too much then this is the perfect choice. Good light reading and a bit of a laugh now and again. The funniest bits for me were when the characters get all romantic – a la Mills and Boon, it reminded me of when I used to work in a library and to cheer ourselves up in the morning, just before we unlocked the door to let in the public, we used to take turns at opening a Mills and Boon and reading the very last page out loud – in a very plummy voice. Such fun!

In this one Miss Pym, who has had some success as a romantic matchmaker in the past is travelling to Brighton by stage-coach and comes into contact with the 28 year old Lady Beatrice who has recently become a widow, much to her relief. Beatrice had been married off to an older man who was a gambler and boozer, unfortunately it took him 10 years to slowly drink himself to death, by which time he had gone through most of his money.

It wasn’t long before Beatrice’s parents were trying to marry her off again to the ghastly Sir Geoffrey. Can Miss Pym help Beatrice?

Thanks again to Jo at The Book Jotter for pointing me in M.C. Beaton’s direction.

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Bertie Plays the Blues by Alexander McCall Smith

24 November 2011 00:06

In this book poor wee Bertie makes a break for freedom by putting himself up for adoption on eBay and when that doesn’t work he tries to get to Glasgow to find an adoption agency. Bertie has always wanted to live in Glasgow, unknown to him his father, Stuart has the very same ambition. Poor Bertie has another psychologist and Irene, Bertie’s horrendous mother, is busy psychoanalysing the analyst. Of course it’s Irene who is most in need of being analysed.

Matthew and Elspeth have become shell-shocked parents of triplets, entirely naturally and they aren’t coping too well with it all. This actually isn’t too far fetched because I do know a couple who had one wee boy and when he was about a year old they decided to have another baby which turned out to be triplets, the upshot being that they had four boys under the age of two. Nightmare! I must admit that I’m beginning to get a wee bit fed up with this gormless pair of millionaires though.

Stuart has joined the Freemasons, much against Irene’s wishes and McCall Smith sings the praises of that secret organisation which apparently is mainly for raising money for charity!!

It so happens that I side completely with Irene on the subject of Freemasons (whodathunkit) which is just corruption dressed up as is every secret society. In fact I can get quite a bee in my bonnet about the whole thing because a big part of the reason why the world is in the state that it is is because people get jobs by their ‘connections’ rather than on merit. It leads to people being in top positions who are completely clueless about what they’re meant to be doing. Like all those so-called bankers who messed up everything and didn’t have any banking qualifications at all. Honestly where is the point in people going to university to get qualifications if some idiot can come along with a dodgy handshake and shoot to the top? It’s corruption – plain and simple.

Right – I got that off my chest. Otherwise I enjoyed the book and I’m glad that I’ve caught up with the series. I have hopes for Bertie getting a life of his own – when he’s about 40.

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The Importance of Being Seven by Alexander McCall Smith

20 November 2011 23:45

As you would expect from the title of the book it’s the six year old character Bertie who is concentrated on in this one. The poor wee soul is still very much under the thumb of his mother, the dreadful Irene, although Stuart, Bertie’s father, is pushed around by Irene even more than Bertie is. You just long for Stuart to ‘man up’. Thankfully they get a wee respite from her overbearing bossiness in this book, bliss for both of them!

At one point some of the Scotland Street residents jet off to Italy, including Angus Lordie and his dog Cyril. Some time ago I was asked which fictional dog was my favourite and I couldn’t think of any dogs at all except Nana in Peter Pan, but now I think that Cyril would be my choice as best fictional dog. He’s a great character and what with his ability to wink and being in possession of a gold tooth, he’s what I would call a gallus dog. I’m sure he must have been born in Glasgow, rather than Edinburgh!

As you would expect from this series of books, it’s a quick and enjoyable read, possibly knowing Edinburgh is an advantage. McCall Smith enjoys educating non Scots in Scots words and early on in the book he comes up with: bidey-in, trauchle and various others – and I’m all for spreading the words.

Mind you, I’m beginning to think that he gets a discount at Valvona and Crolla which is a delicatessen/restaurant in Edinburgh. He certainly should get something because he never misses a chance to give them a name check!

In the past I’ve read one of McCall Smith’s Isabel Dalhousie books which was okay-ish but I wouldn’t rush to read another one, but when I was at the library I saw one of the Corduroy Mansion books. Has anybody read any of these ones, if so, what do you think of them?

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Going It Alone by Michael Innes

16 November 2011 23:57

Michael Innes was a Scottish author who also wrote under the name of J.I.M. Stewart, which was his real name but as Going It Alone is a mystery it’s a Michael Innes book. It’s ages since I read any of the Stewart books and I hope to rectify that soon but from memory this book seemed more like those ones than his usual Innes books.

Maybe it was just because the storyline involves a family and there is no detective involved, just an uncle who helps his nephew when he gets mixed up with unsavoury characters which results in attempted murder, blackmail, kidnapping and robbery.

The uncle, Gilbert Averell, isn’t exactly completely innocent himself as he’s living in France as a tax exile from England and has entered Britain using a friend’s passport to avoid having to stump up more cash to the treasury.

It was first published in 1980 and is an enjoyable bit of light reading. Michael Innes had an incredibly long career as an author, over 50 years, and he usually manages to squeeze a bit of humour into his books too.

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The Man in the Queue by Josephine Tey

18 August 2011 22:53

School for Love cover

This book was first published in 1929 and it’s another Inspector Alan Grant mystery. I read Tey’s Daughter of Time recently and I thought that it was really good but I liked this one even more. It just absolutely hit the right spot for me at the moment. It’s also far better than The Franchise Affair which always seems to be the one which people are recommended to read.

It’s set in London to begin with and a man has been knifed in the back whilst he was standing in a theatre queue. There’s such a crush that he is dead for some time before he falls down as the crowd had kept his body upright. Nobody else in the queue had noticed anything unusual and the body has nothing on it which would help to identify it.

Bit by bit Inspector Grant uncovers his identity and the action switches to the Highlands of Scotland and a man-hunt which is every bit as good as any written by John Buchan.

This kept me guessing all the way to the end and I can’t say that about all mysteries. So if you enjoy vintage crime books you should definitely give this one a go.

The only other thing that I have to say is that the word Dago is used prolifically throughout The Man in the Queue – describing a man of dark Mediterranean appearance. In 1929 this was regarded as normal I suppose but its definitely un-PC now. Mind you I did read somewhere that Spanish/Italian people didn’t regard the word Dago as derogatory as it’s a corruption of the name Diego and so as far as they are concerned it’s just the same as being called Jimmy. I don’t know if that’s true or not though.

Josephine Tey was of course a Scottish writer and not English as I read recently on another blog. She was born in Inverness and taught in various schools in Scotland and England but moved back to the Highlands to look after her father and continued to write there.

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The Duke’s Daughter by Angela Thirkell

7 August 2011 22:54

After watching all the horrible things which have been happening in the news from all corners of the world, I was in dire need of some light-hearted reading to take my mind off it all. This book fitted the bill perfectly and although I sometimes had a bit of difficulty keeping all the characters straight in my mind, especially when people who featured in earlier books are mentioned, I still found it really enjoyable.

This book was first published in 1951 and the upper class inhabitants of the county of Barsetshire are still grumbling about Them – by which is meant the Labour government of the day which seemed to be spending all of its time thinking up ways to tax the supposedly wealthier members of the poulation. Death Duties are a big worry to those who have money and the rest of them would no doubt like to have the luxury of having so much money that they had to worry about how much was going to be paid over to the government on their death!

As ever Angela Thirkell has purloined bits from various classic authors, most notably Anthony Trollope and Jane Austen and set it in her own time.

In this one there are quite a few characters being paired up at the end, to everybody’s satisfaction, and some of the more ghastly characters are nicely snubbed. I’m reading these books as I find them so not always in the correct order which is a wee bit annoying but I intend to read them again when I get the full set. No doubt the news won’t be any better then, whenever that may be.

I found this book in an antique centre, very reasonably priced and it’s a first edition, not that I’m ever bothered with that, but it does have the original dust jacket, a bit tatty, but it has comments on the back from luminaries of the time, a couple of them I haven’t heard of but here are a few of the comments.

‘Grace, wit, equanimity and engaging narrative power… if the social historian of the future does not refer to this writer’s novels, he will not know his business.’ – Elizabeth Bowen.

‘Mrs Thirkell possesses to a high degree the gift of making characters spring to life. She is often both witty and shrewd… she has a most observant, and often an attractively wicked, eye.’- C.P. Snow

I’ll just add – Angela Thirkell is well worth reading!

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The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

26 July 2011 22:51

I’m trying to work my way through all of the Scottish writer Josephine Tey’s books and this is one which I’d been looking forward to getting a hold of as so many people seem to have enjoyed it. And I’m another one.

Detective Alan Grant is going mad with boredom, stuck in a hospital bed flat on his back with only the cracks in the ceiling to scrutinise. Embarrassingly, he had fallen through a trapdoor whilst chasing a criminal and had badly broken his leg.

When his actress friend Marta tries to think of ways which he can entertain himself she suggests that he could try to solve a historical mystery and she later brings him a sheaf of prints of historical portraits to whet his appetite. Grant thinks that he is good at ‘reading’ people’s personalities from their faces and it’s the portrait of Richard III which intrigues him. It doesn’t look like the face of a man who would have his small nephews murdered.

Grant decides that that is the mystery which he is going to look into and after he exhausts the text books which he is given it’s his young American visitor, a student called Brent Carradine who helps him to get further with his research.

As I said, I enjoyed this one which was quite different from her other books and considering that Grant is immobilised throughout the book he still manages to be an interesting character.

It is obvious to us all that history is written by the winners so any historical accounts have to be taken bearing that in mind. Tey gives quite a few examples of this and in particular she complains that the Scottish covenanters have been given a bit of a white-wash job over the years. She says that none of them were put to death despite the fact that everyone thinks that they were. She says that they were guilty of sedition as if that is something really heinous. But sedition is just talking against the government! Hands up anyone who has done that in the past – yes all of us, if we have half a brain!

Tey also glosses over the fact that being transported (sent to the penal colonies in Australia) was more or less a death sentence. Many of the prisoners died on the voyage and most of the others died of fevers shortly after getting to Australia.

One of my ancestors was transported to Australia for- yes you guessed it – sedition, and he only survived 7 months there. So it’s just as well that he and his wife exchanged mourning rings before he left. They knew that they would never see each other again.

Anyway, if you like vintage crime, you’ll probably enjoy The Daughter of Time which was first published in 1951.

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The Finishing School by Muriel Spark

13 July 2011 00:02

This is just the third book by Spark which I’ve read and I liked it better than the last one which was Memento Mori but I don’t think it was as good as The Girls of Slender Means. The Finishing School was first published in 2004 and it was her last published book, she died in 2004.

Nina Parker and Rowland Mahler are a young married couple who set up a finishing school for both sexes and any nationality. College Sunrise, as it’s called, was originally started in Brussels but in an effort to make it more successfull and pay more they’ve started moving the school to a different country each year. It’s put forward as being an exciting experiment and it seems to go down well with the parents.

The main reason for running the school is to give Rowland time to concentrate on his own writing and he hopes to become a novelist. The only work which he does is teaching the creative writing class and everything else is done by poor Nina.

One of the students is a 17 year old boy called Chris Wiley and he is writing a novel too and when Rowland reads the beginning of it he is shocked at how good it is and is consumed with jealousy. Rowland isn’t able to write anything at all and he is obsessed by Chris and his novel.

Chris’s novel is about the murders of Mary Queen of Scots musician, Rizzio, and her husband Darnley. Jealousy was supposedly the reason for Rizzio’s murder but Chris has a new theory about Darnley’s murder and the small community in the school sort of mirrors his idea of the atmosphere of the court of Mary Stuart, with jealousy, lust and obsession playing their part.

Meanwhile Nina carries on with the teaching and it’s this part of the book which gives the humour as Nina imparts supposedly important pieces of information to her students like: If you get a job with the UN and you are chased by a large python, run away in a zig-zag movement, as a python can’t coordinate its head with its tail. and even dafter advice.

Anyway, it was a fairly enjoyable and quick read at just 155 pages.

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