Tag Archives: Family

a flat place by Noreen Masud

Posted on by
Reply

a flat place by Noreen Masud was published in 2023 and it has been shortlisted for several prizes. It’s described as a memoir and Masud writes about her love of flat places, something which she first realised when she was being driven to school in Pakistan every morning by her mother. She longed for her first sight of a flat expanse of land which they passed by, it was something that her sisters didn’t even notice.

Later when family problems led her Scottish mother to leave Pakistan and take her daughters to live in Fife, where she had grown up, Masud went on to visit other flatlands such as Ely in Cambridgeshire, Orford Ness in Suffolk, Morecambe Bay, Newcastle Moor and Orkney, and here she writes of her experiences. Her love of stones, particularly hag stones, is something that I can understand, but where scenery is concerned I’m not so keen on flat vistas. In fact my definition of a good High Street is one where I can stand in it and look up and see soft, rolling green hills, which for me are comforting and enveloping. I remember reading somewhere years ago that the wide skies and flat scenery of Norfolk were thought to contribute to the higher than usual suicide rates in the county!

Masud can’t get away from her childhood traumas, she had grown up cloistered in one room with her mother and three sisters, except for when she went to school. She was in a strange position of not being part of the community that she is growing up in, not even being able to speak Urdu very fluently. Her father was a doctor and he wanted his daughters to grow up speaking English with no hint of a Pakistani accent.

Masud is still haunted by her upbringing, she was lucky in that her father regarded his four daughters as being his sons, and so was keen on them having a good education, but on the other hand he was still wedded to the more traditional morals of his own upbringing. It seems to have been a bit of a toxic mixture. In the end he cared more about what the neighbours/extended family thought than about his own family, luckily for the author and her mother.

I must admit that I learned quite a few things while reading this one, it’s so much more than a memoir. I’m sure it will win more prizes. I’m also sure that I read about this book on a blog, but of course I can’t remember whose it was. Thank you anyway.

There’s one flat land that I visited which I feel Noreen Masud would relish. When we visited Lindisfarne in Northumberland some years ago I watched several pilgrims walking across the the tidal mudflats to the Holy Island and the ruins of the monastery. Although not in the least bit religious I did think that it looked like it might be a good experience – if messy.

Noreen Masud is now a lecturer in 20th century literature at the University of Bristol.

Madame Claire by Susan Ertz

Posted on by
4

Madame Claire by Susan Ertz was first published in 1923 but my copy is a Penguin Books from a boxed set of facsimiles of the first ten Penguin books, published to mark Penguin’s 50th anniversary. I got this one from a secondhand bookshop so I don’t have the other nine books in the set. It cost me all of £2.

I really enjoyed this book, Madame Claire seemed such a sensible and wise elderly woman, named Madame Claire by her adult grandchldren, but Lady Gregory to more formal people. She is a widow.

After Madame Claire’s son Eric married she opted to give up her large house and move into a small suite in a Kensington hotel.  She sensibly refused to move into her son and daughter-in-law’s home.  Claire  has had no contact with her daughter Connie for many years, since the recently married Connie had run off with a famous musician.  Claire has also had no contact from her husband’s best friend Stephen for almost twenty years, he had rashly asked her to marry him too soon after her husband’s death, and her refusal had sent him off in a huff. So when she unexpectedly gets a letter from him she’s happy to renew the friendship.

Connie also resurfaces, and the grandchildren Judy and Noel hare off to France to see her, they’re agog to meet this aunt who had “thrown her hat over the mill” all those years ago

As ever, I’m not giving a blow by blow account of the book which has various plots, a plethora of flawed characters, and a lot about the unfairness of society and its perceived constraints. With age Claire has garnered insight into the behaviour of her family members and others. I have to say that I was incensed that Gordon, the eldest grandchild would inherit everything while Noel his younger brother would have to shift for himself, despite losing an arm in WWI, and of course Judy will get nothing as she’s expected to make a good marriage! I hate unfairness.

I’ll definitely be looking for more books by Susan Ertz.

 

 

 

Another World by Pat Barker

Posted on by
2

Fran and Nick haven’t been married all that long and Fran is coming to the end of her second pregnancy with Nick, but she also has Gareth, an older son by a previous relationship. At the beginning of the tale Nick is going to pick up his daughter Miranda. Her mother has had to go into a mental hospital, as she has had a break-down, she hasn’t coped with Nick’s infidelity and desertion at all well. The family is not a well blended one.

They also have to cope with the renovations in the old house they have bought. Scraping the old wallpaper off seems like it might be a bit of a bonding process, but when a portrait of the original inhabitants of the house is uncovered it spooks Fran, they look just like them, and not in a good way.

But Nick also has the stress of having to help his sister look after Geordie, their father who is 101 years old, and a survivor of the Somme. Although Geordie  survived the war the mental scars have never diminished, have blighted his life and now he is dying of cancer the memories are all coming to the surface.

Pat Barker is a really good writer but there were aspects of this book which were too much like my own father’s death, and that wasn’t something I would have chosen to re-visit.

The Happy Prisoner by Monica Dickens

Posted on by
2

The Happy Prisoner by Monica Dickens was first published in 1946.

Oliver North has been badly wounded in World War 2. He has had a leg amputated and his stump wasn’t healing well, the explosion has also damaged his heart, but he’s back at home now, although stuck in bed as he isn’t well enough to cope with the exercises required for his rehabilitation. It’s a frustrating situation for a previously healthy and active young man, but his bedroom becomes a bit of a hub for his family and he has an attractive  nurse, Elizabeth who attends to him.

It’s a farming community and Oliver hopes to eventually be able to take over the running of the family farm, but meanwhile all of his relatives are in and out of his room telling him of their problems, and he tries to advise them, not always successfully.

His sister Heather’s marriage is in trouble and the return of her husband who had been a prisoner in Japan has not gone well, and his tomboyish sister Violet looks like she’ll be making a disaster of a marriage too.

So it’s a time of upheaval for almost everyone in the family. The war has come to an end at last and people have to adjust to their new life, but there’s also a lot of comedy in this book and the author’s description of a beautiful moth on the first page had me hooked from the start.

I had first  read and enjoyed a few books by Monica Dickens (great-granddaughter of Charles) back in the 1970s, then a couple more over the last decade or so, so it was about time I got around to reading more.

Apparently she volunteered for the Samaritans and when she married an American and moved to the US she set up the first American branch of the Samaritans in Boston, Massachusets.

 

The Musgraves by D.E. Stevenson

Posted on by
Reply
The Musgraves cover

The Musgraves by D.E. Stevenson was first published in 1960. Esther and Charles Musgrave have been married for 25 years but they’re not destined to add any more years to that tally as Charles is terminally ill. He was a widower when he married Esther and is much older than her. His 17 year old son Walter reacted badly to the marriage and took off in high dudgeon to make a life for himself, cutting off all contact with his father.

All that is in the past though and it’s Esther and their three daughters that are preying on Charles’s mind in his last days. Delia the eldest daughter has always been difficult, she has never quite got over not being an only child and having to share her parents with two younger sisters. She’s a needy and dissatisfied young woman and likes everybody to know it, with the result that the other members of the family are walking on eggshells when she’s around.

Meg the middle daughter is going to be married to Bernard soon, but her mother isn’t at all happy about the match. Charles is obviously keen to get Meg settled with a steady husband, looking to the future he knows that Bernard will be a help to his family when he’s no longer around to look after them. Esther doesn’t like Bernard and is really quite a hypocrite considering her far more mismatched but successful marriage with Charles.

Rose, the youngest daughter is packed off to school and with Charles’s death and Meg’s marriage Esther is living with just Delia in the much smaller house that they’ve had to move to when it became a financial necessity to move out of their large family home. Delia isn’t happy with the change in their circumstances, living in a large house with plenty of land around it had been important for her ego and she feels the downfall keenly. Esther is delighted with the new house though, it’s just Delia’s personality that is a problem.

I enjoyed this book about difficult family dynamics and clashing personalities. It’s often the middle child in a family who is supposedly the difficult one so I’m told, but I think that quite often the eldest child comes as such a shock to some mothers, especially if they are young mothers and are an only child themselves. I’ve certainly observed some young mothers treating their eldest as if they are a sibling that they never had and not their child. By the time they have a second child they’re ready to get into mothering mode so the relationship is very different. It’s harsh on the eldest child. Perhaps that was part of Delia’s problem.

Well, as Tolstoy said: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Although I prefer D.E. Stevenson’s books to have a Scottish setting (so parochial of me I know) I did enjoy this one.

Family History

Posted on by
Reply

People who want to find out more about their family history can sometimes wonder how on earth they can make a start.

So for a kick off I think that it is quite interesting to take a look at the National Trust surname search page.

You can then enter in all the family names which you have dug up and it will come up with a map giving you the highest density of that name at a particular time period.

For instance if you enter in the name Carruthers (that always sounds quite a posh name to me somehow), it comes up with Dumfries and Galloway in Scotland as the main area for that surname.

Dumfries and Galloway is close to England but you could never mistake it for England. It always amazes me that the place is so vast and feels so remote. Just miles and miles of hills and sheep, and there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of signs of habitation. Very atmospheric though and I think a bit spooky but maybe that’s just because they aren’t the hills of home.

The internet is a fantastic tool for family research and I think if you google just about any county in Britain they will have a genealogy section on their website. All very exciting.

Don’t blame me though if it turns out that you are descended from a long line of cut-throats or sheep thieves!

One of my collateral ancestors was transported to Australia for sedition, but I’m quite proud of him. It was 1795 and he was trying to get the vote for the common man. Unfortunately he ended up dying of yellow fever. He was a tenant farmer, nothing at all exciting until his mouth got the better of himself and he upset the government of the day.