Tag Archives: memoir

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.

The Salt Path by Raynor Winn

Posted on by
Reply

The Salt Path by Raynor Winn was published in 2018 and everybody seemed to be reading it then – which is why I wasn’t. I actually bought a jigsaw puzzle of the book cover fairly recently, the artist is Angela Harding and I really like her style.

Raynor and Moth Winn had been married for 32 years when they were told that he was terminally ill with a neurological condition, days after that devastating news their long legal battle to stop their home and business from being repossessed came to an end and they were suddenly homeless. With nowhere to live they decided to go on a long walk along the South West of England Coast Path, it was something they had always wanted to do anyway. They wild camped most of the time and had to live on £48 a week benefits, which for some reason dwindled to about £30 a week fairly quickly.

Another reason why it has taken me so long to get around to reading this one is that I thought it might be a bit depressing, at times it is as they encountered more and more problems along the way, but there are uplifting moments, as well as the frustrating ones when I asked myself – ‘how could they have been so stupid?’ from time to time.

Moth’s health fluctuates, but mainly the walking regime seems to have helped his condition. There’s some humour and some serious comments on the horrendous problem of homelessness in the UK, which those in power make sure is very much under-reported. Winn also mentions that she and her husband didn’t get Legal Aid for their legal problem despite them having no money. It’s totally bizarre that millionaire Boris Johnson allegedly (according to the newspapers) DID get Legal Aid recently. How is that possible?

I quite enjoyed this book which has some lovely descriptions of scenery and nature and interesting characters met along the way, but mainly I was glad that we visited Cornwall about 30 years ago as the coastal towns seem to have been swamped by visitors nowadays, and it’s sad when so many houses which should be family homes have become businesses rented out for holiday homes. It’s almost as bad in the east coast of Scotland too.

I think her book Landlines features a walk along a Scottish pathway, so I might eventually read that one.

Down and Out in Paris and London

Posted on by
Reply

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell was published in 1933.

In 1928 George Orwell moved to Paris and ended up living the life of a poverty stricken down and out. No doubt it was all good copy for his writing, in this book he describes what it was like to be jobless and starving in Paris. He had in fact had his money stolen and I’m sure that he would have been able to get more money from friends if he had really become desperate so the experience wouldn’t have been quite the same as your average down and out.

Eventually he got a job as a dishwasher in a posh hotel, a nightmarish and exhausting existence, he describes the disgusting insanitary conditions in the unseen background of such establishments – not for the squeamish, but honestly for anyone who has had any sort of experience in catering none of it will be particularly shocking. I know that one head chef in a hotel frequented by the Queen in the 1970s routinely spat in the frying pan fat to see if it was hot enough!

Going for days on end with no food and having to pawn the clothes on his back in an attempt to survive must have been no fun, but Orwell must always have had the ability to get money from someone as he must have had friends who would have helped him out if he had asked, unlike the rest of the down and outs.

When he did borrow money to return to London so that he could compare the two cities and the experiences of destitute men he had a lot to learn about the rules that tramps had to stick to if they didn’t want to end up in prison. It seems it was easier to get food as a tramp in England, there were religious groups who would provide bread, margarine and tea – in return for being preached at. No mention of soup kitchens though which surprised me, bread and marg seems to be what tramps lived on in London.

They were only allowed to stay in a ‘spike’ for one night before having to move on to the next one, usually about 14 miles away, walking was the only way to get there, otherwise you would be sleeping on the Thames embankment if you were lucky. A ‘spike’ seems to have been a section of the local workhouse. Tramps weren’t allowed to sit down, they had to keep on the move, literally tramping around. Begging would land you in prison if you were caught at it. There were very few female tramps, almost certainly because they could usually get some sort of live-in employment as a servant.

Due to the fact that all your time was taken up tramping around it wasn’t possible to get any work, not that there would have been many jobs around then anyway. There were various types of dosshouses that you could get a bed of sorts in if you had some money. Sadly the other men were often old soldiers from World War 1, the accommodation was always filthy and usually so crowded that they were breathing into each other’s faces. As George Orwell died of tuberculosis it’s a fair bet that he contracted the disease whilst being down and out in Paris and London.

Ninety years or so on from when this was written things don’t seem to be a lot better for some poor souls in our society – a sobering thought.

Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill

Posted on by
2
Somewhere Towards the End cover

Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill was published in 2008 when the author was 89 and she was getting to the stage when her life was becoming ever narrower and she was realising that there were some wishes that were just never going to come to fruition, such as – she was never going to be able to own a pug, she was too old to be able to give them the walks and the care that they need, she says ‘I would so like to to begin that process all over again with a little black-velvet-faced pug – but no! It can’t be done.’ Each to their own I thought, I think those dogs are like marmite, you either love or hate them.

To begin with I thought that this book might be one of those name dropping ones because in no time flat she was mentioning Jean Rhys, but it was just that she had a close professional relationship with her as Athill was an editor at Andre Deutsch, and Rhys had a terrible fear of death and inevitably death is one of the main topics in this book. You would think that that subject could be depressing but it’s actually quite an uplifting book. She was apparently often described as “the finest editor in London”.

I found this to be a fascinating and at times really funny book. She’s quite brutally honest about her relationships with men, and she has much the same feelings about religion as I have. She had no religion, was an atheist but had a Christian upbringing, so had a clear view of right and wrong. However she was one of those people who did whatever she wanted and to hell with anyone else, so her sense of morality where relationships were concerned was pretty low.

‘So we, the irreligious, live within the social structures built by the religious, and however critical or resentful we may be of parts of them, no honest atheist would deny that in so far as the saner aspects of religion hold within a society, that society is better for it. We take a good nibble from our brother’s cake before throwing it away.’

Diana Athill might have thought she was somewhere towards the end of her life but in fact she still had another ten years of it to go and of course wrote another three books after this one. This book was nominated for the biography category of the Costa book awards. In fact I thought that she had died recently but it seems that she is still alive and kicking aged 99.

One thing that really annoyed me was that she mentions that although she had worked with the publisher Andre Deutsch from the beginning, she was very poorly paid. She said she understood that he deserved to take more money out of the company as it had been set up using his money, but she couldn’t afford to buy a house despite having worked for him for donkey’s years – and he refused to pay her any more. Honestly, publishers are just the limit. I bet he wouldn’t have tried that on if she had been a man! Of course in the 1960s and 70s even professional women couldn’t get a mortgage from a bank or building society, if they wanted to buy a house they had to save like mad for years, it’s amazing how much life has changed since those days.

I’m now looking forward to reading Diana Athill’s other books. You can read an interview with her here.

A House Unlocked by Penelope Lively

Posted on by
4
A House Unlocked cover

I’ve been enjoying reading some of Penelope Lively‘s novels this year so when I saw A House Unlocked sitting in the biography section of the library I just had to borrow it.

Actually I was expecting something quite different from the title of the book, I thought it would be about the house she had grown up in, but the house of the title is her grandparents’ house, a large and very grand place which was run with the help of umpteen servants and gardeners. Lively grew up in Egypt but was sent back to the house for holidays, she was an only child of divorced parents so there were no reminiscences of the things that she and siblings had got up to in the house. She tells the story of the house through objects that were in it, but at times it’s more about social history, as an embroidery sampler stitched by her grandmother reminds her of the evacuees that had stayed in the house during the war. But instead of writing about those specific children Lively chose to explain how the evacuation of millions of children and some women had been achieved, and the consequent shock to all concerned. That may be news to some readers I suppose.

The locals were appalled to discover that all of the city children seemed to have lice and Lively comments that that is something that has changed since her younger days as now even middle-class children have nits, including her grand-children. That was news to me as I’m very thankful that I’ve never had to deal with such things, despite having had two boys. Prevention is best, comb their hair with a fine toothed comb at least four times a day and you’ll have no problems is what I suggest!

The hymn book reminds her of the church and that leads her to go into detail of the statistics of the church attendance of the Church of England over the years, it has dwindled drastically although church going was never in a healthy state, not even in Victorian times. Although she herself is a non-believer, she attends the church more to support the actual upkeep of the building and stop it from being deconsecrated and turned into flats or a wine bar.

I found the parts detailing the garden most interesting, how such a huge place was set out and planted. As she freely admits, if it hadn’t been for the very many Scottish plant hunters of the 19th century lots of the trees and plants would never have arrived in Britain’s gardens and estates.

It wasn’t until almost the end of the book that Lively explains what financed the very comfortable life style. Her family name was Reckit, which I immediately recognised as the well known manufacturer of household cleaning/laundry products such as Reckitt’s Blue, Silvo, Brasso and Robin Starch – do you remember that? It was obviously a very lucrative business although as the family was ‘trade’ they wouldn’t have fitted in with some snooty people’s idea of high society.

Social mobility that came about post World War 2 meant that her husband Jack Lively had been able to get to Cambridge despite being brought up in a council house and in an earlier generation she would have been very unlikely ever to have met him, never mind married him. I found those observations quite depressing as over the last forty years or so things have definitely gone backwards, with first evening classes having to be paid for and more recently university education no longer being free.

So as I said, I found this book to be a wee bit disappointing, I think fiction writers often don’t hit the right spot with me when they turn to memoirs, I suspect some of them hold too much back. But I might be being unfair as I immediately started reading Diana Athill’s book Alive, Alive Oh! after this one and for me that one was much better – but that’s for another day!