apology

Just a very brief word to say, so sorry, everyone, I'm currently out of action for health reasons. Hopefully back before long.

Are writers introverts?

sometime i love to be alone not becouse of lonely..
it's just because i love to spending time with myself and enjoy every little things that i like to do..
so being alone does'nt make me feel lost anywhere
the loneliness let me noe what i need for me all de time..
heppiest moment ever when im alone.

                            Veronica Francis

It is said that an extravert is someone whose batteries are charged by being around people while an introvert gets charged by being alone. Writing is a solitary art; you need solitude for creation. Writers need peace and quiet enough to work, for a start. They need to concentrate. Even those of us who collaborate, write our own pieces separately and knit them together later. Writers get their energy from time alone with their minds. On a good day for writers, there’s a buzz about it; everything else fades away except people and the story in their heads; a “flow” develops and they become lost in thought. They can write pages without pausing, each word leading naturally to the next. At the very least, writers have to be happy on their own.

Then, in order to observe and gain insight into people’s minds and personalities - or where are their characters and their dialogues to come from -  writers must stand back, build a bit of a wall between themselves and other people. To stand back from, to hold back from… It does suggest that they are necessarily rather aloof and reticent.

Is that true? Are all writers introverts, then? I’m interested. What do you think?

'Play on, play on and play the game!'*

Dad already has his much loved copies of ‘Moving On’ and ‘Someday, Maybe’, so I suggested a ticket to a cricket match as a special gift for Father’s day

Offspring  seemed to think it was a good idea and are currently debating the virtues of the One Day game on the Saturday versus the International 120 at on the Tuesday. (It’s no use asking me. I do know that he isn’t keen on One Day matches, but that’s as far as watching it on telly is concerned, and I haven’t the faintest what a 120 is. You’d think I’d have picked up a bit more after 55 years of being a cricket widow, but I haven’t.)

I know he really only enjoys watching test matches on the television, and I can’t think why.  I hear him occasionally swearing or cheering and clapping at some mysterious event, but the pleasure of five days spent watching the grass grow and  men in white* wandering about rubbing a ball up and down their leg, eludes me. If you’ve got to watch a sporting game, it shouldn’t last more than one hour and it should be clear all the time who is winning and who is losing. I’ve learned not to ask that question anyway with cricket. The answer is always too complicated to hope to understand.

(*Or red or green or blue, these days, what’s that all about? The only good thing about it was that the whites against the green  all looked quite pretty.)

Andy Brice (‘Moving On’) knows he’s found a good man when he hears that his neighbour likes cricket, and looked forward to joining the local club. My man, though, doesn’t seem to want to get involved with local club matches any more.  I have it on good information (his) that one of the things that seems to have happened with is that it is very hard to get team members actually out to play.  They don’t want to play away fixtures and will rarely appear for duty more than once in a week, if that.  “Now, in my day…”

Ah, the good old days…. Let me tell you about his day.

Back in the dark days, when the dinosaurs roamed the land, there would be a match every Saturday and every Sunday throughout the season, which seemed to last a lot longer than it does now. There would be mid week games on a Wednesday and Thursday as well, and then there was at least one tour (which is another whole story). Very rarely did anyone miss a match. All team members played in every game, sudden blindness, two broken legs or similar providing the only possible excuses for missing one. Matches seemed to go on from lunchtime until after eleven or twelve in the evening, longer if the game was away from home.

It took me quite a few years to realize that they didn’t really play on after dark under floodlights.

I did try to like cricket, I did, really. In the very early days, I used to go along to matches and try to pass the endless, boring hours perched on a deckchair in the long grass and batting away the midges and the wasps by trying to do some embroidery. We ended up with quite a few grubby and badly decorated pillow cases and table cloths in our bottom drawer before I gave up the will to live - I mean, the will to pretend that I was enthralled and happy. I actually hadn’t a clue what they thought they were all up to out there for hours and hours on the field. It wasn’t even as if you could join them for tea or get together with your man in the bar afterwards, because of course, Women Were Not Permitted To Enter The Clubhouse.

It was quite a well-appointed clubhouse, too, well decorated, with plenty of facilities and plenty of room for all. Occasionally,  visiting wives with bedraggled children tried to break into our clubhouse to shelter from a shower of unexpected rain, only to find  themselves chased out again sharpish, to wander and keep dry where they might, until their men had finished draining the free jugs, buying each other extra pints, dissecting the match in the every minute  detail, laughing at each other’s jokes,   patting each other enough on the backs, (always calling each other, presumably in a gesture of male bonding and camaraderie, by the surname with a ‘y’ or an ‘o’ attached at the end, as ‘Jonesy’ or ‘Gibbo’; it seemed to be mandatory.) and they  (and the coach driver if any) were ready to leave the bar.

After a long, long while, it was grudgingly agreed that the women might come just a little closer and shelter on the verandah outside beneath the overhanging roof – and then, a few years later again, under pressure, the decision was taken to allow the women (though only those unaccompanied by children) to sit upstairs in the committee room on match days. They would even be welcome to purchase a drink, or to have one sent up to them, but downward ordering or upward despatch of liquid refreshment would be done only via a butler’s hatch.

The committee suggested that in return for this privilege wives ought to take over the making of teas from the caterer.

We said no.

This noble committee decision was, some time later amended in an enormous gesture towards equality. One small area at the far end of the clubhouse from the bar would be closed off by a set of heavy doors. Drinks could be carried to this area and the ladies were free there to disport themselves at will. They could even be joined by those men who wished to be with them (though not many did as there really wasn’t very much room.) Should one of the men passing through the doors on their occasional provisioning of drinks carelessly leave one open and should a Female be spotted peering through it towards the bar, someone would stride across smartly and slam the door sharply shut.

Some men, of course, would have been happy to have a mixed membership without restrictions, and they do indeed have one now, but for me, it came too late. Even if I did not applaud the great GBS for his comment that “The English are not a spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give then some idea of eternity,” for me, it is much, much too late.  But bless him, it is Father’s Day coming, and he’s allowed to have his passions.

“There’s a breathless hush in the close tonight -*

Ten to make and the match to win.

A bumping pitch and a blinding light

An hour to play and the last man in…

                                                                                             *Sir Henry Newbold.  

Jim Norris and his tum. -1) 1930s

You may not have helped but notice that both Jim Norris (‘Someday, Maybe’) and Andy Brice (‘Moving On’) are men who are extremely fond of their stomachs.  (Fortunately for them, they are both married to women who see it as their role to have a meal on the table when their man comes in!) I thought it be rather fun from time to time to have a look at some of the things that Jim or Andy might have found waiting on the table.

Today, let’s start with JIM and pick a day from the early chapters of the book, ‘Someday, Maybe’, which opens in the 1930s:-

Jim has a market garden, so that, although money is in very short supply, and the best of the crops have to be set aside for customers so that the family have to make do with the bruised fruit and the windfall apples, there are still plenty of fresh vegetables left over after the boxes are done for the delivery rounds as well as the apples and a variety of soft fruits in their seasons. There are also the hedgerows with their prickly swathes of blackberries, and the fields and hills and woods with their wild herbs and mushrooms and their bilberries.

They occasionally buy meat from the farm, and there are sometimes fish in the nearby river and rabbits and pigeons to be found when Jim goes out with his shotgun. They keep quite a few hens, which they feed by boiling up their scraps with bran, so there are eggs (though they must sell most) and once in a very long while there is the treat of a chicken. This is occasionally roasted, but is usually an old boiler; past her best for laying or as a broody, but she makes a delicious stew.

Nobody is concerned about fats and carbohydrates, and so they have no worries about eating too much butter, cream and cheese. Mary has her milk and cream - unpasteurized and very rich - fresh from the nearby farm and often makes her own butter, using elbow grease to turn the paddle in the wooden churn and, naturally, adding plenty of salt for flavour and preservation, before rinsing and patting the rich, creamy butter into blocks with her pair of wooden paddles. She usually buys cheese from the shop. Frying and roasting is done with lard and dripping, from the occasional roasted meat or from some kidneys, if they can get any, and obtained, if necessary, from the butcher.

The village shop provides most of the other things that they might need, like flour sugar or rice and a few tins, but they try to keep their shopping bills as low as possible. Mary saves the ends of candles and remoulds them and reuses slivers of soap; stored in a jar in a little water, the liquid feels a little slimy, but it works a treat. borax and vinegar, baking soda, ammonia and a bar of household soap deal with her washing and cleaning needs.

So what might Jim actually eat during one of his days in the 1930s?

For his breakfast:-

Mary is out as usual in the early morning seeing to the hens, but has managed to brew some tea and to make some porridge which she has left simmering on the stove. We find Jim helping himself to the porridge and then cutting and buttering a couple of thick slices of bread to have with a cup of tea for his breakfast. This doesn’t sound very exciting, but at this hour he has too many demands on his time to prepare and eat anything more. He may well grab an apple for his pocket from the storage shed when he goes out to get the customer’s fruit and vegetable orders onto the trap ready for the morning round – or even an onion; he is quite partial to a sweet raw onion around ten o’clock when his stomach usually starts to growl. If Mary has plenty and is willing, he may manage to take a small wedge of good strong cheese wrapped up in greaseproof paper to accompany it.

For his dinner:-

Mary prepares the main meal of the day for half-past twelve.  Yesterday she plucked, gutted and boiled up a couple of pigeons,  so today Jim will have one of his favourites – a pigeon pie with a rich gravy of onions and carrots and gravy under a crispy golden lid of suet crust pastry. She will serve it with cabbage – sensibly boiled for a good long time with some soda bicarb in the water to preserve the green colour – and a pile of potatoes mashed with butter and a good dollop of cream.  To follow, apple dumplings, apples sliced with sugar and sultanas mixed in, enveloped in individual blankets of short crust pastry and served with custard. (The full fat, unpasteurised milk from the farm makes lovely, creamy custard.)  Oh, and a cup of tea.

For his tea:-

They only have afternoon tea when they have a visitor, but Mary will usually bring out a drink for him at mid-afternoon wherever he is working in the garden – sometimes homemade lemonade, sometimes tea, sometimes even beer.

When he comes in at 5, there won’t be a great deal of time because there is still the evening round of deliveries to be done as well as many other jobs for both of them to get through. Mary will have made an effort, though, and he can rely on there being a sort of High Tea, with both something savoury and something sweet on the teatime table. (Teatime isn’t complete for Jim without a cake or on the table.)

Today, we will give him one of his favourite savouries - Cheese Dreams. Mary butters bread for sandwiches, filling these with grated cheese and chutney, then beats an egg with two tablespoonfuls of milk. She pours this onto a plate and dips each sandwich into it on both sides, before frying them in butter until they are golden brown and the cheese inside has melted and is piping hot. There will be some bread and butter and a small pot of honey or jam in case it’s needed, and maybe a bit of lettuce and a few tomatoes in the summer, and to follow there is a tasty seed cake, and some sticky parkin left from the last week’s bake.

Oh, and tea, of course. There is always tea.

And for his supper?

Often he will pop in to see an old friend or a faithful customer on his evening round and he may well be offered something to eat or drink, but there is Meg the horse to see to when they get home as well as a myriad of smaller tasks and though he may have had several cups of tea on his travels, he is always thirsty again and a bit hungry again when he does lock the back door for the night at last. Once Mary has seen to the hens for the night, tucked her little Patsy safely to sleep in her little room, made up whatever floral decorations are needed customers for the next day and finished – or put on hold – all her other tasks – they are both too weary to do more than sit at the kitchen table over a plate of bread or crackers and cheese and whatever bits of cake there might still be left. Once in a while, just for a comforting change, Mary may suggest cocoa or even Horlicks if they have a jar. Otherwise, it will be a big pot of tea.

That’s lot of tea in a day for people in a cottage with an outside lav. Good thing they each have a large china po under their side of the bed. 

Politicians, don't forget the Arts! .

'If thou of fortune be bereft

And in thy store there be but left

two fishes, sell one and with the dole

Buy hyacinths to feed the soul.'

                   

                 Muslihuddin Sadi. 

We know that the flower has the shape and colour and perfume that it has, but why do we find it beautiful and why do we seem to need beauty?  Science is beginning to show us just why. Beauty seems to be in the genes of the beholder. Humans just work better when they are looking at certain shapes and colours. hearing certain sounds, smelling different scents - and I don't just mean 'work' in the obvious sense, but in terms of making the best of what we have,  physically and mentally and emotionally. And why do we need the arts? They are part of our humanity. Making art, in all its varieties,  gives us the chance of sharing our experiences with others and  making  some sense of the chaos of life - and what do a Beethoven symphony, a Monet painting and a Shakespearean soliloquy have in common? They give us a means of finding beauty. We need businesses to make the country money, but  we also need beauty - and the Arts. We forget to include it in our education system  at our peril. 

Victory!

Fancy dress competition during Victory celebrations in our village, after the end of the war in Europe and Japan. I'm the one in the nurse's outfit.

The village's victory celebration took place a little while after the end of the war, probably to make sure that all the men who were coming home, had come home.

 I don't remember a great deal about wartime. We lived in the countryside  and there were very few signs of it about. I knew that my father was a long way away, in India, because I received (and still have) one of the small records that the forces were allowed to make to send home. My father's voice seemed to be very hissy and squeaky. "Bye bye, little Bun, have lots of fun. Daddy." I wondered if that was the way he always sounded. 

As far as I was concerned, as a very small girl, life was just the way it was. The world was almost entirely populated by women, old men and children. New clothes came in a ‘missionary barrel’ from a land called ‘America’ or sometimes from one called ‘Canada’ and mostly they weren’t new at all, but I didn’t realize that. Certainly, the shoes we were given pinched. My mother said that American fittings were narrower than ours. I imagined people with long thin tapering feet like those worn with the medieval costumes in my colouring-in book. It worried me how they managed to walk. We had a wireless round which my mother and grandparents would gather, listening intently and not wanting to be disturbed. (It must have been a battery-operated one because we didn’t have any electricity, just open fires and oil lamps and candles.) I remember one evening after the news must have filtered through about what the Allied Forces were finding when they liberated the German prisoner of war camps. I was a bad sleeper, and on this occasion had been allowed to get up in what felt like the middle of the night (probably about 11 pm) and to join my mother and grandparents round the oil lamp at the kitchen table, where they were drinking tea and eating crackers and cheese and discussing  the reports in disbelieving and horrified tones. I heard  the name 'Hitler' several times and I was full of curiosity, because I knew that  nasty Mr Hitler was a very Bad Man, my questions flustered them. ‘Oh, something very very naughty. Very very unkind. ” They dropped the subject and wouldn't say any more.

Then the war was over and the Men came home. Everything seemed to change. 

 

After Wisley

Very thoughtfully, one of my daughters has bought me a small, lightweight folding wheelchair, which means that we can get out and a little more about than has been possible for a long while, and she took me for a trial run to the beautiful gardens of RHS Wisley. 

The forecast was for much colder, greyer weather than we have been having, so we wrapped up with jumpers, cardigans and coats, and, of course, the sun shone and it got warmer and warmer. By the end of our visit the little wheel chair and I were swathed with discarded woollies and coats and we had to stop every now and then to collect one or other which was trailing behind. The chair proved not that easy to push unless the ground was very even, but she has determination and stamina and, four-inch heels or not, tarmac, gravel, bark or chippings, my goodness, did she work hard shoving me up hill and down dale! It was really lovely – and quite a giggle, especially when, as a keen photographer but novice wheelchair-pusher, she darted off to take a picture here and there, forgetting to put on the brakes. Fortunately it only happened on gentle slopes, not precipices!  

The orchards were just coming into bloom, the greenhouses were full of delicious scents, the ducks and geese were marshalling broods of tiny chicks - it was all lovely. 

Over tea and sandwiches in one of the cafes, we somehow got round to working out that her father and I will have totalled up 150 years between us in a month or so. What have we  learned in that time? I won't speak for him, but I  often feel that I know less now than I did in my youth.  I certainly know how much more there is that could be learned that I shall never know. Two things I am fairly sure about: -

Happiness is a choice. 

Listen to the voice in your heart. It is your best advisor. 

Election fever

I wanna be the leader
I wanna be the leader
Can I be the leader?
Can I? I can?
Promise? Promise?
Yippee, I'm the leader
I'm the leader

OK what shall we do?

                  Roger McGough.

Vanity, vanity...

There are certain things that happen to a woman as you are getting older and they are not all as freely anticipated as long hairs sprouting on your chin or starting to grow a moustache.

(Himself sometimes twiddles the end of a particularly long whisker and jokes that I am getting ready to join the RAF if I haven’t used my tweezers for a while.)

For a start, you don’t just grow white hairs in your eyebrows; you grow great, long, black, wiry ones as well. If you left them alone, you’d start to look like that politician, what was his name? Big bushy eyebrows... Chancellor of the Exchequer... Jim. Jim somebody. Definitely began with a ‘J’. John? James? Jeremy?

Oh, no. Denis. Denis Healey.

And whilst the hair is growing luxuriously all over the face, it is rapidly fizzling out on the legs and under the arms and er-hum… Everywhere else. All those young women are paying for ‘Brazilians’ or ‘Landing Strips’ and designs with names like that, would, if only they would have the patience, save themselves a lot of pain and money. To our surprise, many of us older ladies find ourselves remarkably on trend.

It is, of course, much demanded that one should maintain  a sylph-like figure. To that end (so difficult to lose a baby tum, even when you are a great-grandmother.) I caught a bus yesterday afternoon and went to the big town instead of the little one for a special purchase.  

I'd heard they were miraculous. I chose black, rather than the white or nude ones which were also on offer; they seemed more glamorous. I was tired when I got home, though, and I had to water the plants and cook a meal and one or two other things, so I put off trying them on till today. I'll have a go this afternoon.

*

Well, I've tried them on and it looks like another bus journey. I followed the instructions carefully and rolled them up like you do with tights before trying to get into them, but I could hardly get them up as far as my knees.

They're back in the packet now. It was worth a try.

I remember my Mother

My mother had kind grey eyes. She had long, dark brown hair which she wore parted in the middle and swept up in a thick roll about the back of her head. She had a small, smiling mouth and smelled of Pink Lilac talcum powder. She would sing me to sleep every evening.  I thought she sang like an angel. She didn't; she sounded very much like me and you don't want to hear me attempting to warble. She had a very bad stammer. My aunt, her younger sister, told me recently that she had been told that it started before my aunt  was born, following some incident during World War 1. At that time, my soldier grandfather was away in Egypt, doing his bit, leaving  my grandmother alone with her small daughter in an isolated cottage at the top of a steep hill. They had no water or electricity and it was my mother's task to fetch the day's supply of water from a spring in woods on the other side of the lane. One night, one of the many discharged and abandoned ex-servicemen who were roaming the countryside  came to  the house. Something happened. The stammer started after that. That was all my aunt  knew.  

She was my whole world, my security, my warmth, my safety in a frightening world. She died forty years ago this coming April. 

I still miss her. 

A sketch of what Jim and Mary's attic bedroom ('Someday, Maybe' ) might have looked like. 

Fiction or Non-fiction?

Where do you stand on fiction versus non-fiction? Which do you prefer?

Amongst those who came to have a few words about my novels ‘Someday, Maybe’ and ‘Moving On’ when I was in South Harting the other week was an elderly gentleman who told me, with a certain touch of disdain,  that he was not interested in reading fiction.

               “Why would I want to read about imagined events that happen to imaginary people?” he asked. “Why waste my time with something that isn’t real? Fiction is pointless. Non-fiction is informational, mind expanding. When I read, I want it to be something that will teach me something, make me think.”

At my elbow at this moment are the two books that I am currently reading. One is Emma Healey’s novel, ‘Elizabeth is Missing’ and the other is professor of physics Chad Orzel’s ‘How to Teach Quantum Physics to your Dog’. Across the table, my husband has columnist and broadcaster Rory MacLean’s ‘Berlin: imagine a city’ and the novel, ‘The Finckler Question’, by Howard Jacobs. Sometimes the mood and the moment is right for the reading of one, and sometimes for the other. Surely, there is a value in both fiction and non-fiction and very much a time and a place for both.

Certainly, non-fiction can be educational, informative, engaging and educative, given the infinite variety and complexity of reality.  Slower labour is required; you have to proceed to the next paragraph only after you have managed to grasp the previous one .You need more energy!  It involves slower, line-by-line reading;   you can’t just glide over the words. Fiction may not require as great an intellectual effort, and is, of course, dependent on the experience and imagination of the author and his or her idea of how a person might feel, think or act – though non-fiction, too, depends on the research skills,  integrity and organisational skills of the author, as well as his judgement as to how to represent or interpret the information at his or her hand at hand – but some intellectual effort is required in fiction reading in order to recreate the world of the book and the characters according to  the words the author has given us. There is also an argument that information may be remembered better when presented in a fictionalized form.

More importantly, though, I am with those who think you can gain insight into other people’s lives, human nature and emotions and develop human empathy through reading novels. During my conversation with the gentleman  I mentioned David Halberstam, who spent two years in Vietnam during the early stages of American involvement in the Vietnam war and who wrote a non-fiction book about it afterwards,  ‘The Making Of A Quagmire’.  Afterwards, he said, he had felt that he wanted a way to portray the frustrations and the emptiness of the war and so he wrote a novel about it, too.  ‘One Very Hot Day.’

 Like Halberstam, I believe that stories don’t just entertain, but also enlighten and engage us and allows us to learn about social interaction, psychology, history and so on  in a way that non-fiction can’t. By drawing us into their imaginary worlds, novels don’t just give us a narrative or stimulate our imagination, but also enlarge our understanding of ourselves and increase empathy with others. We identify with fictional characters and think about how we would react and respond to their situations. We try to imagine what it would be like… As someone said, novels are word machines which carry us through time and space. 

My gentleman said that truth is stranger than fiction.  Mark Twain said that it’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

 Pity I didn’t remember that quotation at the time!

Wakey- wakey!

Instead of watching the latest episodes of ’Spiral’ on television last evening I made the mistake of recording them and instead spent the time wrestling with a knotty problem that I had hit with the plot of my latest book, the sequel to ‘Someday, Maybe’, (available online and on Kindle along with the second book, ‘Moving On’!) and scribbling down some possible solutions for getting over it.

I should know better!

It wouldn’t have been so bad if my brain had kept me awake most of the night in order to continue with working on the subject, but it didn’t. What my brain and I amused ourselves with to pass the night time hours was a dreary and protracted recital of nursery rhymes, ‘’Hey Diddle Diddle, the Cat and the Fiddle’, ‘Little Boy Blue’, ‘Dr Forster went to Gloucester’, ‘Little Polly Flinders’ and so on and so on, which seemed to be on a loop, arriving on the hour every hour. Between performances, we employed ourselves usefully in making such fascinating studies as counting up how many of each letter there might be in my full name and what the sum total of those numbers might be; how many generations have lived in this house ( musing at length as to whether a generation should be two-score-years and ten or somewhere around 40 to allow for having children), what route my husband’s troop train would have taken between the Hook of Holland and Berlin when he was doing his National Service, how many stops and where there might have been (wondering at length whether or not the men got undressed at night to get into their bunks. I decided not; no room.) We continued in like vein until the light crept in weakly around the edges of the curtains, whereupon I drifted off…

… and awoke moments later knowing that I had discovered the Meaning Of Life! Eureka! What a moment!

Fortunately, I keep a notebook by my bed and I scribbled it down for posterity before drifting off again.  I entrust it to you, dear reader:-

‘Joy of joys,

Tea of teas.

Don’t it make you

Want to sneeze?’

Yes,I did find it just a little disappointing in the morning.

New Year’s Eve we lit a bonfire on the headland at the place where the winds from the sea meet theOn  winds from the stars. We danced with flying hair and pounding hearts amidst the glittering sparks, drank deeply to our dear lost friends and shouted our hopes and wishes for the New Year into the orchestra of the crashing waves. 

Oh, no, we didn’t, I’m wrong there. Sorry.

We were in bed by ten.

I do remember a time when New Year's Eve was the highlight of our social calendar. Christmas for the children, NYE for the adults. In the earlier years, we usually spent it in the home of some Scottish friends, who really pushed the boat out, first-footer and all. Then later, we would host a dinner party for a group of good friends. It usually went on all night. The last time we celebrated NYE with any sort of style and degree of  enthusiasm must have been  seven or eight years ago now. 

Does it make us feel uncomfortable that the years are flying past too fast? Do we have insufficient energy and optimism? Are there too few dear friends left with whom to celebrate? Does the midnight tolling of Big Ben remind us too much of good times that are passed? Are we too fearful of tomorrow?  Who knows!

We feel quite happy really. We just prefer an early night.