A series of essays inspired by books that I own, talking about their history, some reviews and also how they came to be on my shelves. With over 6,500 books here and several more arriving each week I doubt I'll ever be short of a topic.
Towards the end of his life Steinbeck felt the need for one last adventure, this was 1960 and he would die of heart failure in 1968 aged just 66. His wife had long been concerned about his health and his heart condition, brought on by his heavy smoking had flared up several times in the preceding years and she was worried about his plans to travel right round the country in a converted camper van with his standard poodle, Charley, as theoretically his only companion. But Steinbeck wanted to reconnect with America, as he says at the beginning of the book:
The plan was to drive up from New York into Maine and explore the back roads of that sparsely populated state before heading along the Canadian border and into Canada by Niagara Falls, before coming back into the USA and travelling up through Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota then along the northernmost border to the coast, trying to stay off interstate freeways as much as possible. The first stumbling block was going into Canada with Charley, the Canadians were fine but, as is still the case, the USA border patrol were not, so Canada was dropped from the route. The less busy roads were also too slow so freeways appear more and more as the journey went on, but those kept him away from the people he wanted to talk to to see how their lives were changing so a sort of compromise was decided on where open countryside was driven through as often as practical.
The book when it came out in 1962 was a hit although it soon became clear that although Steinbeck had genuinely driven around the USA the text was less a travelogue than a carefully created artifice. That’s not to denigrate the book or the stories it tells, which are funny and at times distressing and provide considerable insights into how America had changed over the decades since Steinbeck had left his native California for the east coast and New York State. But it should be taken into consideration that Steinbeck was a great novelist, he was to win the Nobel prize for Literature just after this book came out, and probably couldn’t resist moving stories around and inventing dialogue to make his point. Also the actual trip was considerably more luxurious, and less lonely, than made out in the book, of the seventy five days he was away from home he spent forty five in hotels with his wife, Elaine, and on more than half of the remaining thirty days he either stayed in motels or trailer parks or parked the camper van at the home of friends. Steinbeck’s son, also called John, said that his father invented almost all of the dialogue whilst writing the book but frankly I don’t care, it’s a fun read and you do learn a lot about America on the turn of the 1950’s into the 1960’s.
It is a very uneven travelogue anyway, by page 160 of the Folio Society edition I have we are in Seattle having left New York State and travelled along the US/Canadian border, so just one side of the rough rectangle planned for the journey. On that basis we should be looking at a four or five hundred page epic but instead it is only 241 pages in total, so over two thirds of the mileage is covered in a quarter of the pages and the detail in the first three quarters is lost in the remainder. That said I actually think the last quarter is the most important, as we have Steinbeck returning to search for his roots in California and finding that they are irretrievably lost. Cannery Row has been gentrified and he barely recognises the places of his childhood. Charley is also confused but that is mainly down to the visit to the giant redwoods which are so huge that he doesn’t seem to see them as trees and finds a small bush to mark instead.
But it is pretty well the last section that is the most important of this ‘almost’ documentary and drives home Steinbeck’s dislike of some of what he found on his journey when he goes to New Orleans in search of ‘the Cheerleaders’. These frankly repellent middle aged white women gathered each day to scream abuse at six or seven year old children going or leaving school who just happened to be a different colour than they were. Steinbeck was appalled by them and the crowds they pulled together which meant the children needed police support just to go to school.
Last week saw the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War and this week sees the eightieth anniversary of VE Day, the end of the Second World War in Europe, as this post goes live on the 6th May 2025 two days before VE Day itself. Whilst last week I read Felix Greene’s excellent summary of the first half of the Vietnam War, this week I’m looking at eight books produced as part of the Penguin Specials series which were designed to help the population feed themselves during a time of food shortages and rationing. Penguin Specials were intended to be books dealing with issues of the day and they had rapidly multiplied during WWII with such titles as ‘Aircraft Recognition’, ‘Nazis in Norway’, ‘How Russia Prepared’, ‘Signalling for the Home Guard’ etc. The books were produced far quicker than titles in the other Penguin Series so that they were relevant to the issues of the day, but before the designation of some of them as handbooks there had also been some concerned with making best use of the food supplies however these were in the more usual red covers for Specials. These included ‘S90 The Penguin Book of Food Growing, Storing and Cooking’ (May 1941), ‘S101 Keeping Poultry and Rabbits on Scraps’ (January 1942), ‘S119 Soft Fruit Growing’ (December 1942) and ‘S127 Wartime Good Housekeeping Cookery Book’ (February 1943).
The dates shown below for most of these handbooks may seem quite late in the war for those of us born after the end of shortages and rationing, but it should be noted that general rationing in the UK continued until July 1954 although some items such as bread (1948) did come off rationing before then.
S132 Tree Fruit Growing – Apples – December 1943
Raymond Bush had already written one book for Penguin, as can be seen above, but the two handbooks detailing tree fruit growing took us to his main speciality which he had adopted following a bad accident in 1914 and being advised that an outdoor life would be better for his health than the poster design his company had been doing prior to the First World War. He was a commercial grower from 1915 up until 1935 when he started advisory work on the subject for various scientific committees. The book is a wide ranging guide to growing apple trees with notes where similar methods are appropriate for other fruits such as pears and almost a third of the book is dedicated to pests and how to get rid of them, but it is based on Bush’s determination that the wartime population should not be derived of wholesome fruit. As he says in his introduction “Well my amateur friends, once again you must sit back and watch the Ministry of Food collect most of the fruit to make jam go several times as far as it has any rights to go by the judicious addition of apple pulp, swedes, mangolds and what not. That is unless you grow your own fruit and make your own jam.”
S137 Preserves for all Occasions – April 1944
This book admits that it will soon become out of date as ingredients become more available after the war ut nevertheless it provide a lot of useful information on the varying ways of preserving food. Not just the expected jams and chutneys but syrups, bottling means of drying fruit, vegetables and herbs and how to store fresh produce for the longest time. Unlike other books on preserving that I own it doesn’t include recipes but instead concentrates on good techniques and means of avoiding common mistakes.
S138 Tree Fruit Growing – Pears, Quinces and Stone Fruits – December 1943
Volume 2 of Tree Fruit Growing concentrates much more on the individual varieties of a wider range of crops than I was expecting. I hadn’t realised that almonds were not true nuts but were in fact relative of the plum and peach where we eat the seed and discard the rest as a direct opposite to the two fruits. Bush admits to not having grown them himself and struggled to find any information but put together what he could. There is also a section on laying out an orchard and a substantial chapter on bees at the end along with the inevitable chapter on spraying for pests, a subject clearly on Bush’s mind a lot.
S140 Rabbit Farming – June 1944
Inspired by the success of ‘S101 Keeping Poultry and Rabbits on Scraps’ which as Goodchild explains in the introduction to this book was “giving all the practical hints I knew on rabbit keeping under wartime conditions in order that many newcomers could make a success of rabbit meat production”. This book on rabbit farming is however a very different work as it is aimed at a larger scale operation and includes use of the fur in coats and other clothes necessary to make a living from the business. Goodchild himself came from a long line of farmers and along with his partner ran the largest rabbit farm in England producing not just meat but from it’s manufacturing division coats, gloves and other assorted fur products. The photographs, presumably taken at his site near Crawley in south east England, show an extensive operation which must have been very useful to wartime food and clothing supplies.
S144 Poultry Farming – May 1945
The second of the books split off from ‘S101 Keeping Poultry and Rabbits on Scraps’ took almost a year longer to write than the first. Alan Thompson was amongst other things the editor of the monthly magazine ‘The Poultry Farmer’ which had started in 1874 as ‘The Fanciers Gazette’ and was eventually bought by the publishers of ‘Poultry World’ in 1968, so he was ideally suited to write the book. The book is not aimed at people wanting to keep a handful of chickens in their garden or allotment which was the point of S101 but instead those planning to run a commercial operation and early on mentions a figure of £2,000 (£73,500 in today’s money) for initial outlay if you want to have a hope of making a success of such a venture. The book goes into considerable detail not only on housing and selecting your chickens but also the finances of such an operation with several pages of photographs along with many line drawings to illustrate various points. My copy has clearly been well used.
S145 Trees, Shrubs and How to Grow Them – January 1945
Uniquely in this collection of eight books we have a title not covering food preparation or production and it is also, for me anyway, the least interesting of the titles. It goes into considerable detail about the various trees and shrubs in the UK, with guides as to what to plant and where, such as hedgerows and because Rowe is trying to impart so much information in a book just short of two hundred pages it is not particularly readable. That’s not to say it isn’t useful but just not for the general reader.
S146 The Vegetable Growers Handbook – Volume 1 – May 1945
All the other handbooks were commissioned by Penguin especially for this series and my copies are therefore true first editions whilst S146 and S147 are first editions in Penguin. The Vegetable Growers Handbook by civil servant Arthur J Simons however had first appeared in 1941 published by Bakers Nurseries Ltd of Codsall, Wolverhampton. Simons had written it during a period of quarantine he had undergone after contracting “a succession of childish but contagious diseases during the air raids”. In it you learn the basics of preparing the ground, improving the soil, using manure, compost and chemical fertilisers and this takes up the first third of the book. You then progress on what to grow, how to sow the seeds and raise the plants successfully initially in open ground and then a short section on using greenhouses and frames before a final chapter on pests and diseases and what to do about them. All in all a pretty comprehensive guide and I’m sure customers of Bakers Nurseries found it very useful.
S147 The Vegetable Growers Handbook – Volume 2 – May 1945
The second volume doesn’t have a first published date, but it doesn’t appear to be a Penguin original so I’m guessing this also first appeared from Bakers Nurseries. This volume deals specifically with the various crops you can grow, when to sow them and how to ensure a long cropping season with various vegetables ripening throughout many months. Like the first volume there are suggested plans for gardens or allotments to make maximum use of the space without wastage from gluts in certain weeks. Simons refers to letters he received after the first volume with suggestions which prompted this second book and despite the focus on wartime household needs these two books would even now be useful for a keen vegetable grower.
After the war it was decided to create a series of its own called Penguin Handbooks, the first new title of which was The Penguin Handyman which came out in November 1945 and was assigned the number PH9 with the obvious intention to move the existing eight books into this new series, however it all became more complicated than that, as it often does with Penguin Books. In fact PH1 is a 1945 reprint of ‘S119 Soft Fruit Growing’ but in the green cover of Penguin Handbooks rather than its original red. PH2 was assigned to the reprinted ‘S132 Tree Fruit Growing – Apples’ and PH3 became the reprint of ‘S138 Tree Fruit Growing – Pears, Quinces and Stone Fruits’, both of which are covered above and these would ultimately be combined into a single volume ‘PH83 Tree Fruit Growing’ in September 1962.
Despite the assumed plan of simply renumbering the existing handbooks into the gap left at the beginning of the new series we already have one book which hadn’t previously been issued as a handbook and just two of the originals occupying the first three numbers and this gets worse as numbers PH4 and PH5 were not in the end used and neither was PH8. This leaves just two numbers PH6 which became a reprint of ‘S145 Trees and Shrubs and How to Grow Them’ in 1951 and PH7 which combined S146 and S147 as the ‘Vegetable Grower’s Handbook’ in 1948.
Oddly ‘S137 Preserves for all Occasions’ did get reprinted as a ‘proper’ handbook as PH12 in July 1946, why they didn’t use one of the abandoned numbers I have no idea. ‘S140 Rabbit Farming’ and ‘S144 Poultry Farming’ were both discontinued in favour of their original base work ‘S101 Keeping Poultry and Rabbits on Scraps’ which came out as handbook PH14 in June 1949 making these two some of the most difficult to find Penguin Handbooks.
This post is being published on the 29th April 2025, the day before the fiftieth anniversary of the surrender of South Vietnam and the ending of the Vietnam war, the Vietnamese by the way refer to it as the American war. The choice of this book amongst several that I have on the conflict was pretty well certain as over half the book consists of photojournalism and the balance a series of essays detailing in chronological order what led up to the war and the first ten years of the fighting. Even though Greene was a British journalist the book was first published in 1965 in America, with still eight more years of American involvement and beyond that two years of the slow push down the country by the North until they finally prevailed. That this book was written roughly half way through the war would have horrified its author who, at least partly, hoped that exposing just what was going on might have hurried the end. My copy is the 1967 British paperback edition by Penguin Books.
By going back to the French Indochina colonies pre WWII and taking the story of how America came to be fighting there the twenty two essays that make up the second half of the book largely follow a historical progression. So how did America get into this mess? Well it turns out that when the French were kicked out by the invading Japanese during WWII they were determined to regain control of their colonies just as the Vietnamese, along with the populations of Cambodia and Laos for that matter, saw an opportunity to gain independence at the end of the war. There was a short lived declaration of independence for all of Vietnam but the French did re-invade in 1946, however they needed American assistance, which was forthcoming as part of the anti-communist sentiment in American politics through the 1950’s and this led to them supporting the extremely unpopular puppet president Diem with ever increasing military power initially in the guise of ‘advisers’ and ‘trainers’. The French eventually gave up and left leaving the Americans, who by then were financing roughly three quarters of the military push and supplying arms despite the Geneva accords of 1954 which said that foreign forces should not be in Vietnam and there should be elections within two years leading to reunification of Vietnam. America and France, despite being signatories to these agreements had no intention of allowing them to happen.
Picture by Kyoichi Sawada – United Photo Industries (UPI)
And so we ended up with America fighting the Vietnamese under the guise of preventing North Vietnam gaining control of the south but in fact the National Liberation Front, known outside of the country as the Vietcong, set up in 1960 was entirely composed of people from the south who wanted the foreign forces out of their country and the weapons they used were almost entirely from deserters from the American backed Vietnamese troops.
I have been selective in which photos to use from the book as a lot of them are far more shocking than the example of American torture shown above and include the famous picture of the monk, Thich Quang Duc, sitting and burning in the road as he set fire to himself in protest at the ongoing conflict in June 1963. In truth the photographs are far more telling than the essays, especially when juxtaposed with quotes which clearly don’t match the images such as the destroyed houses below.
Photo by Felix Greene
There are clearly books that look back on the war with the benefit of hindsight which I could have reviewed but I was drawn to this work written during the middle of the conflict. It may not be the most dispassionate summary of what was going on but Greene was trying to make sense of what he witnessed whilst reporting and for that it is a fascinating book.
Top photo by Bob Ibrahim UPI, bottom photo un-credited UPI
I travelled the length of Vietnam in 2007-8 and was lucky to have three very different guides which could provide alternate viewpoints. Starting in the south the guide was an older gentleman who had lived through the defeat of the south a a civilian and could talk about the pulling out of the American forces and the advance of the troops from the north leading to the surrender. In central Vietnam our guide was an ex Vietcong fighter who still walked with a limp from a war injury sustained in Hue, whilst the north was explained by a man in his early twenties who had never known anything other than a unified country. I doubt it is possible to have such an interesting selection of guides nowadays fifty years on from the end of the conflict and I’m glad I went when I did.
Cicero was a prominent statesman, lawyer and orator at a time of great turbulence in the Roman empire. Born in 106BC and elected one of the two consuls in 63BC, he was at his prime when Julius Caesar became dictator following his invasion on 49BC, and whilst not one of the group that ultimately assassinated Caesar in 44BC it was generally known that he supported them. He is one of the most prominent men of letters of his time with over eight hundred existing examples and many of his speeches were published. We don’t by any means have everything he wrote but what we have is still a substantial body of work. This book starts with his opening speech in the prosecution of Gaius Verres for mismanagement during his time as Governor of Sicily. the Roman legal system at the time expected a very long speech, normally over a day, in such matters but Cicero gave a ‘shortened’ version (still 23 pages long) as he was concerned that with various public holidays coming up the trial could be postponed for months. It’s a good introduction to Cicero’s style as are the selection of twenty three letters that follow which include one from Caesar.
It is in the third section that we really see Cicero in full flow in the second of his fourteen speeches mainly given in the Senate against Anthony, although this particular speech was never delivered there, being published instead. This massive fifty three page speech established Cicero as a major opponent to Anthony, who had seized control of Rome following the death of Caesar. The series of speeches were known as the Philippic’s after Demosthenes’s denunciations of Philip II of Macedon and were so powerful that Cicero eventually convinced the Senate to declare Anthony an enemy of the state as Cicero attempted to gather support for Anthony’s son, Octavian, to stand against his father. The section below is just a small part of the second Philippic against Antony but gives a feeling of the enmity between the two men:
For what was left of Rome, Antony, owed its final annihilation to yourself. In your home everything had a price; and a truly sordid series of deals it was. Laws you passed, laws you caused to be put through to your interests, had never even been formally proposed. You admit this yourself. You were an auger, yet you never took the auspices. You were a consul, yet you blocked the legal right of other officials to exercise the veto. Your armed escort was shocking. You are a drink-sodden, sex-ridden wreck. Never a day passes in that ill-reputed house of yours without orgies of the most repulsive kind.
The book concludes with two of Cicero’s best known works, the third part of ‘On Duties’ and all of ‘On Old Age’. ‘On Duties III’ consists of eleven sections where Cicero endeavours to explain the preference for actions seen as right as opposed to ones which are simply advantageous and why an action which may appear advantageous but cannot be seen as right is never the correct thing to do. This book, along with the first two parts is addressed to Cicero’s son Marcus who was then in Athens and is a guide to moral behaviour. ‘On Old Age’ is a lot more fun to read, it is written as an imagined conversation between Cato the Elder, who was 84 at the time it is set in 150BC, with Scipio Aemilianus, then 35, and Gaius Laelius, also in his thirties. Cato expounds on the advantages of old age and a reconciliation to the fact that death cannot be far away, in Cato’s case the following year.
Cicero was murdered in 43BC aged sixty three as he was attempting to escape the wrath of Anthony, now reconciled with Octavian, and his head and hands, specifically requested by Anthony as punishment for writing the Philippics, were nailed to the Rostra in the Forum Romanum.
The translation is by noted classicist Michael Grant, Professor of Humanity at the University of Edinburgh and was the first of several translations, mainly of Cicero, that he undertook for both Penguin Books and the Folio Society. This has been the first time that I’ve read Cicero although I can’t imagine it will be the last, there are several Penguin Classics that cover more of his writings and The Folio Society have recently published a massive single volume 664 page collection.
And now for some nostalgia, I first read this book along with the first book in the series ‘The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm’ when I was in Primary school aged about seven or eight years old. I never actually owned a copy of either book, simply reading the ones in the school library, but the other day I came across this copy, dated 1966, which is the same as the version I first read all those years ago at the end of the sixties. I had to have it and see if childhood memories of loving the books were anywhere near as good as with Elleston Trevor’s ‘Where’s Wumpus’. Sadly the adult me found the book a bit of a curate’s egg (good in parts) and some parts have not dated very well, but when it was good it was great fun.
For those unfamiliar with the absent minded professor and inventor of crackpot inventions Branestawm would be partly great fun to meet but also a complete danger to anyone around him as his inventions not only invariably go wrong but also quite frequently do so in catastrophic ways, often explosively. His jacket is fastened by safety pins, having lost its buttons many years ago, and he wears five pairs of spectacles, one set is specifically for looking for the other four whenever he loses them, which is frequently. His housekeeper, Mrs Flittersnoop, is often to be found residing at her sister Aggie’s house when the professor’s home has been rendered uninhabitable by one disaster or another. In this book one of the stories concerns the house burning down, amazingly not caused by one of Branestawm’s inventions but not helped by him trying to put the fire out by trying to smother the fire with a rug, which promptly caught fire, adding to the conflagration, and then throwing alcohol on the flames which of course made everything worse. This leads to him trying to invent automatic fire alarms which prove to be so sensitive that even the mayor’s cigar sets them off and the professor ultimately having to move in with Mrs Flittersnoop’s sister as well because so little of the house is still standing. Other regular characters are Colonel Dedshott of the Catapult Cavaliers who is always to be found in full regimental dress uniform complete with jangling medals, Mr Chintzbitz the owner of the furniture shop and Doctor Mumpzanmeasle, these names giving a hint of Hunter’s love of word play, which can sometimes get in the way of readability as you try to work out just what you have actually read.
‘The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm’ was first published in 1933, whilst ‘Professor Branestawm’s Treasure Hunt’ originally came out in 1937, there then was a long hiatus before book three was released in 1970, with a further eleven being written between 1972 and 1983. I suspect the reprinting of the first two books by Puffin in 1947 and 1966 respectively and especially the subsequent 1969 television adaption did a lot to revive the character and prompt Norman Hunter to write more. I’ve never read any more than the first two and indeed didn’t even know they existed until I came to research this blog. Norman Hunter was born in 1899 and died, aged 95 in 1995
Continuing the bucolic countryside and doomed love themes from last week’s ‘Far From the Madding Crowd’ I was drawn to this book of English folk songs, which was Vaughan Williams’ last book as sadly he died just before it was published. Ralph Vaughan Williams was of course one of the great English composers of the first half of the twentieth century, he died in 1958, and was heavily inspired by English folk songs although he also wrote nine symphonies and four concertos along with his numerous song cycles and choral works. He qualified as a Doctor of Music from Cambridge University and it is as Doctor Vaughan Williams that A L Lloyd refers to him in his ‘Note on the Presentation of the Tunes’ at the start of this book. The selection of songs is quite widespread, although biased toward tunes gathered in the south of England as that was where Vaughan Williams lived so it was easier for him to travel round collecting material in that part of the country although there are a small number from the north. Vaughan Williams was inspired to start collecting English folk songs by contemporaries such as Cecil Sharp and the collections he made helped to preserve a rapidly dying art form as well as influencing his own work.
If I have one criticism of this book it is not in the choice of songs, which provide a spectrum of styles but in the structure of the book itself with the songs in the first part and the accompanying text in the second half which means that you need two bookmarks to keep track of where you are as you continually skip to and fro to read the context and history of the song you have just read. I would have much preferred the descriptions to be interleaved with the music as that would have been far simpler to read.
Before the couple of examples I have chosen, I must explain that the copy I have has a very tight spine and to avoid splitting it I have been forced to hold it open as much as I dared but that has led to somewhat distorted photos of the pages.
Although listed as collected from Somerset, the earliest versions of this song are known from Newcastle Upon Tyne, so the opposite end of the country, and these date back to the late seventeenth century. The lyrics included are a mix of at least three versions into a harmonious whole presumably by Vaughan Williams when collating this book.
The Green Bed follows a theme common with other songs of the period of a sailor who arriving at lodging he has used before claims to have lost all his money in a disaster and is turned away but when he shows that actually he has plenty of money all of a sudden beer and bed are available and the landlady is quite happy to include her daughter in the bed. However the sailor spurns the offer as it is clear that both of them are only interested in the money he has. Again the example comes from the south of England but versions of this song are also known from Warwickshire, in the English Midlands and therefore a long way from the sea.
I really enjoyed this exploration of English folk song and I have various other collections of traditional music which would also be worth exploring at a later date.
I have to admit that in the over three decades I have owned this book, as part of a set of six novels by Hardy from The Folio Society, I have attempted to read it at least three times. Initially when I bought it back in 1993 and then again probably ten years later, where according to the bookmark I found inside I made it to page 84 out of 413, this time I read and thoroughly enjoyed the book in just four days during the last week. I don’t know why I failed the first two times, some books you just have to be in the right frame of mind to appreciate them.
There are five main characters, I’ll tell as much of the start of the novel to set out how they stand with each other. Gabriel Oak who starts the novel as a farmer in good standing with two hundred sheep and a couple of sheepdogs, the younger of which would lead to his ruin by one night driving his entire flock over a cliff edge to their deaths, The sheep were not insured but by selling everything he owned he managed to cover his debts. Also appearing at the start of the book is Bethsheba Everdene, a young woman whom Oak falls in love with, pretty well at first sight, but she does not return his affection. She however soon leaves the vicinity, before Oak’s disaster with the sheep, and he knows not where she has gone. Oak, now penniless takes himself off to a hiring fair hoping to get a job as a bailiff (farm manager), failing to do so he reverts to his skill as a shepherd but still doesn’t get a job so decides to try the next fair in a nearby town. On his way he sees a hayrick on fire and endeavours to put it out, his bravery is soon noticed by the labourers on the farm as they race to his assistance and on the back of this he is offered the job as shepherd by Mistress Everdene who it turns out had inherited this very farm which is why she left the area where Oak was living. Still very much in love with Bethsheba but now so reduced in fortune as opposed to her meteoric rise he realises that he can never hope to gain her hand in marriage.
On coming into the village after the fire is extinguished he encounters the young Fanny Robin who it turns out has that night left the house where she was employed as a servant without telling anyone and is running away to her love, a Sergeant Troy in one of the local regiments who has promised to marry her. Troy however is an out and out cad as will become obvious as the book progresses. This leaves one more major character, the owner of the farm adjacent to Bethsheba Everdene’s, Mr Boldwood, I don’t think we ever find out his first name. In a moment of fecklessness Bethsheba sends Boldwood a valentine one year even though she doesn’t love him and this prompts the bachelor to look again at his neighbour and consider marriage for the first time in his life and this will lead to all sorts of problems as the book progresses. These five characters with their interrelationships drive the whole plot but around them the description of rural life and its nearness to poverty is brilliantly told by Hardy, take the following example, which also shows the expression of the local dialect which pervades the novel, this is just after Oak has been retained as shepherd after his heroics with the fire.
The book, like all Folio Society editions, is beautifully illustrated, this time with thirty one wood engravings by Peter Reddick who worked on all of their Thomas Hardy volumes, around twenty of them, making him the first artist to completely illustrate Hardy.
It was only at the end of the book that it dawned on me how young the major characters are, Gabriel Oak is one who is given a definite age, that of twenty eight at the start of the novel which covers the span of around four or possibly five years so he is thirty two or thirty three at the end of the story. There then becomes the slight problem of the age of Bethsheba Everdene caused by two statements by Gabriel which disagree. In chapter twenty nine – Particulars of a Twilight Walk he says he is six years older:
But in chapter fifty one – Bathsheba Talks with Her Outrider he says there is eight years between them and Bethsheba agrees:
As she agrees and she knows him better by now, as it is near the end of the book, I’m inclined to the eight year gap meaning she was twenty at the start of the novel and twenty four or twenty five at the end. Suddenly it dawned on me just how young she was when she inherited the farm and started running it by herself and that brings a new perspective to her fearlessness and possibly recklessness in deciding to do that. Mr Boldwood is described as ten years older than Oak so allowing for Oak’s approximations in the earlier passage we can say he is in his early forties by the end, which fits with his position as a confirmed bachelor early on in the narrative as he would hardly be described as such if much younger than his late thirties. Sergeant Troy is stated as twenty six at the end of the book and Fanny Robin is twenty, so she was just fifteen or sixteen when she started her relationship with Troy. However I can’t include a picture of where these ages come from without giving away a large part of the end of the book, which I don’t want to do.
I’m so glad I had another go at reading this book and I’m now not sure why it has taken me so long to finish it as I have greatly enjoyed this tale of Victorian life in south west England, so much so that I’m considering which one of the other six Hardy novels I own to tackle next.
When I decided to review a book about Peter Cook this week I was faced with a dilemma, should it be ‘Something like Fire’ edited by his widow Lin Cook, or ‘Tragically I was an Only Twin’ edited by William Cook who is apparently not related to the great comic. Both books are wonderful tributes to Peter Cook who sadly died thirty years ago (9th January 1995) at the far too young age of just fifty seven. In the end I chose the second not because ‘Something Like Fire’ is the lesser book, it is a compendium of reminiscences and through that you learn a little more about what it was like to be with Peter Cook and it is of course extremely funny. But this book is a collection of his works, many transcribed from recordings as either there aren’t scripts existing anymore or in several cases there weren’t scripts in the first place, Peter’s genius lay in extemporisation. What this book definitely isn’t as a complete Peter Cook, that would be multiple volumes, but what is here is representative and whilst reading it I can hear Peter’s voice, especially in his guises of E L Whisty and Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling or memorably with Dudley Moore as Pete and Dud.
The performances between Cook and Moore worked mainly because they rarely had a script or rather there was the basis of one which Dudley Moore would learn but Peter Cook wouldn’t despite having dictated it into his ever present tape recorder, relying instead on headlines to keep the performance going in the right direction. Cook would invent a lot during the double act which gave spontaneity to the shows and would often lead to Moore struggling to keep a straight face as some new brilliant line would strike Cook as a better alternative to what he should have been saying. That Dudley Moore could continue regardless is a mark of his acting abilities but it also left William Cook with a dilemma whilst compiling this book as there would be several different versions of a lot of the sketches so he had to choose which one should be included. There is a lot more to Peter Cook than his work on stage or on television and his writing for newspapers and the satirical magazine Private Eye, which he ran for many years, is also featured in this collection.
Sadly Cook did most of his best work in the 1960’s and 70’s only occasionally appearing after then and then only when he wanted to but when he did it was invariably superb. The one legged Tarzan sketch seen in the link is a classic and was originally performed in 1964 but this is a version from one of the Secret Policeman’s Balls in the 1980’s to raise money for Amnesty International. The real tragedy of this book is it highlights how much of the early material no longer exists, a lot of the 1960’s performances for the BBC were wiped when the BBC decided to re-use the master tapes so only records and tapes still exist and almost all of those are no longer available to purchase so this book is invaluable in preserving the work one of the great comic geniuses. Sadly I never heard his alter-ego Sven the Norwegian who would call in to a late night local radio show and would be so strange whilst talking about the Norwegian obsession for fish which had driven him from his home country without the radio host, at least at first, having any idea he was actually talking to Peter Cook. I did see the wonderful Clive Anderson interviews from December 1993, also included here, where Clive apparently interviewed four different, and distinctly odd, people in one show all played by Peter including a biscuit quality controller who had been abducted by aliens, a judge who shot a defendant in court, a football manager and an ageing rock star. Peter Cook’s performance in these was entirely unscripted and this was probably his last great appearance.
For those inspired to approach Cook’s work after reading this blog I feel I should warn about the language used in Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s last collaboration, that of Derek and Clive. These sketches are deliberately littered with profanities and the two performers are often inebriated whilst coming out with this stream of consciousness. The coarseness of the language and the, at times, unpleasantness from Cook to Moore, who at the time (late 1970’s) was becoming successful in Hollywood just as Cook’s career was struggling sometimes makes these a difficult read but they are nevertheless very funny.
This book, Rageh Omaar’s first, starts with him being the first BBC journalist allowed into Iraq after five years in September 1997. He had become the BBC Middle East correspondent that summer and had straight away applied for a visa for Iraq not really expecting it to be granted as anyone from the BBC was persona non grata in the country since the end of the Gulf War in 1991. But Omaar is not the white middle class reporter expected by the regime, rather he was born in Mogadishu, Somalia and speaks fluent Arabic so amazingly they let him in. The book would be fascinating enough if it just dealt with the next six years whilst Omaar gets to know Baghdad and develops friendships with not just his team but ordinary Iraqis, finds a regular tea shop and chats to locals providing an insight to daily life in a country few of us have had a chance to visit. Of course during that time Omaar only spent a few weeks or months at a time in Iraq, he had the entire Middle East to cover and in 2001 and 2002 he was in Afghanistan reporting on the fall of the Taliban, I’d love to read a book by him about that time as well. But at the end of 2002 he was back in Iraq as US President George Bush Jr and British Prime Minister Tony Blair falsely accused Saddam Hussain of having weapons of mass destruction that he would be willing to use and decided on regime change in Iraq as part of the Global War on Terror started following the attack on the Twin Towers in New York in September 2001, which Iraq had nothing to do with.
As 2003 began it became clear that despite the lack of a UN resolution supporting such action America was going to lead a coalition force including Britain in invading Iraq and journalists and their teams were given the opportunity to get out of the country. Despite it clearly being highly dangerous, especially for news teams from countries involved in the invasion, Omaar and a much reduced team decided to stay. The picture above is of them filming on top of the Palestine hotel in central Baghdad with the 14th of Ramadan mosque behind him during the invasion, just three days later they would be in the same place when the Americans bombed the hotel, the impact knocking them flat and killing at least one member of another news team. This is despite the much vaunted precision guided weaponry in use in the conflict and the location of the hotel and the use it was being made of by a lot of journalists still in the country being clearly flagged to the invading forces.
The descriptions of just how the news reports were made and transmitted from the middle of a conflict zone are really interesting and Omaar’s continuing ‘normal’ life in Baghdad interacting with ordinary people, still going to his favourite tea room etc. adds greatly to the story he is telling. I remember hearing him being interviewed from London on a satellite phone as bombs and missiles rained down around him but it is the calls made on the same phone to his wife and family afterwards to assure them he was OK that bring home the fragility of his and his crews existence at the time.
The book has an epilogue where he goes back to Iraq a few months after the invasion and speaks to Iraqi’s about how they are surviving after the conflict and the mismanagement of the country by the victors, who didn’t seem to have a plan for what to do afterwards, is well worth reading, as of course the whole book is.
It was a long time between the first collection of one-act plays published by Penguin and this second selection, the first volume was published in November 1937 whilst this one came out in November 1953. Part of the sixteen year gap can of course be explained by the onset of WWII but Penguin wouldn’t publish any more collections of one-act plays until 1965 and the establishment of Penguin Plays as a series of its own. Which is odd if the blurb on the rear of the book is true as this suggests that one-act plays are particularly popular with amateur dramatic associations. Popular or not I’ve largely enjoyed this collection even if, just over seventy years after it came out, I recognise the names of just two of the playwrights of the seven ‘famous’ plays and there are three I would really like to see performed. Taking them in the order they appear in the book, rather than the front cover:
Villa For Sale – Sacha Guitry
A noted French actor, playwright and film maker, Guitry was prolific in both his production of plays and films, often acting, producing and directing in the same film where he also wrote the script and in 1936 he performed all four roles in four separate films. Villa for Sale is translated from the original French, although no translator is given in the book, and it was quite enjoyable as an entree to the collection. However it isn’t really satisfying as a story as the characters are quite lightly painted possibly due to the restrictions of the length of the play but as my favourite of this set is only a little longer I’m less inclined to give Guitry the benefit of the doubt with this. The story concerns a French lady who is trying to sell her villa for 250,000 Francs but would take 200,000 at a pinch, the villa is in an up and coming neighbourhood for the French film industry so should be in demand but has been on the market for a while, however she has a viewer this afternoon. A couple arrive and are welcomed but the husband is clearly bored of looking at villas and doesn’t really want to buy anything. Whilst his wife is upstairs being shown around it becomes clear that this couple are not the expected buyers but have turned up on spec when the real potential purchaser arrives, mistaking the man as the seller of the property she offers 300,000 Francs and provides a cheque straight away as she wants the place immediately ready to start working on a film. She leaves just before the real owners comes back downstairs and the husband writes a cheque for 200,000 Francs to buy the villa. All in all a rather tawdry story and not one I would rush to see performed.
We Were Dancing – Noel Coward
The play that for me has aged least well in the book, this comedy of manners based around a woman who feels that she has suddenly fallen in love with the man she was dancing with despite being married for many years to another man she loved once but over time it has become more habit to be together rather than love. I had high hopes for this as I had never read a play by Noel Coward, and at times the interactions between her husband and her new infatuation did work but frankly for the most part it left me bored and the clip I found of Coward performing the song included in the play does little to improve my opinion of the play.
Master Dudley – Philip Johnson
In third place of the plays I would like to see performed is this one, although the chance of any company even hearing of the play never mind putting it on are very low. Over fifty of Philip Johnson’s one-act plays appeared in the Samuel French catalogue of published plays of 1951 – more than any other author. In the comparable catalogue of 2005, his plays had disappeared without trace. At the start of the play Dudley’s aunt Stella had just arrived from America to provide support to her sister’s family as Dudley was on trial for murder, however as she arrives he is sensationally acquitted, It becomes clear as the play progresses that there has been a grave miscarriage of justice…
Interlude – Paul Vincent Carroll
Irish playwright Paul Carroll was well known in Ireland and wrote many works including for the National Theatre and this almost makes it into my list of plays I would like to see performed as I suspect that done well it would make great entertainment. The play is set in the office of a money lender in a small market town in Northern Ireland, Judy Tippin and her husband have come to Farrelly’s office to try to get an extension on their loan which was actually due to be settled the day before. Judy and Farrelly have history and she is hoping to use this to soften the heart of the famously stern money lender. The use of ‘defective’ electrics in the office which cause the lights to flicker occasionally and then ultimately go out leaving the performance by candlelight for a short-while has Judy almost convincing Farrelly to forget the debt in lieu of happy memories but then the lights come back on and in the harsh light the hard-hearted Farrelly takes her money leaving her and her husband with nothing.
Although Carroll was lauded in both Dublin and New York as a major new theatrical voice, virtually none of his work has been in print since his death in 1968 until Colin Smythe published a significant collection in 2014 as the sixteenth volume in his series of Irish dramatists, with six complete plays (although not including this one) and overviews of many of his other works.
A Husband for Breakfast – Ronald Elwy Mitchell
Top of my list for plays I would like to see performed from this collection is this one, yet annoyingly Mitchell is the author I can find least about on the internet, other than born in Camberwell, Surrey in 1905 and died in Dane County, Wisconsin, USA in 1986. Nothing he wrote appears to still be in print yet from this short play he was clearly an excellent writer. The play, set in a small Welsh village, is full of humour. It starts early morning as Aholibah is starting to prepare breakfast for her and her husband Isiah, who is still asleep, but is surprised by the arrival of a neighbour who is clearly expecting some sort of show. It becomes clear that Isiah had been in the pub the previous night and when it came to his turn to pay for the drinks he hadn’t any money. Trying to think of anything he could sell or barter for his round he was constantly thwarted by people pointing out the items he came up with belonged to Aholibah. Eventually he struck a deal with Moses Roberts to sell Aholibah herself to him for the price of the drinks. Various villagers were therefore descending on Aholibah’s cottage to see how she reacts. Eventually Moses Roberts himself arrives seeking the return of the half a crown he had paid Isiah but Aholibah sensing a way to profit from this instead sets him to work around the house as her new ‘husband’ much to the amusement of the other villagers there. Moses Roberts is then desperate to get out of the bargain as can be seen below and a trade is proposed for Roberts to buy himself out of the ‘contract’ which starts with two bushels of wheat but quickly escalates:
The Rose in the Cloister – Margaret Luce
Later Lady Margaret Luce as her husband was knighted when he became Governor of Aden in 1956 she is also one of the grandmothers of English actress Miranda Hart and wrote a book about her experiences in the Middle East ‘From Aden to Gulf: personal diaries’, which covers 1956 to 1966 and is a book I will definitely be looking out for. The play is well written and is also by far the shortest work in this collection being just nine pages long yet it manages to tell a complete story and even deliver a moral. It starts with a monk just concluding his sermon in the cloister of the monastery during which he points out a rose bush with a single flower and warns that “Only he whose heart is true as steel and without sin may pluck that rose from its stem: if any other dare to make the attempt his hands as they touch the stem will be burned”. This greatly excites his listeners but one resolves to take the rose and give it to his true love in place of the rose he has already brought for her.
The Will – J M Barrie
Second in my list of plays I want to see is this one. Barrie is probably most famous as the creator of Peter Pan and this is beautifully written as we see the effect of the years passing with the simple expedient of altering the set dressing, and presumably some quick changes on behalf of the cast. It is set in a solicitors office and a young couple arrive to set out his will in favour of his new wife. Once this is done the curtain falls ut rises again just ten seconds later to reveal subtle changes such as the portrait of the monarch going from Queen Victoria to King Edward VIII. The couple return, a little older, and revise the will, he is obviously doing much better than anticipated yet the beneficiaries other than his wife are getting less. The curtain falls and rises ten seconds later again, the portrait of the monarch has altered to King George V along with other small changes. The couple return and again revise the will, he is now wealthy but again the changes show even less regard for others. The curtain comes down and back up for a third time and this time just the man arrives as his wife has died, this time he wants to revise to will to pay back those people he had taken advantage of on his way up in society. The play is really well done as not only are the changes in the couple elegantly drawn but the father and son pair of solicitors also evolve over time.
One thing I would have liked included in the book is a brief biography of the various writers, I assume it is missing as they would have been well known at the time, but only Coward and Barrie have lasted the decades as names I recognised so I’ve had to do a little research to identify the authors.
Ramblings on my bookshelves 