Every Friday Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Readerwhere you can share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading. You can also share from a book you want to highlight just because it caught your fancy.
I’m featuring The Boy With No Shoes by William Horwood, a memoir I started to read today. William Horwood is an English novelist. His first novel, Duncton Wood, an allegorical tale about a community of moles, was published in 1980. It was followed by two sequels, forming The Duncton Chronicles, and also a second trilogy, The Book of Silence. William Horwood has also written two stand-alone novels intertwining the lives of humans and of eagles, The Stonor Eagles and Callanish, and The Wolves of Time duology. Skallagrigg, his 1987 novel about disability, love, and trust, was made into a BBC film in 1994. In addition, he has written a number of sequels to The Wind in the Willowsby Kenneth Grahame.
In 2007, he collaborated with historian Helen Rappaport to produce Dark Hearts of Chicago, a historical mystery and thriller set in nineteenth-century Chicago. It was republished in 2008 as City of Dark Heartswith some significant revisions and cuts under the pen name James Conan.
The book begins with the Author’s Note:
When I was thirty-four and had been iller than I knew for two long years, my recovery began in the strangest and most magical of ways. I woke one day from dreaming and saw myself when very young, as clearly as in a black -and-white Kodak photograph. I saw how desperately the little boy I once was had needed someone to talk to in a world where no one wanted to listen.
From the Prologue:
My name is Jimmy and there was a man in my time long ago, before the Boy and the Girl, before my Darktime, before Granny came to help me; and the man held my hand and took me out of our cold house into the sun and then along a street to a great big place with a sign outside
From Chapter 1 Running:
The park keeper in his uniform and hat shouted at me and grabbed one of my ears and pulled me towards him.
‘KEEP OFF THE GRASS!’ he yelled, so close it made my eardrums ache.
Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice, but she is taking a break and Anne at My Head is Full of Books has taken on hosting duties in her absence. You grab a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% of an eBook), find one or more interesting sentences (no spoilers), and post them.
On page 56 the characters are talking about the day that Edmund Hillary from New Zealand and Sherpa Tensing from Tibet had climbed the highest mountain in the world. No one in the whole history of the world had stood on top of it before.
Uncle Max said, ‘This is a great day for England and the monarchy.’
Granny said, ‘It seems to me that it is a great day for New Zealand and for Tibet, and a bad day for Mount Everest. It is nothing to do with England at all, let alone the Queen.
Description from Goodreads:
Five-year-old Jimmy Rova is the unwanted child of a mother who rejects him, and whose other children bully him. The one thing he can call his own is a pair of shoes, a present from the only person he feels has ever loved him. When they are cruelly taken away, Jimmy spirals down into a state of loneliness and terrible loss from which there seems no recovery. This triumphant story of a boy’s struggle with early trauma and his remarkable journey into adulthood is based on William Horwood’s own remarkable childhood in south-east England after the Second World War. Using all the skills that went into the creation of his modern classics, Horwood has written an inspiring story of a journey from a past too painful to imagine to the future every child deserves.
Spell the Month in Books is a linkup hosted by Jana on Reviews From the Stacks on the first Saturday of each month. The goal is to spell the current month with the first letter of book titles, excluding articles such as ‘the’ and ‘a’ as needed. That’s all there is to it! Some months there are optional theme challenges, such as “books with an orange cover” or books of a particular genre, but for the most part, any book you want to use is fair game!
The optional theme this month isChristmas or Nonfiction and I’ve chosen the Nonfiction option as I don’t read many Christmas-related books. The descriptions are taken from my posts on the books, where they exist.
D is for The Dancing Bear by Frances Faviell, the pen name of Olivia Faviell Lucas, painter and author.
After the war, in 1946, she went with her young son, John, to Berlin where Richard Parker, her second husband, had been posted as a senior civil servant in the post-war British Administration. It was here that she befriended the Altmann family, which prompted her first book The Dancing Bear (1954), a memoir of the Occupation seen through the eyes of both occupier and occupied.It covers the years from Autumn 1946 to Autumn 1949, with an Epilogue dated Autumn 1953. Her memoir is mainly about her friendship with the Altmann family – Frau Maria Altmann, her husband, Oskar and her children, Ursula, who works for a group of American service men, Lilli, a ballet dancer and son, Fritz, who was a member of the Hitler Youth and is now involved in the Black Market. Their eldest son. Kurt. is missing in Russia. Berlin had been divided into four sectors by the Allies – Britain, the United States, France and the Soviet Union – and Frances is horrified by the conditions she found. There were deaths from hunger and cold as the winter approached and queues for bread, milk, cigarettes, cinemas, buses and trams.
This is an extremely readable biography of a fascinating woman. It’s well researched and provides an insight into the early years of Australia’s colonial history. Elizabeth was born on 14 August 1766 in Devon, England and she married JohnMacarthur in October 1788. In June 1789 they sailed with their first child, Edward, to New South Wales where John joined his regiment, the New South Wales Corps, in the recently established colony of New South Wales.
For sixty years, Elizabeth ran the family farm in Parramatta, west of Sydney town – on her own during her husband’s long absences abroad, when she was responsible for the care of their valuable merino flocks, as well as the Camden Park estate and the direction of its convict labourers. By the time Macarthur came back from his second absence, he was overwhelmed by mental illness, and they spent the last few years of his life apart. He died in 1834. The house and gardens of her farm, aptly named ‘Elizabeth Farm’ is now an ‘access all areas’ museum. In 1850, she died in her daughter and son-in-law’s house at Watson’s Bay outside Sydney, overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
Agatha Christie had visited the Middle East in 1929 travelling on the Orient Express to Istanbul and then on to Damascus and Baghdad. She visited the excavations at Ur and returned there the following spring where she met archaeologist Max Mallowan – by the end of the summer they had decided to marry, which they did on 11 September 1930.
It’s her memoir in answer to her friends’ questions about what life was like when she accompanied Max on his excavations in Syria and Iraq in the 1930s. The emphasis in the book is on the everyday life on a dig and Agatha took an active part, helping to catalogue, label and clean the items they found as well as taking photographs and developing them. She also found time to spend on writing her books. So, although she gives a detailed account of how they worked, how they employed workmen for the excavations and servants who looked after Max and his team of archaeologists, there is not much about what they found.
She described the local people in her Epilogue as people, who know how to laugh and how to enjoy life, who are idle and gay, and who have dignity, good manners, and a great sense of humour, she also recorded their disputes: ‘Quarrelling is, in any case, almost continuous.‘ And ‘Syria is full of fiercely fanatical sects of all kinds, all willing to cut each other’s throats for the good cause! ‘
Cousin to Elizabeth I – and very likely also Henry VIII’s illegitimate granddaughter – Lettice Knollys had a life of dizzying highs and pitiful lows. Darling of the court, entangled in a love triangle with Robert Dudley and Elizabeth I, banished from court, plagued by scandals of affairs and murder, embroiled in treason, Lettice would go on to lose a husband and beloved son to the executioner’s axe. Living to the astonishing age of ninety-one, Lettice’s tale gives us a remarkable, personal lens on to the grand sweep of the Tudor Age, with those closest to her often at the heart of the events that defined it.
In the first ever biography of this extraordinary woman, Nicola Tallis’s dramatic narrative takes us through those events, including the religious turmoil, plots and intrigues of Mary, Queen of Scots, attempted coups, and bloody Irish conflicts, among others. Surviving well into the reign of Charles I, Lettice truly was the last of the great Elizabethans. (Amazon UK)
Princess Louise was Victoria’s sixth child – her fourth daughter, born on 18th March 1848. It was an agonising and terrifying birth in a year of revolution and rebellion, a time when royal families throughout Europe were being deposed and in Britain the working classes were agitating for higher pay, better working conditions and more legal rights. There is so much detail about her life in this book, packed with intrigues, scandals and secrets.
She had a difficult childhood, disliked and bullied by her mother and she often rebelled against the restrictions of life as a princess. She had an unhappy marriage to John Campbell, the Marquess of Lorne, later the 9th Duke of Argyll, a homosexual, and went with him to Canada in 1882 when he was appointed as Governor-General. Her relationship with Canada became a love-hate one, but began and ended with Canadian adoration.
The scandals arose about whether she had had an illegitimate child and her long term love affair with the sculptor Joseph Boehm. The mystery is still unresolved as Louise’s files in the Royal Archives are closed and her husband’s family archives are inaccessible.
B is for Breathtaking by Rachel Clarke, a palliative care doctor.
Her book recounts her experiences during the first four months of 2020, when she worked on the Covid-19 wards in the Oxford University Hospitals system. Taken from her diary that she kept at the time it has an immediacy as she records her insomnia, her fears for her family and also the tremendous resilience, courage and empathy that she and the rest of the hospital staff had. Although it is a grim account, it is also uplifting to know the care they took of their patients and the attentiveness to their patients’ needs despite the fact that many of the staff were not trained in intensive care and had never dealt with anything like this before. Breathtaking records the compassion and kindness of numerous people, and pays tribute to both NHS staff and volunteers in dealing with such a distressing and immensely horrific situation.
I like Paxman’s style of writing, I could almost hear him speaking as I read. He’s a person who has grown on me over the years and lately I’ve enjoyed his TV documentaries too. It’s always been entertaining to watch his interviews, even if I didn’t agree with his views – or his aggressive approach. It’s toned down in this book, but every now and then his acerbic nature comes across. He writes about food, sport, football hooligans, language, individualism, education, religion, ‘John Bull’, cities and the countryside – the English idyllic village, class structure and social tone, attitudes to women, business and trade to name but a few topics. It’s well researched and very readable, with a bibliography listing all the books he mentions plus others that presumably he has used. It seems there really is no such thing as ‘the English’ – we’re a mixture of all sorts, or as Paxman puts it, The English are a mongrel race‘. (page 59)
This is the story of a house and those who peopled it between the years 1930 and 1960. In 1930 Maxine Elliott, an American, commissioned the architect Barry Dierks to build the Chateau de l’Horizon on the land she had bought on a narrow stretch of rocks with a small promontory between Cannes and Juan-les-Pins. This is the part of the book I enjoyed the most, first of all about Maxine herself, then the description of the construction of the Chateaux and the years that Maxine owned it and lived there. Maxine really came into her own there as a superb hostess. Regular visitors included Winston Churchill, Cole Porter, Noel Coward, Somerset Maugham among many others – famous actors and actresses as well as members of the aristocracy and politicians.
The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who lived nearby before the Second World War, were also visitors. The picture painted of them is not flattering – and there was much talk about how to address Wallis and whether the women should curtsy to her. By the time the War approached Maxine had lost her sparkle, suffering from ill health and she died in March 1940.
The Chateau was bought by Aly Khan, the Aga Khan’s heir presumptive at the time. There is quite a lot about his time there, his womanising, his marriage to Rita Hayworth and the social scene of the post-war period up to 1960. It is a fascinating and entertaining book about a pampered, luxurious and decadent world.
The next link up will be on January 4, 2025 when the theme will be: New; this could be new-to-you books, new additions to your TBR list, recently published books, or something else that you connect with the word ‘New’.
Top 5 Tuesday was created by Shanah at Bionic Book Worm, and it is now being hosted by Meeghan at Meeghan Reads. It’s time to talk about all the shiny new books coming out in October, November and December 2024. What are the books you can’t wait to hold in your hands the most? For details of all of the latest prompts for October to December, see Meeghan’s post here
Here are five books I’m looking forward to reading and they are all coming out this month! They are all by authors whose books I’ve loved.
Death Rites by Sarah Ward – 3 October. This is the first in a new series, a dark and atmospheric crime thriller (Carla James Crime Thrillers Book 1).
Archaeology professor Carla James is reeling following the death of her husband. Desperate for a change of scene, she takes a job at an elite New England college. On her first day, Carla is asked to represent the department at a murder site. She initially believes there is nothing notable about the scattered debris that surrounds the body, but there is more to the case than meets the eye. This victim is just the latest in a series of unsolved deaths. Nothing obvious links them but Carla is convinced – there is a methodical killer operating in the shadows.
Can she uncover the truth before she becomes the next victim?
Midnight and Blue by Ian Rankin – 10 October. It’s the 25th Inspector Rebus book. I’ve read all the others, so I have to read this one!
John Rebus spent his life as a detective putting Edinburgh’s most deadly criminals behind bars. Now, he’s joined them…
As new allies and old enemies circle, and the days and nights bleed into each other, even the legendary detective struggles to keep his head. That is, until a murder at midnight in a locked cell presents a new mystery. They say old habits die hard… However, this is a case where the prisoners and the guards are all suspects, and everyone has something to hide. With no badge, no authority and no safety net, Rebus walks a tightrope – with his life on the line.
But how do you find a killer in a place full of them?
Olifantshoek, Southern Africa, 1688. When the violent Cape wind blows from the south-east, they say the voices of the unquiet dead can be heard whispering through the deserted valley. Suzanne Joubert, a Huguenot refugee from war-torn France, arrives in search of her cousin — the notorious she-captain and pirate commander Louise Reydon-Joubert — who landed at the Cape of Good Hope more than sixty years before, then disappeared without a trace . . .
Franschhoek, Southern Africa, 1862. Nearly one hundred and eighty years after Suzanne’s perilous journey, another intrepid and courageous woman of the Joubert family — Isabelle Lepard — has journeyed to the small frontier town once known as Oliftantshoek in search of her long-lost relations. Intent on putting the women of her family back into the history books, she quickly discovers that the crimes and tragedies still shadow the present. And now, Isabelle faces a race against time if she is to discover the truth, and escape with her life . . .
In the darkness of an old asylum, a young man unscrews the lid from a bottle of sleeping pills.
In the nearby village, two couples begin their day. Local doctor, Eric Parry, mulling secrets, sets out on his rounds, while his pregnant wife sleeps on in the warmth of their cottage. Across the field, in a farmhouse impossible to heat, funny, troubled Rita Simmons is also asleep, her head full of images of a past life her husband prefers to ignore. He’s been up for hours, tending to the needs of the small dairy farm he bought, a place where he hoped to create a new version of himself, a project that’s already faltering.
There is affection – if not always love – in both homes: these are marriages that still hold some promise. But when the ordinary cold of an English December gives way to violent blizzards – a true winter, the harshest in living memory – the two couples find their lives beginning to unravel.
Where do you hide when you can’t leave home? And where, in a frozen world, could you run to?
One afternoon many years ago, James Rebanks met an old woman on a remote Norwegian island. She lived and worked alone on a tiny rocky outcrop, caring for wild Eider ducks and gathering their down. Hers was a centuries-old trade that had once made men and women rich, but had long been in decline. Still, somehow, she seemed to be hanging on.
Back at home, Rebanks couldn’t stop thinking about the woman on the rocks. She was fierce and otherworldly – and yet strangely familiar. Years passed. Then, one day, he wrote her a letter, asking if he could return. Bring work clothes, she replied, and good boots, and come quickly: her health was failing. And so he travelled to the edge of the Arctic to witness her last season on the island.
This is the story of that season. It is the story of a unique and ancient landscape, and of the woman who brought it back to life. It traces the pattern of her work from the rough, isolated toil of bitter winter, to the elation of the endless summer light, when the birds leave behind their precious down for gathering, like feathered gold.
Slowly, Rebanks begins to understand that this woman and her world are not what he had previously thought. What began as a journey of escape becomes an extraordinary lesson in self-knowledge and forgiveness.
The Dancing Bear by Frances Faviell took me by surprise by how much I enjoyed it. I wasn’t expecting it to be so good.
Frances Faviell (1905-1959) was the pen name of Olivia Faviell Lucas, painter and author. After the war, in 1946, she went with her young son, John, to Berlin where Richard Parker, her second husband, had been posted as a senior civil servant in the post-war British Administration. It was here that she befriended the Altmann family, which prompted her first book The Dancing Bear (1954), a memoir of the Occupation seen through the eyes of both occupier and occupied. She later wrote three novels, A House on the Rhine (1955), Thalia (1957), and The Fledgeling (1958). These are now all available as Furrowed Middlebrow books.
The Dancing Bear covers the years from Autumn 1946 to Autumn 1949, with an Epilogue dated Autumn 1953 and, in this edition, an Afterword by John Parker, Faviell’s son. Her memoir is mainly about her friendship with the Altmann family – Frau Maria Altmann, her husband, Oskar and her children, Ursula, who works for a group of American service men, Lilli, a ballet dancer and son, Fritz, who was a member of the Hitler Youth and is now involved in the Black Market. Their eldest son. Kurt. is missing in Russia. Berlin had been divided into four sectors by the Allies – Britain, the United States, France and the Soviet Union – and Frances is horrified by the conditions she found. There were deaths from hunger and cold as the winter approached and queues for bread, milk, cigarettes, cinemas, buses and trams.
The complete and utter devastation of Berlin had shaken me profoundly. Nothing … had prepared one for the dead horror of this city. (page 15)
…
The complete absence of shops was something the Allied and German women felt. There was scarcely a single shop left standing in Berlin. The great stores and emporiums lay in dust, as did the great blocks of flats. One could not get the simplest articles except on the Black Market, and then only in exchange for cigarettes and coffee which had taken the place of money. (page 166)
The Altmanns live on the ground floor of a large ruined house – the upper storeys had disappeared and just the twisted iron girders remained, sticking up grotesquely against the sky. The ground floor looked very shaky and the windows were covered in cardboard and the door had been repaired from odd pieces of wood. It was freezing cold, and although they had a stove they had no fuel to light it and because electricity was rationed they had to use candles. There were two bedrooms, a small kitchen, a sitting room and a bathroom. With the help of her driver, Stampie, she does what she can to help them.
The British, unlike the Americans were forbidden to be friendly with the Germans, or to allow them in their homes or any of their buildings, clubs or messes and also to give them lifts, but these rules were frequently broken. At night Berlin ‘became a whirl of revelry’:
But if Berlin was a tragic city by day; at night it became a whirl of revelry. The Allies entertained on a scale which was extraordinary in a starving town, and if one went down to the Kurfurstendamm or the Kaiserdamm at night every cafe and night club was packed with revellers. (page 63)
I have only touched the surface of this book in this short post. It’s a moving memoir and I was fascinated by it all – the people, their situations, and their morale and attitudes as well as the condition of Berlin in the aftermath of World War Two. The realities of living under occupation are clearly shown, as well as the will to survive despite all the devastation and deprivation. I now want to read more of Frances Faviell’s books.
Every Friday Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Readerwhere you can share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading. You can also share from a book you want to highlight just because it caught your fancy.
My book this week is Extra Virgin: Amongst the Olive Groves of Liguria by Annie Hawes. I had completely forgotten that I had bought this book; I have no idea when or where I bought it, but it’s there on my bookshelves waiting to be read. I’m guessing I bought it after reading other books about life in Italy by Frances Mayes, Bella Tuscany and Under the Tuscan Sun about restoring a crumbling villa and building a new life in the Italian countryside, full of the pleasures of living in Tuscany – the sun, the food, the wine and the local people.
It begins with a Prologue:
Hearing the racket from above, Franco wades through his pile of prunings and peers up through the trailing branches. A pair of foreign females, skin so white it’s blinding in the glare of the sun, are messing about outside Pompeo’s old place, a few terraces uphill, shouting and giggling.
Followed by Chapter I :
Glamour , we soon spotted was not the outstanding feature of the village of Diano San Pietro.
Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice, where you grab a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% of an eBook), find one or more interesting sentences (no spoilers), and post them.
Page 56:
Here in Liguria you are surrounded by life-threatening terrors.
Synopsis from Amazon
A small stone house deep among the olive groves of Liguria, going for the price of a dodgy second-hand car. Annie Hawes and her sister, on the spot by chance, have no plans whatsoever to move to the Italian Riviera but find naturally that it’s an offer they can’t refuse. The laugh is on the Foreign Females who discover that here amongst the hardcore olive farming folk their incompetence is positively alarming. Not to worry: the thrifty villagers of Diano San Pietro are on the case, and soon plying the Pallid Sisters with advice, ridicule, tall tales and copious hillside refreshments …
Longlisted for the Wainwright Book Prize 2019, How to Catch a Mole and Find Yourself in Nature is a beautiful book by Marc Hamer and illustrated by Joe McLaren. It is part memoir, part a nature study of the British Countryside, part poetry, and, of course, about moles. It is a mine of information. After leaving school Marc Hamer was homeless for a while, then worked on the railway, before returning to education and studying fine art in Manchester and Stoke-on-Trent. He has worked in art galleries, marketing, graphic design and taught creative writing in a prison before becoming a gardener. And before writing this book he had been a traditional molecatcher for years.
I read the book in January and have been wondering what to write about it, mulling it over in my mind. I’ve made several attempts to write this post as it’s not a straight forward non fiction book. He tells the story of his life intermingled with that of the mole, writing about what his life as a molecatcher was like, how it affected him and why eventually he decided to stop. The result is that this book is a mix of recollections and information about moles. He doesn’t write his recollections in chronological order – the harder he tries to remember, the more his memory seems to shift and change as though he is looking into a kaleidoscope where the colours remain the same and although the patterns are slightly different every time, the picture remains true to itself.
He no longer catches moles and says:
Molecatching is a traditional skill that has given me a good life but I am old and tired of hunting and it has taught me what I wanted to learn.
I’ve only seen a mole once when our cat caught what I think, sadly, was a baby one, and I know very little about them. Our garden has mole hills on the edges of it, piles of earth that the moles have turned over, and dug to a fine crumb – ‘the kind of damp rich earth that farmers and gardeners love for its texture and nutrients.’ So, I’m comfortable with having moles in the garden.
Not everybody is happy about them, however as Hamer points out:
Apparently sane people lose sleep over the chaos the moles create. We do not like to lose control of our property it makes us feel uncomfortable, impermanent, weak. Moles can ruin domestic lawns, and I have seen real hatred developing in homeowners as they lose control and ownership of their gardens. An obsession grows and an endless, unwinnable war can take over their lives. (pages 17-18)
Moles are small and powerful, moving at speed in their tunnels hunting worms and digging about 20 metres of tunnel in a day. They pack the soil into the roof and walls, pushing the soil ahead until there is too much to push and then make a diversion pushing the earth out onto the surface making a molehill. They go where the worms go. I was fascinated by this fact:
In times of plenty a mole will dig a little room in the wall of his tunnel, then gather lots of worms and bite their heads off, leaving them all knotted together in a section of tunnel. We call this the worm larder; it is a fairly common sight. A tunnel system could have any number of worm larders. (pages 202-203)
I was also interested in his thoughts on gardening. Here are a few extracts:
Gardening is not nature: it is using the laws of nature and science to impose our will on a place; and for some people this need for control goes to extremes. (page 19)
As a gardener I do not dig any more: I hoe off the weeds and top-dress the gardens in autumn with compost just as nature does with falling leaves and grasses. This keeps the moisture in and the weeds suppressed; it allows the worms to break up hard soil and increases microbial activity, allowing life to expand its range, and lets air and water into the soil. Moles do this for us. Some gardeners still double-dig, but more and more people are coming to understand the importance of microbes and fungi, and often see digging as destructive and prefer to stay off the soil to avoid compacting it. (pages 58-59)
And
A fine-looking garden is a sterile place. A perfect green lawn is only kept that way by continually dousing it with chemicals. A lawn that is not treated will naturally become home to a massive number of species of birds and worms and native wild plants, crane-fly larvae, beetles, invertebrates. (page 223)
I don’t usually include so many quotations and such lengthy ones, but I’ll end with one more quotation:
Having worked all my life, created a family, discovered a home, I feel as secure as a working-class man ever feels, and I feel a sense of equality again with the crow and the toad and the hawthorn, with the rain and wind. I am them and they are me. . . . I am just another animal, another tree, another wild flower in the meadow among billions of others. . . . There is something deeply magnificent in being just ordinary. (page 115)
BooksPlease 