Reading Week: Being Mortal, Bees, Meadowland and Gods in Ruins

Lady in the Mirror by Harold Dunbar

The In-Charge tells me that I'm not very good at taking time off.
He has always had the knack of pacing himself. He does a job and when he gets tired, he stops and does something else. Later on, he goes back to job A.
How enviable that is.
How sickening.

The thing is, my To Do List is endless, so I throw myself at things like a headless chicken, and if - for any reason - a gap opens up in my schedule, I gleefully try to squash in an extra, unscheduled job. Even then, I often end up feeling as if I've achieved nothing by nightfall.
'Never a moment to lose,' the In-Charge says. 'That's your problem. One of them,' he adds.
I didn't ask what the others were.

However, I've been tired recently.  The sort of tired that a good night's sleep isn't curing. There seems to have been a lot going on this last while, and on top of everything else I pulled a muscle in my right arm in November and it isn't getting better.
So I've taken a week off and spent it reading.
It's been bliss.

Reading Woman with Dog - Birbee

Perhaps it's my Protestant upbringing, but normally I find it impossible to read during daylight hours. Nagging voices in my head taunt me with laziness, list things I ought to be doing, threaten the devil itching to commandeer idle hands. I'd have to be ill in bed to read a book during the day, but - thank heavens - I'm never ill in bed. The trouble is, I'm so tired when I climb in at bedtime that I generally fall asleep after a few pages, so the pile of books beside my bed gets higher and higher. In fact, the In-Charge once asked me if I could please sort them out, as he couldn't vacuum round my side. I blush to confess there were 73 books in tottering stacks, but I have turned over a new leaf since then, and the heap is a good deal more modest.

Angelica, The Artist's Daughter Reading by Vanessa Bell

I started with Atul Gawande's slim volume, Being Mortal, thanks to Isobel who recommended it.

For such a serious book, it was amazingly easy to read, and I would urge everyone to get it.

Gawande, as a doctor, sees more clearly than most that as science has given us unprecedented quantity of life most of us have stopped considering its quality. He shows how easily, without our even realising it, the goal posts keep shifting. I found the book an eye-opener. It reaffirmed many things that I already think, opened my mind to possibilities I hadn't been aware of - especially in how we care for people, and made me realise how important it is that each of us choose how we spend the final stages of this one, special, unrepeatable life that we are given. 

Fairy Tales by Mary L Gow

Then I moved on to The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

It's an older book, that I'd picked off a swap shelf recently. In fact, I nearly put it back, but I'm glad I didn't. I loved it. I loved every bit of it. It's about a 14 year old girl in South Carolina in the mid '60s,  consumed by half memories of her mother who died when she was four, and the problems of living with an angry and unloving father. How she deals with these, with Rosaleen, her 'nanny' and everything else that happens, is recounted with humour, insight and an incredibly sure touch. It was funny, it was sad, it was a glimpse of life in a different place and era. Wonderful. 

I believe it was made into a movie, but I haven't seen it.

  

Painting by John Ennis

I have now moved on to the wonderful Kate Atkinson's most recent book, A God in Ruins. I happened to see it in Waterstones when I was in the UK last week. Oh Waterstones, where art thou? I miss you! Easons just isn't the same, I'm afraid. Anyway, I picked it up automatically - I love Kate Atkinson, but have only this week opened the cover. Imagine then my joy and delight to find that it is a sequel to her wonderful, absorbing, strange but seductive Life After Life which I read at the end of last year. Oh, the joy of being reunited with characters you thought you'd said goodbye to! I am still in the depths of the book, but once again I find myself under Ms Atkinson's spell.

Mrs Graafland-Marres by Robert Archibald Graafland

In between all these delights, I have been dipping in and out of Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field by John Lewis-Stempel. On the face of it, you'd wonder how much one could write about a field, but from the first sentence I was hooked. Ironically, words cannot describe how beautifully this book is written - sometimes Stempel's prose is so aching beautiful that I have to go back and read the page all over again. Aside from that, his one-ness with the field is remarkable, as if it is just an extension of himself. I have been dipping in and out only because I want the book to last for as long as possible. The whole year would be nice - especially as it is written in monthly chapters - but there's no hope of that, I will have gobbled it up all too soon.

 A Favourite Author by Poul Friis Nybo

And, as the icing on the cake, I've been catching up with back issues of The English Garden which is, for my money, the best magazine out there. My mother gave me a subscription for my birthday a year or two ago, and I have enjoyed it so much, I've carried on. I came back from the UK armed with the last two editions and have been reading them - again in small bites - from cover to cover. 

Heaven.

  

 The Reader by Roberto Ploeg

I'm not quite sure how I'll switch out of this mode. It becomes quite moorish after a day or two. Especially when the wind is howling and rain is battering on the windows, as it's doing now.

Farewell, Seamus Heaney

Portrait of Seamus Heaney by Peter Edwards c 1987

I was fortunate enough to hear Seamus Heaney reading his poetry some years ago.
Many, many poets should be prevented at all costs from reading their own work.
Perhaps it is a fear of being overcome by emotion that makes so many writers assume a toneless, deadpan voice when reading, or perhaps they take their work too seriously, but whatever the reason, the results can be dire.


It was not like that with Seamus Heaney.
He sat easily on a stool and talked about growing up in Northern Ireland.
I was just one of an audience, but it felt as if there was no one else in the room, as if his words were in response to some question I had asked.
The images of his home, of relatives and neighbours, of life in Derry during the 40s and 50s, were painted swiftly and vividly and economically, but they were real and three-dimensional and made me feel as if I had known them, or at the very least, visited them for myself.  And he spoke poignantly of his father, and of rural traditions in his local area, and of the Troubles.

Perhaps in consequence of that, his poems, when he read them, seemed to speak of things I was familiar with. They sprang off the page and took life and form in my mind's eye, and even all these years later I remember clearly the pictures conjured by his soft understatement, the emotions that his words never actually stated.

This is one of the poems he read that day:

Mid-Term Break 

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying--
He had always taken funerals in his stride--
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were "sorry for my trouble,"
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four foot box, a foot for every year.

And here is another:

Thatcher

Bespoke for weeks, he turned up some morning
Unexpectedly, his bicycle slung
With a light ladder and a bag of knives.
He eyed the old rigging, poked at the eaves,

Opened and handled sheaves of lashed wheat-straw.
Next, the bundled rods: hazel and willow
Were flicked for weight, twisted in case they'd snap.
It seemed he spent the morning warming up:

Then fixed the ladder, laid out well honed blades
And snipped at straw and sharpened ends of rods
That, bent in two, made a white-pronged staple
For pinning down his world, handful by handful.

Couchant for days on sods above the rafters,
He shaved and flushed the butts, stitched all together
Into a sloped honeycomb, a stubble patch,
And left them gaping at his Midas touch.

I met him later, at a garden party.

He was affable and friendly, easy to talk to. I remember thinking What do you say to someone who has at his fingertips the words that are only on the tip of your tongue?

I remember him looking at me as if waiting for a question he thought I was about to ask

Meaningful words eluded my fingertips and my tongue.

But we had a pleasant conversation and aside from our chitchat, I did ask him something.

'Of your own books, which is your favourite?'

He looked surprised and after a few moments, he said: 'I suppose I'd have to say Death of a Naturalist.'

I don't know if that was his favourite, but I can understand any writer having an umbilical link to their first book, their first-born.

I have read many of his books since then, and long ago also bought The Rattle Bag which Heaney edited alongside Ted Hughes. I had to buy it, for the simple reason that I was once lucky enough to meet Ted Hughes too.

If a poem is an image, written on the heart with words, then Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes were both truly poets.

It is a sad day when the Earth loses one of her poets, and if a poem is an image, written on the heart with words, then Seamus Heaney - and Ted Hughes - were truly poets. And how badly the Earth needs poets,  someone who speaks for her and of her without guile or sleight of wit, someone who sees beyond what others see, and who, in touching on her truths, adds something, rather than depleting, constantly depleting.

Dermot Blackburn's portrait of Seamus Heaney, 2010

Poems: Mid-Term Break and Thatcher by Seamus Heaney

Helmingham Gardens: Walled-In Heaven

I've been in Suffolk, on the far eastern side of England.
Beautiful Suffolk, with cloudless blue skies full of shrieking swifts, endless fields of ripening, golden corn, stately trees marking horizons and hedgerows, and picture-postcard cottages straight off the lids of chocolate boxes.

Picture postcard houses

It was lovely to be there again - pottering in my parents' garden; listening to the church bells; visiting antique/vintage/junk shops with my sister; and whiling away scorching afternoons beside the open French windows, chatting with my mother over some gentle crochet.

Not to mention being almost entirely off-line.

Now I am back at home - to a rapturous welcome from Model Dog and the TeenQueen, it's true - but to the less enjoyable realities of normal life as well. My dear friend has been in a car smash and is in hospital with two broken ankles, the TeenQueen, in an enthusiastic but misplaced attempt to defend her home from canine intruders, has bitten another friend's lurcher, and the rain it raineth every day.

At lunchtime I rushed out to feed some roses and young blossom trees - a job best done in wet weather - and it was only as I changed into dry clothes afterwards that it dawned on me: a week ago this very afternoon, I was visiting one of the most beautiful gardens I have ever seen - the walled garden at Helmingham Hall.
How I wish I'd had my camera. My phone isn't the same thing at all. Apologies, Helmingham, for not doing you justice.

Side view of Helmingham Hall

It's not very far from my mother's village, but for some reason I've never been there before.
I shall certainly be going there again. In fact, I'm wondering if I might move in without them noticing.
There are several gardeners there, but I'm sure they could use an extra pair of hands, and I'd work very hard.
The Head Gardener, I was told, has been there for 50 years, since he was a boy.
It shows.
And the lady of the house is a garden designer.
That shows too.

I'm sure the walled garden at Helmingham has always been a thing of beauty, but now it has reached the peak of perfection.
You have to walk around the lovely Tudor Hall to get to it - along the side of a moat on which water lilies drift lazily in the afternoon sunshine. At the end, a notice on the gate says something along the lines of 'For the sake of the deer, please keep this gate closed', and there is a half-wild, half-mown path with topiary hedges that entice you ever onwards.

Even then you only catch glimpses of the joys ahead.
Have you ever noticed that about the best gardens? They lure you bit by bit. Never is everything revealed at once, and just when you think you have arrived at the pièce de résistance, a path - or a doorway - or an arch cut into the hedge tells you that there is more - still more - to come.

So it is at Helmingham.
After the moat, the topiary hedges, and the casually thrown out lure of a dappled apple walk, finally you arrive in a walled enclosure, with trees, urns overflowing with white cosmos and lavender-edged flower borders that look  like oil paintings, in which hide covered seats where you can sit out of the sun yet still smell the hot, sweet scent of roses.

The ante-room

But it's only the ante-room.

Huge pillars entwined with roses and topped with winged horses' heads mark the entrance to the actual walled garden. They hold massive wrought iron gates of which I am deeply jealous.
Although to be honest, it wasn't just the gates I lusted after.

Someone once said to me: 'One garden is much like another.'
Wrong.
Gardens are like books. They are all different, although some may fall into the same genre. I have seen gardens that leave you depressed, others that leave you unmoved. There are many that disappoint and many that surprise and delight. But the best of gardens take you to another place entirely, a place that I, for one, never want to come back from.

Inside its high, aged brick walls, Helmingham's rectangular garden is broken up geometrically. A central grass path is edged with wide herbaceous borders backed by fences, railings or obelisks supporting endless roses, clematis and other climbing beauties.

The central path

And at regular intervals there are other paths leading off to the sides.
Some of these are arched allées - covered with runner beans, or wisteria or sweet peas.

Sometimes there are just more grass paths, with more herbaceous borders.

And hidden away in between are long rectangular beds of vegetables, or cutting flowers, or lavender.

Set against the outer walls, in between the planting, are benches and amusing topiary specimens.

The Snowman

The armchair so you can sit and watch your leeks grow

And there are side gates - of which I'm also exceedingly jealous.

Exceedingly jealous.

There is also the Coach House Tea Room serving delicious cakes to revive you for part two - the knot garden, the rose garden, and a newly planted garden with lots of trees...
Or maybe just a second, leisurely tour of the walled garden, where you can sit and watch the bees falling over each other to get at the veronica and the allium and the honeysuckle - and everything else. I've never seen so many bees in one place.




It was so hot last Wednesday that I was glad to slip out of the back gate for a moment in the shade, where a sort of secondary moat - or perhaps it was originally a carp pond - runs around the outside of the walled garden, dividing it from the Apple Walk and the Deer Park. It reflects the magnificent, graceful trees, and does what water always does. It brings heaven into the garden.

As if it wasn't there already.

Behind the walled garden

Between the Apple Walk and the Walled Garden

What else can I say? Except hie thee hence to Helmingham.
It's part garden, part oil painting, and part heaven.

Desert Island Women

Today is International Women's Day.
There are so many 'days' that you could make following them the sole focus of your life.
We have - apparently - just had 'National Cereal Day' and I even heard something about Pyjamas.
Don't even ask - I am as mystified as you are.
But International (maybe the Inter national is a clue here) Women's Day is something else.

Last year my CyberFriend, Isobel, marked the day on her blog, by paying tribute to some of the women who had influenced her life, and I have often thought of it since.
This year I would like to do the same.

Truthfully, I think they are too numerous to mention, but you have to start somewhere, and it is not far-fetched to say that these women's hands have helped shape the helix of my DNA. For that, I would like to thank them.

Rumer Godden with one of her beloved Pekingese

Perhaps I would have been a writer, no matter what. But it was being immersed in the magicical world of books when I was young that made me want to perpetually recreate that magic, and amongst others Elizabeth Goudge, Rumer Godden, Louisa May Alcott, Kathleen Wendy Peyton, Edith Nesbit, Rosemary Sutcliffe, Mary Noel Streatfeild, Frances Hodgson Burnett, the Bronte sisters, Georgette Heyer, Daphne du Maurier, Monica Dickens and Barbara Timewell were amongst my formative fairy godmothers. Later the influences ballooned and it would be hard to isolate a few names (though I'm sure I will do so, after this has been posted).

When you are a child, pictures can lead you into another world as surely as words, though they are not always necessary if your imagination is constantly straining at the bit. But, like most people, I have loved some books purely for their illustrations and discovered others through my son's eyes; and the images they have created in my head will be there forever. Janet and Anne Grahame Johnstone, Shirley Hughes, Jane Ray, Nicola Bayley, Cicely Mary Barker, Sheila Moxley and Margaret Tarrant are just some of the illustrators who have hugely enriched my life.

The Young King by Anne Grahame Johnstone - 'borrowed' from My Christmas Book of Stories & Carols pub by Award

And then of course, there is the poetry. Where to begin with poetry? Well why not with Carol Ann Duffy or Elizabeth Jennings, with Mary Oliver or Dorothy Parker, Carole Satyamurti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, HD, Kathleen Coates, Jenny Joseph, Edna St Vincent Millay, Christina Rossetti - Ruth Fainlight, Diane Wakoski, Maura Dooley, I could go on and on...

Next it would have to be images. I couldn't exist without beautiful images. But if I was lost with the poet-list, I'm really sunk now, there are just too many, so perhaps I should keep this even more personal. Some of the images that make my life special every day have been created by Annabel Langrish, Hilda van Stockum, Heidi Wickham, Sarah Brecht and Sylvia Ripon. 

My treasured portrait of Top Dog by Sarah Brecht

And so far I haven't even included the women who make me laugh, like Sue Perkins, Jo Brand and Victoria Wood; the ones whose gardens have inspired me - Beth Chatto, Vita Sackville West and the Empress Josephine who bred so many roses; the ones who have filled life with small inspirations, like Francine Lawrence and Susy Smith - both editors of Country Living Magazine; the Hildegardes, Dame Julians and (again) Elizabeth Goudges who open up avenues into inspirations of other kinds; the Sandi Toksvigs, WTFs and Kirsty Warks for their ascerbic commentaries; the Audrey Hepburns, Yasmin le Bons and Sandra Bullocks of this world who are just hopelessly beautiful; the Candace Bahouths, Laura Ashleys and Tricia Guilds for exploding me into colour and pattern way back when; the Ella Fitzgeralds, Lesley Garrets and Rebecca Fergusons who make me wish I could sing; or the Svetlana Beriosovas, Marie Ramberts and Darcy Bussells who make me wish I could dance.

And then, of course, there is my mother, who taught me the joy of the little things in life.

My mother - from whom I also learned to love animals

I don't think Kirsty Young would let me take this amazing crowd to my desert island, but - in a way - I'd be taking them all anyway.
Thank you, wonderful women.

Mellow But Too Fruitful

Isn't is rather wonderful that most things mellow with age.
Even our irascible selves.
Even a vase of flowers.

It looks even prettier at the end of it's life than it did at the beginning.

The only thing that doesn't seem to mellow is my garden.

It is like a perpetually unruly toddler, filled with boundless energy and only waiting for my back to be turned to do exactly what it likes.

I am exhausted by my garden.

I love it, as presumably one loves one's toddler - however naughty. But it wipes me out.

After a month of ceaseless work, one tiny patch feels vaguely tamed - although once the rain returns even that will soon prove to have been an illusion.

Having - by some thoughtless oversight on the part of my parents - only one pair of hands, the other 95% of the garden is, so far, untouched. But even now it is summoning up all its newly awakened zest for life, and is gathering strength to burst forth with whatever it feels like growing.

I wonder what it will produce as 'This Year's Weed - DaDah!'

Not verbena bonariensis or papaver orientalis, I don't suppose, and needless to say, yet again, I will not be consulted in any of its decisions.

It is at times like these that one needs comfort.

Like many people, I keep a pile of books beside my bed.
It tends to grow rather than diminish, as I am very bad at moving on the ones I have read - there is always some quote I'm intending to copu out, or else I simply forget to put them back on the shelf.
The In-Charge once asked, very politely (all things considered), if I could deal with the pile, as he hadn't been able to hoover on my side of the bed. As I redistributed them, I counted.
73 books. I was shocked, but also pleasantly surprised to know that 73 books could be accommodated in such a relatively small space.
It gave me hope for when we come to 'downsize'.

The pile of books is a great comfort.
There is always some treasure to soothe my troubled mind or drown my woes in balm.
And of course, I never put all the books back on the shelf. One or two have to stay within handy reach, and this is the one I am reaching for now.

As you can see, it is well-thumbed

It never fails to lift my spirits when the garden reminds me who's boss, or gets uppity.
Which is surprising really, as it is full of magnificent pictures of magnificent gardens where not a weed dare show its face.

Come here to me, as they say in Ireland, and I'll give you a few tasters - several from France and one from America:

Words (for once) fail me

I gave up longing for this when I learned how many hours of sunshine a day irises need to thrive

I want this house just as much as I'd like the garden, so let me know when you're moving out Michel

Perfection. And if anyone has an urn like this that they don't want anymore, please get in touch.

But it doesn't really matter that these gardens are perfect in every detail.
That they each have - no doubt - teams of devoted tenders who pick up every stray leaf and tenderly clip the box hedges before breakfast, lift the tulips after elevenses and sow more peas in the afternoon. That because there are no weeds, it only takes a stroll around at dusk, glass in hand, to check for unwelcome arrivals in any of the flowerbeds.

I suppose it is more about aspiration and inspiration.
About the triumph of imagination over reality.
It is about rekindling the essence of your passion.
And I guess it's cheaper to drown your woes in balm than in champagne.

So if there are any garden-lovers out there, hie thee hence to your local bookshop and order a copy.
Give yourself a well-earned break.

Fashion Designers' Gardens

by Francis Dorleans, photographs by Claire de Virieu
ISBN: 9 780304 354375
My copy published by Cassell & Co