Six Degrees of Separation: December 2020

Six Degrees of Separation is hosted by Kate of booksaremyfavouriteandbest.com.

This month we begin with Judy Blume's famous novel Are you there God? it's me, Margaret.

I had never read any Judy Blume before, though I had read an interview with her in which she sounded like an American version of Jacqueline Wilson, ie a writer who still understood what it was like to be a teenager (or in this book, a pre-teen). I decided to buy a copy of Are you there God? It's me, Margaret and I am so glad I did. Although it was written fifty years ago, the story is fresh and relevant: it  addresses many of the worries and problems that young girls still have today, and no doubt will have in fifty years' time: friendships, family, school, and that over-riding need to fit in. Here's what I wrote about it in another post:

Margaret has moved from New York to New Jersey so that her parents (who have brought Margaret up with no religion after their own 'mixed' marriage has caused her mother's parents to disown her) can afford a house with a garden. 

Like most 11 year old girls, Margaret worries about a lot of things - but she also discusses her worries with God:

'Suppose I hate my new school? Suppose everyone there hates me? Please help me God. Don't let New Jersey be too horrible.'

Margaret does make friends, in particular Gretchen, Janie and the bossy, hilarious Nancy, who encourages them all to do exercises to hasten their development;

'I must, I must, increase my bust!'

and decides that they will all keep and share lists of the boys they want to kiss.

I liked the way the girls were shown to have such normal pre-teen girl obsessions and worries, but also that Margaret could be serious too, with her project investgating different religions (and not finding the God she talks to privately in any of them.) I loved her New York Jewish grandmother, who plans covert outings just for the two of them, lets her take her shoes off at Lincoln Center concerts, and travels ‘all the way’ to New Jersey by train (which she hates) to bring carrier bags full of Jewish food, because she cannot believe that any good stuff can be available outside the city (or that any sane person would want to move there from New York in the first place.) And I admired the way Judy Blume was able to create parents that were both ‘normal’ and funny – despite being embarrassed by her Mum and Dad from time to time, Margaret gets on fine with them really. 

At the end of the novel, Margaret has learned some important life lessons – not everyone tells the truth, no-one is as confident as they appear, the best-looking boys are rarely the nicest – but this is all shown very subtly, there is never a preachy tone to it.  

Although I didn't read Judy Blume's novel when I was a teenager, a coming-of-age book that I did read at that time was Peggy Woodford's wonderful Please Don't Go. It's about a girl on an exchange trip (remember them?) - her first visit to France (Brittany). I read it when I had just come back from staying with my own French penfriend. Like Mary, I had been thrilled and overwhelmed by the sheer difference of France - the food, the houses, the countryside, the people, the way of life; it was all so fabulously French, and so very much not English.

If a Breton wall was sunny, it had fruit not flowers growing up it. The garden was full of fleshy green artichokes and solid sunflowers....I adored the smells in that little house; of garlic cooking in oil and butter, of fresh bread, of chocolate warming in the morning for our breakfast.....The morning after I arrived was clear and hot, so we had breakfast outside at a battered tin table, and drank our chocolate from bowls. Then we ran down to the beach; the tide was high so we bathed at once in the sparkling green water. No bathe was ever better than the morning bathe when the tide was high. 

 And like Mary, I had of course fallen madly in love (with my sulky penfriend's older brother.) I'm afraid the similarities ended there, as said brother was completely unaware of the undying devotion I was prepared to pledge to him - but Mary, who first obsesses over an older married man,  eventually has a wonderful romance with Joel, a 16 year old friend of the family. It is 1960; Jacques Brel's Ne Me Quitte Pas is playing in every beachside bar: 

And so it happened that in my first afternoon at Tréguinac I saw the beautiful man, I met Joël, and I heard Ne me quitte pas for the first time; all three in their different ways were going to change my life. 

I won't reveal what happens at the end of the summer, but the subtitle on the front cover of the book sums it up:  'A love story to break your heart.' And it certainly broke mine, in the most moving, delicious way.

I'd never forgotten Please Don't Go, but as it's not especially famous, I'd always thought it was a book only I had read. I treasured it as my little secret. A few years ago, idly flipping through reviews on Amazon, I came across it and was amazed; so many women of my age had loved, and continued to love, this book. It had stayed with us all over the years. I don't suppose any of us ended up with our French boys, but we had all hung on to those memories. Thank you Peggy Woodford.

HE Bates' A Breath of French Air may also be set in Brittany, but it definitely doesn't feature broken hearts. It's the second of Bates's Larkin family novels, featuring wheeler-dealer Pop, easy-going Ma, beautiful eldest daughter Marietta, her new husband and ex-taxman Charley, and the rest of the Larkins' numerous children. Ma is fed up with the rain in Kent; she wants some sunshine. Spurred on by the rather better-travelled Charley, Pop decides to take the whole brood off to Brittany for a holiday. He's also hoping that a change of air might kick start the production of grandchildren, as he's getting a bit worried about Charley's failure to impregnate his beloved daughter. 

The original Larkin books are full of sexism, racism and very inappropriate behaviour (mainly by the lascivious Pop). If you can put these aside as being of their time (this book was written in 1959), A Breath of French Air is a very enjoyable romp through another episode in the Larkins' carefree and largely careless lives. My full review of the book is here.

In John Hadfield's Love on a Branch Line we meet someone very like Marietta's Charley; Jasper Pye is a very respectable civil servant who overhears his girfriend describing him as boring. Determined to make radical changes, he tries to resign from his job and become a painter in Paris, but his boss persuades him instead to travel to Arcady Hall in Suffolk, his mission being to close down an obscure government department that appears to have done nothing much since the war.

When Jasper arrives at Arcady Hall (having had to walk the last 4 miles because the branch line he thought still ran has closed down), he discovers that Lord Flamborough lives on a steam train on the defunct line, and the goverment department is run by three members of staff only, two of whom spend their time looking after the estate rather than doing any government business, while the third just makes up the statistics she sends back to London. 

More interesting to Jasper, though, are Lord F's three beautiful daughters, and he soon couldn't care less about the government as he's too busy having relationships with all three of them.

After many adventures, Jasper has to make a decision; will he close the department down and go back to London, or stay in this eccentric rural idyll, where he has become so popular?  In the end, of course, everything turns out for the best, though not quite as Jasper (or the reader) may have anticipated. Love on a Branch Line was written in 1959. I didn't read it till maybe thirty years later, but really it is timeless, and great fun. The book was adapted for television in 1994 but I didn't watch it, just in case it spoiled my own ideas about arnarchic Arcady.

My current read also involves a train; in fact it's set almost entirely on two of them. In David Baldacci's The Christmas Train, cynical ex-war correspondent Tom is obliged to take the Capitol Limited from Washington DC to Chicago, and the Southwest Chief from there to Los Angeles, to meet up with his on/off partner, high-maintenance voice-over artist Lelia. He's never taken a long distance train before, and is only doing so now because one too many arguments with airport security has landed him firmly on the 'no-fly list.' 

The South West Chief (American-Rails.com)

Tom's going to make the most of the trip by writing an article about it. He's hoping the trains will resemble the one enjoyed by Cary Grant and Eva Marie Sainte in North by North West, and although he soon realises that those days are long gone, both trains still sound pretty luxurious to me. As they chug across North America (Amtrak not being known for the speed of its passenger services) Tom meets his fellow passengers and crew, who include a film director, a mystic, a retired priest, a runaway young couple, a mysterious old lady, a singing conductress, a boys' choir - and the love of his life, Eleanor, from whom he stupidly walked away some years previously. The plot flies along as the snows falls and the worst storm in generations closes in ....and I can't tell you what happens next because I still have 80+ pages of this excellent book to go. 

Snow is always a great backdrop for a story. Characters can be lost in it, marooned by it, or snugly indoors beside the fire, looking out as the blizzard rages. I prefer the latter scenario, so, even though I also used it last month, I turn shamelessly to Kenneth Grahame for my final book, and to the wonderful Christmassy scene in Chapter 5: Dulce Domum of The Wind in the Willows. When, on a snowy winter's night, Ratty accompanies Mole back to his little riverside home, they soon have visitors;

'"I think it must be the field mice" replied the Mole, with a touch of pride in his manner. "They go round regularly at this time of year. They're quite an institution in these parts".... It was a pretty sight, and a seasonable one, that met their eyes when they flung the door open. In the forecourt, lit by the dim rays of a horn lantern, some eight or ten little field mice stood in a semicircle. red worsted comforters round their throats...and forthwith their shrill little voices uprose on the air, singing one of the old-time carols that their forefathers composed in fields that were fallow and held by frost, or when snow-bound in chimney corners, and handed down to be sung in the miry street to lamp-lit windows at Yule-time.'

Margaret arrives in New Jersey in midsummer while Ratty and Mole listen to carols in deep midwinter - but Margaret and Mole have something important in common. They both want to fit in, to make friends, to find their place in their own communities. And in their own ways, both do. 

Next month's starter book is Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet. Anyone can join in (and you don't have to have read the books); full details of how to do so are here: https://booksaremyfavouriteandbest.com/6-degrees-of-separation-meme/