Six Degrees of Separation: August 2021

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

Our starter book for August is Postcards from the Edge by Carrie Fisher. 

I have not read this novel, which I believe was based on Fisher’s own experiences with drugs and rehab in Hollywood; although it is highly acclaimed, I doubt I will read it, and I don’t want to write a chain about addictions. Instead I will focus on ‘postcards’ as a form of communication, and my next book is about a young girl on holiday.

In Don’t Forget To Write by Martina Selway Rosie is packed off to stay with her Grandad and Aunty Mabel on their Yorkshire farm. She doesn’t want to go, as the first page of her letter home to Mum makes abundantly clear;

‘I didn’t want you to leave me at Grandad’s.  When you went I cried and cried. Grandad said, “Come on Old Ginger Nut, dry those tears and let’s see if Aunty Mabel has got our tea ready.” I don’t like being called “Old Ginger Nut.” I want to come home.’

Rosie’s letter describes her meeting the farm dogs Bess and Rags, attacking one of Aunty’s rock cakes, and losing her wobbly tooth – which causes her to worry about whether the Tooth Fairies will know where she is;

‘How will they know I’m staying at Grandad’s? I wish I was at home.’

But as the days pass, Rosie starts to enjoy being on the farm – collecting the eggs, finding photos of her Mum as a baby, going fishing (unsuccessfully) with Grandad – and starting to think about the things she’s going to miss when she goes home. The letter ends;

‘PLEASE let me stay a little longer with Grandad. I don’t want to come home yet. Lots of love from Old Ginger Nut.’

 The story is illustrated with pictures of Rosie’s adventures. It’s a lovely book to read to children, and shows them that not all new experiences are to be feared.

Holidays are a rich source of fiction; my next book is set mainly in Bognor, a most respectable (at least then) resort on the Sussex coast where I myself spent a childhood holiday (at the rather smartly named, but rather less smartly decorated, Riviera Lido Holiday Club.) The Fortnight in September by RC Sherriff, observes an ordinary suburban family, the Stevens, on their annual trip to the seaside. Nothing exceptional happens, but the parents, grown up children and younger schoolboy son are all so beautifully written that this remains one of my favourite books several years after I first read it. Sherriff shows us the inner thoughts of each of the member of the family, all of them decent, kind people, all with their own hopes and worries, as they hire a beach hut, play cricket on the sand, take walks, go to the pub (father only!) and swim.

The Riviera Lido Holiday Club, Nyetimber, Bognor

The Fortnight in September was published in 1931, and it is rich with period detail of the kind I have not seen elsewhere. Before reading it, I had no idea that people who stayed at a boarding house generally bought their own food, which the landlady would then cook for them – so Mrs Stevens goes out every morning in search of good meat, and a barrel of beer is ordered for Mr Stevens.  But the world is changing – the parents know that this might be their last holiday with their grown-up children, who are secretly making other plans (but don’t want to hurt their parents), and they all notice (but of course don’t mention) that their boarding house is shabbier than last year, and that their landlady is struggling. But that’s all that happens; at the end of the fortnight, they board the train, go home to south London, and are delighted to see their house, their cat and their garden. It’s hard to explain just how good this book is, but I love it, and I know I am not alone.

Not everyone has such good clean fun in Sussex though. In Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, the focus is on the shady underworld of gangsters, spivs and prostitution. Brighton Rock was first published in 1938 – just seven years after The Fortnight In September – but it gives us a very different take on a seaside resort, and one in which beach, sea and sun are hardly mentioned. Pinkie, a teenage sociopath, has taken over leadership of a gang after its previous head, Kite, has been killed. He in turn murders Hale, whom he believes to be responsible for Kite’s death – but when he realises that a naïve waitress, Rose, knows the truth, he has somehow to prevent her from giving evidence against him. A wife can’t be compelled to stand as a witness against her husband, so Pinkie, who loathes all women, and especially Rose, must marry her to buy her silence. He has, however, not reckoned on Ida, a decent, sensible woman who had met Hale just before he died, and who soon works out what is going on. 

The tension and barely controlled (and often not controlled) violence in this book makes it truly gripping, and – this being Greene – Pinkie and Rose’s Catholic faith is a central force, with its concepts of sin and morality compared to Ida’s non-religious belief in decency and justice. I first encountered Brighton Rock as a teenager, and recently heard it read (on BBC Sounds) by Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, who brought tremendous nuance and menace to the story.

 
When I was a child we sometimes had a day out in Brighton; although I was of course unaware of its seedier parts and just wanted to go on the pier (and later to the Royal Pavilion), it was even then a fairly tacky place. Now it is super-smart and cool, a favourite with the LGBT+ community, and home to many of the more ‘alternative’ celebrities. The last time I was there it was overflowing with great cafes and bars. The pier was still great too, and as I had done as a child, we got fish and chips and ate them on the train back to London, well satisfied with our trip to the seaside.

Fowey - image (c) Cornish Gems Ltd

Continuing with the theme of my own childhood holidays, we now head westwards along the coast to Cornwall. My mother’s oldest school friend Marge moved there with her husband Sid and their three children. They did this because Sid, a child of the London slums, had once been taken there on a charity holiday, and was so impressed with it he had ever afterwards been determined to go back. In adult life had become a bit of a wheeler-dealer, and eventually bought a big house on the Esplanade at Fowey. There I spent many happy summer holidays, although I’m sure I’d hardly recognise it now, so popular has it become with monied Londoners.

Catherine Alliott’s A Cornish Summer, is full of these affluent people – but is surprisingly engaging, and good fun. Flora, an artist and the divorced single mother of public schoolboy Peter, is invited to her ex’s family’s lavish clifftop home to paint a portrait of her ex-father-in-law. What she doesn’t know until she arrives is that also in residence will be her ex Hugo, his lovely new wife, their perfect children, and Hugo’s best friend, her arch enemy Tommy, complete with leggy blonde Janey Karachin. This is very much a story of how the rich live, but it is also full of well-developed, believable characters and a plot that races along almost as fast as the yachts in the annual regatta. Much as I wanted to loathe these entitled, pampered people, I loved every minute in their company. Alliott brings various threads together to lead us to a convincing and satisfying ending – a great read, and one you certainly don’t have to be on a beach to enjoy. My full review of A Cornish Summer is here.

My final book this month continues the Cornish theme; it is by an author I’ve no doubt mentioned before, the late Janie Bolitho. Bolitho’s series about widowed artist and photographer Rose Trevelyan is also set in Cornwall – this time in Newlyn – but Rose is nothing like Catherine Alliott’s Flora. 

In Betrayed in Cornwall, the fourth book in the series, Rose tries to find out what happened to her friend Etta’s son Joe, who is found dead beneath a clifftop path – with a bag of heroin at his side. Joe was well liked, a respected fisherman and a good son to Etta, but the police think that even if he wasn’t taking drugs, he must have been supplying them.  There’s also the problem of Joe’s sister Sarah, a teenager who won’t tell anyone where she goes, and who then disappears completely. Meanwhile a wealthy incomer couple come back from holiday to find their home stripped off a valuable art collection – is there a connection? And who is the married man with whom Etta is having a clandestine affair?  Rose’s on-off partner, Inspector Jack Pearce, warns her to keep out of the case, but of course this is the last thing she’s going to do, and eventually they both help to put the pieces together and find the reasons behind Joe’s death.  My full review of Betrayed in Cornwall is here.

I really enjoyed this month’s Six Degrees; my chain took me back to the holidays of my childhood, and I was surprised at how vividly I remembered them.