Six Degrees of Separation: September 2021

Six Degrees of Separation  is hosted by Kate of  booksaremyfavouriteandbest.com. Our starter book for September is Rachel Cusk’s Booker Prize nominated Second Place.

Years ago now I really tried with Cusk’s Arlington Park and The Country Life, but I eventually decided that her writing just wasn’t for me. Hence I have no plans to read Second Place, and my first book is simply a link to a word in the title.

Caldicott Place by Noel Streatfield was written in 1967. It’s a typical Streatfeild story about a family whose life is disrupted, but to whom happiness is - by a chain of  fortuitous (and, it must be said, unlikely!) circumstances – eventually restored. The Johnstones lead a happy life in a small town. Father is the foreman of a factory in London, and is,

The nicest sort of father, always interested in anything his family were doing and he did his best to help.

There are three children and – as is inevitably the case in Streatfeild’s children’s books – a dog, this one rejoicing (or not...) in the name of Jelly. 

On the night before the family is to go on holiday, Father goes to fill up the car with petrol and is seriously injured in an accident caused by inattention on the part of the chauffeur of a wealthy old lady.  Father is in hospital for months, the family has to leave its beloved home and move into a flat in the city, Mother has to get a job, and the children have to change schools. Worst of all, Jelly is not allowed in the flat, and has to stay with the family who move into the Johnstones’ house.

When the youngest son, Tim, goes to pay an illicit visit to Father in hospital, he comes across Lady Paine (the very same old lady) in her private room. As a result of this meeting the family’s fortunes change, and they end up living at Caldicott Place, a huge house in Sussex. And I’m sure you can guess the rest. 

Noel Streatfeild wrote over twenty books for children, and although they can be formulaic, and are generally extremely middle class, the stories are well written, engaging page-turners that I still enjoy today. Ballet Shoes is probably her most famous work, but I prefer The Growing Summer (probably partly because it was immortalised as a TV series starring none other than Wendy Hiller as the unforgettable Aunt Dymphna. My 1968 Puffin copy of that book also has wonderful illustrations by Edward Ardizzone.)

The turnaround  in the Johnstones’ fortunes comes when Tim inherits a house. I have lost count of the number of books I have seen in which this very convenient plot device turns up – it seems to be particularly popular in romance, when the heroine, broken-hearted after being dumped and/or betrayed by a man whom she thought was the Love of Her Life, is left a cottage/mansion/café/shop by her grandmother/aunt/person she only ever met once as a 4 year old. Obliged to investigate her inheritance, she travels – often reluctantly – to the countryside/seaside, with no intention of staying more than a week, and ends up discovering how much she prefers rural life – and the tall, dark and handsome man who just so inevitably happens to be her new neighbour/workman/business rival.

This, in essence, is the plot of Jackie Fraser’s The Bookshop of Second Chances, which I might never have requested from my library had not a friend recommended it to me. And yes, it does follow the well worn pattern of its genre, but I have to say I loved every minute of it. It’s well written, the setting is convincingly evoked, and the characters engaging.

The story: Thea discovers that her husband of 20+ years (one of the things I especially liked about the book is that the protagonists are not all under 30) is about to leave her for her best friend; within weeks she also (handily) discovers that she’s been left a lodge house and a huge collection of valuable books by a great uncle she hardly knew. Off she goes to Dumfries and Galloway – ‘just for a couple of weeks’ – where she meets Charles, owner of Holinshaw House and Lord of the manor, and his elder brother Edward, who renounced the title and lives above his shop (but still, it must be said, in fairly aristocratic splendour) in nearby (fictional) Baldochrie. And guess what that shop is? A bookshop!

Well blow me down, preferably with a first edition of Ivanhoe.

Edward is bad-tempered and anti-social; he is not on speaking terms with his brother, and his brother is none too fond of him either. And surely it goes without saying that Edward is super-tall and super-handsome? Soon Thea is working in the shop and working on her extra-mural activities with Edward, while also attempting to find out what has happened between him and Charles, and how she can put it right.

So yes, no big surprises, but a very good read and one that I would recommend.

The writer (and founder member of The Detection Club), Dorothy L Sayers, also had many connections to Dumfries and Galloway. Sayers and her husband Mac Fleming first came to Gatehouse of Fleet in 1928; her sixth Lord Peter Wimsey novel The Five Red Herrings centres on Gatehouse and Kircudbright, where from 1929 Sayers and Fleming rented a studio. Both locations were already artists’ colonies, and in the book we are introduced to seven local painters; one is murdered, one is the murderer, the other five are the titular red herrings.

I first read The Five Red Herrings when I was still at school, and recall being fascinated by Gatehouse of Fleet as a place name. Having now lived in Scotland for over thirty years, I am no longer surprised by such things (Crook of Devon, anyone?) and I listened to it again recently as an audiobook. I am sorry to say that this time I found it extremely irritating; the characters were hardly developed at all, it was hard to remember who was who, and there was so much emphasis on the minutiae of train timetables and bicycles that I wanted to scream. 

Kircudbright today (c) Visit Kircudbright - kirkudbright.town

Before I am torn to metaphorical shreds, let me add that I am aware that many ‘Golden Age’ detective stories turn on such details, but this one just seemed so much drier and uninteresting than all the others. I loved Sayers’ The Nine Tailors, for example, even though it depends on timings, etc, because it is infused with so much local detail of the Fens, its main players are well drawn, and Wimsey himself becomes a much more complex and nuanced character. The Five Red Herrings had mixed reviews at the time of publication (1931), with one critic saying

…it has been appreciated immensely by puzzle fanatics who possess "the type of mind that goes on solving crossword puzzles for ever and ever”

So there you are; if you spend your days glued to the puzzles page of The Guardian, you may well love this one.

My next book is quite a different kettle of fish – and fish it is that kindly provide the link here too.

Ian Stephens’ A Book of Death and Fish is the fictional story of Peter MacAulay, who sits down to write his will, a process that leads him to reflect on his life, his family, his relationships and, perhaps most of all, on boats, fishing – and even the cooking of the catch.

Stephens comes from (and still lives on) the Isle of Lewis, and anchors his main character there. Peter is born and grows up on the island, son of a Stornoway man (‘the olman’) who never returned to fishing after an horrific experience in the war, instead becoming a skilled weaver, and his wife ('the olaid'), a secretary from the Broch (Fraserburgh, on the east coast of Scotland.) This is not a twee story, not an idyllic version of island life; there are disasters at sea, illness, alcoholism, drugs, suicides. When Peter is born his parents finally get enough points to get a council house. The family is not destitute but is certainly not rich; to Peter life on Lewis is just how it is; normal.  (And in case this sounds too depressing, there's also a lot of humour.)

It’s hard to describe A Book of Death and Fish; it’s written as a series of impressions, snapshots, pictures of Peter’s life, on Lewis, in Glasgow – to which the family moves for a while - later at Aberdeen University, then back to Lewis. The narrative is not linear, it jumps back and forth as memories come back to an old and ailing man; his years as a coastguard, his fishing trips with his friends, his time on a kibbutz, where he meets his German wife Gabriele, the arrival of their daughter Anna.  And always the sea.

It took me three attempts to read this book; I finally achieved it this summer and I am so very glad that I did. Stephen does not explain anything (because why would Peter?) – from the very first page we are launched into an at first confusing world of people who are almost always related to one another, into a mixture of dialect, some Gaelic, many west coast terms; religion, language. 

Monument to the 205 men lost on the Iolaire as she sank on approach to Stornoway harbour in January 1919 - image (c) Wikipedia

And interwoven with the details of Peter’s life are major events of the 20^th century, from the tragic sinking of The Iolaire to the tragedy of Kosovo. There is a great deal about the construction of boats, the techniques of fishing, and later, of the ways to cook scallops and skate. This is not the kind of thing that usually holds my attention, and I admit there were sections (although there are over one hundred chapters most are just a couple of pages long) where I had to push myself along – but it was well worth the effort, as by the end of the book I felt I knew a great deal more about real life on the islands, and also 20^th century life in general - and more than all of that, I knew this man Peter MacAulay. Highly recommended.

A few years ago, at an Edinburgh Fringe event, I heard Alastair McIntosh speak about his book Poacher’s Pilgrimage, in which he describes a 12 day walk he undertook, alone, from the tip of Harris to the northern Butt of his birthplace, Lewis. (Harris and Lewis are conjoined Hebridean islands.) 

I still haven’t managed to read the book, but I have never forgotten Alastair’s talk; he spoke of his childhood, but more importantly about the landscape, present and past, the Gaelic (which he does not have, but in which he has a great interest), spirituality, island culture, ecology, land reform, politics, and so much more. He has led a full life as a writer, broadcaster, activist and academic; brought up in the Free Church he has long been a Quaker and believes in faith in action. His talk was as full of anecdotes and humour as it was powerful, and he ended with a reading of Sorley Maclean’s famous poem Hallaig (translated from the Gaelic by Seamus Heaney), 

'Time, the deer, is in the wood of Hallaig'

which moved me so much that I eventually persuaded my husband to accompany me on a visit to the Isle of Raasay, where we walked along spectacular deserted clifftops above still blue seas to the ruins of Hallaig, a village destroyed by the Clearances in the mid-1800s.

Ruins at Hallaig (c) John Allan (geograph.org.uk - Licensed for use under a Creative Commons Licence)

To get to Raasay you take the little ferry from Skye, and it is to Skye that I turn for my final book.

Mary Stewart’s Wildfire at Midnight has London fashion model Gianetta fleeing to a remote hotel on the island to get away from the misery of her divorce from famous author Nicholas Drury. It is 1953, Coronation Year, but Gianetta wants only to find some peace and quiet. Needless to say, this being Mary Stewart, this is not what our heroine is going to get. Even as Gianetta crosses Loch Scavaig, she is soon made aware that the boatman knows more than he is prepared to say about Blaven, the mountain overlooking the hotel, and before long she has discovered that a local girl has been murdered there shortly before her arrival. The hotel is, of course, inhabited by the usual motley crew of potential murderers, and when Gianetta’s ex-husband suddenly turns up, she even begins to wonder about him. With strange goings-on in the night, wildfires seen on the slopes of the mountain, and before long another murder, Gianetta is soon putting herself in danger as she tries to find out what is going on, and why.

I love Mary Stewart’s books, and although Gianetta is not as feisty as my favourite, Charity Selbourne (Madam, Will You Talk?), she is still very independent for her time. The story rattles along, the supporting cast are all well-developed and credible; I had no idea who the killer was till very near the end, and I enjoyed the journey to the final dramatic climax of the plot.

Although I had no interest in this month’s starter book, I still had fun getting a chain out of it. I’ve only now realised that five of my six books are set in Scotland – from Dumfries and Galloway to Skye and Raasay.  I hope to be off to the islands (Islay, Jura and possibly Colonsay) myself next week; can’t wait, even though the Jazz Festival we usually go for has been cancelled (again) this year. More time for walking, reading, writing….

Next month’s (2^nd October) starter book is a short story, The Lottery by Shirley Jackson.