Six degrees of Separation: December 2021

 Six Degrees of Separation is hosted by Kate of http://booksaremyfavouriteandbest.com/

We start the December chain with Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton’s story of (mainly) woe and misery, set in the snowbound Massachusetts countryside at the turn of the last century.

I heard this book read on BBC Sounds last year. The narrator was Joseph Ayre, who perfectly captured Wharton’s sense of place, and her ability to infuse the smallest of gestures and the fewest of words with meaning. I can still imagine the cold winter fields, the granite outcrops ‘like tombstones’, the empty, rotting, barns, and the sledges flying down the hillside.  I don’t usually like very miserable books, but this one is an exception, it is so well written and so evocative, and while the end is shocking, in one way it almost isn’t. Anything else would have felt trite.

I may have enjoyed Ethan Frome, but that still doesn’t mean I want to continue the theme of gloom and doom. My next book, therefore, is linked to the first by the authors’ shared first name. It is The Story of the Treasure Seekers by Edith Nesbit.

This is one of my favourite children’s books; it’s about the Bastable family, whose mother has died and whose father is in 'reduced' (but always middle class) circumstances. The family lives in south London, and the children, led by Oswald, the oldest boy (who narrates the story, allegedly anonymously, but in fact in his own highly entertaining style) come up with numerous schemes to try to make some money to refill the family coffers. The opening paragraphs give such a good feel for the book that I will quote them here;

This is the story of the different ways we looked for treasure, and I think when you have read it you will see that we were not lazy about the looking.

There are some things I must tell before I begin to tell about the treasure-seeking, because I have read books myself, and I know how beastly it is when a story begins, “‘Alas!” said Hildegarde with a deep sigh, “we must look our last on this ancestral home”’—and then some one else says something—and you don’t know for pages and pages where the home is, or who Hildegarde is, or anything about it.

Our ancestral home is in the Lewisham Road. It is semi-detached and has a garden, not a large one. We are the Bastables. There are six of us besides Father. Our Mother is dead, and if you think we don’t care because I don’t tell you much about her you only show that you do not understand people at all. Dora is the eldest. Then Oswald—and then Dicky. Oswald won the Latin prize at his preparatory school—and Dicky is good at sums. Alice and Noel are twins: they are ten, and Horace Octavius is my youngest brother. It is one of us that tells this story—but I shall not tell you which: only at the very end perhaps I will. While the story is going on you may be trying to guess, only I bet you don’t. It was Oswald who first thought of looking for treasure. Oswald often thinks of very interesting things. And directly he thought of it he did not keep it to himself, as some boys would have done, but he told the others, and said—

‘I’ll tell you what, we must go and seek for treasure: it is always what you do to restore the fallen fortunes of your House.’

 

Oswald’s unfailing optimism is one of his most endearing traits. Another young boy whose glass is always half full is Dylan, the 9 year old narrator of Frank Cottrell Boyce’s Framed. I know I used this book in last month's chain, but it fitted too well here for me to ignore it. Both Framed and The Treasure Seekers leave the reader with a renewed trust in the essential goodness of (some) people, which is something I think we all might need just now.

Framed is set in a small Welsh village. Thirty years earlier, Nina Bawden set another story in Wales, though unlike Dylan, the children whose story this is are not Welsh at all; they come from London.

 

In Carrie’s War, Carrie and her brother Nick have been evacuated from the Blitz and sent to a small Welsh mining town. There they are (eventually) picked by Miss Evans, who takes them home to the house she shares with her terrifying, ‘very Chapel’, brother. 

The children gradually meet a number of other characters, including lovely Hepzibah, housekeeper to Mr Evans’ estranged sister Mrs Gotobed, Mrs Gotobed’s disabled cousin Mister Johnny, and Albert Sandwich, a fellow evacuee posted to the Gotobed household, Druid’s Bottom. Each one is so real and yet so unusual that I feel I have known them since I first read this book as a child myself. Carrie's War has also been adaptated for television several times, and although I have fond memories of the first serial, made in 1974, I recently found a DVD of the 2004 TV film version and thought it excellent; Keeley Fawcett plays Carrie, Jamie Beddard Mister Johnny and Pauline Quirke Hepzibah.

(I have a photo of my mother looking out of a train just like this, with her gas mask, and her name tag  round her neck)

Carrie’s War is a wonderful story, but for me it is even more special because in some ways it mirrors my own mother’s experience.

She was evacuated from London and sent to the small town of Rhiwderin, near Newport. Like Carrie and Nick, she was passed over by many of the people who were required to take in evacuees – she was a small plain girl and they wanted boys who could work. She was eventually somewhat foisted onto a childless couple and went to live with them in their small terraced home. To her this was akin to a palace; she had grown up in an overcrowded house with little food and few possessions, and although her hosts were far from rich, they had enough to provide proper meals, and even had rugs on the floor. She loved it and them.

At the station - Hope and Glory

 Unfortunately, just before the Blitz, her mother came to take her back to London. She was never told why, but now thinks that her parents simply could not afford to make the required contribution to her keep. She never forgot Rhiwderin, and when, many years later, we were visiting a friend of hers in the area, we managed to find that little house again. The same couple opened the door, and they were all three absolutely thrilled to see one another. 

Evacuation was not all good – some of my mother’s classmates had terrible experiences – but for her those months spent in Wales were one of the best parts of what was otherwise a hard and hungry childhood. Thinking about evacuees now, having had my own children, always brings tears to my eyes, and I feel so much for the mother in the film Hope and Glory, who takes her little son and daughter to Waterloo station but can't bring herself to hand them over and instead takes them home again. For poor children like my mother though, who were lucky with their host families, evacuation was a joy.

The need to get out of wartime London also begins the story of some children who have adventures even more bizarre than Carrie’s. In CS Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy Pevensie are sent to the country to live with Professor Digory Kirke and escape the Blitz. The professor has a huge house, but although he is kind he does not have much spare time for children, so they are free to explore. Lucy climbs into a wardrobe and finds herself in the land of Narnia - and we all know what happens next.

Two of my favourite characters in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe are Mr and Mrs Beaver, friends of the faun Mr Tumnus, who also become friends of the children and help them in their efforts to avoid the White Witch. Beavers have in the past been hounded to extinction in Scotland, but in recent years they have made a return, both through official schemes set up by bodies such as Scottish Natural Heritage (now NatureScot) and in slightly less official ones organised by a network of well-wishers and word of mouth.

In Nature’s Architect, the Scottish nature writer Jim Crumley looks at the history, persecution, re-introduction and importance of these fascinating animals. He argues that, rather than causing trouble for farmers, beavers actually save us all a lot of problems by managing waterways on our behalf. Their practice of felling trees, building dams and diversions, then moving on to build some more, would, he argues, lead to far less flooding with far less effort and expense than manmade barriers.

Beavers in Scotland: image (c) NatureScot

In this most interesting book, Jim compares beavers’ activities to the work of great architects and jazz musicians. They all

‘improvise…play off each other….make something’

Jim has also written a quartet of books about the seasons. In the second, The Nature of Winter, he is slightly fed up to find the winter of 2016-17 ‘soggy, soggy, soggy’ – but then he spends a December day high up in the Cairngorms

‘watching a perched golden eagle do nothing at all for four hours.’

No wonder he’s cold. But when the eagle starts to fall (deliberately, I should add), it is

 ‘falling as an art form’. 

In his luminous, evocative prose Jim describes this magnificent bird;

‘no diamond ever shone with a finer lustre….power and elegance in equal measure’

Golden Eagle: image (c) Cairngorms National Park Authority

 He talks about spending time alone in the hills, the importance of needing to

 ‘give the landscape time to have a conversation with you.’

And he says that his greatest asset as a nature writer is his ability to sit still doing absolutely nothing for hours (aided, it must be said, by a hip flask and the odd bar of chocolate…) – he’s so good at this that once a badger even peed on his wellington boot while he was wearing it.

This month I have at last managed to come full circle, from a harsh and unrelenting winter in the aptly named Starkfield to another, wetter, but somehow far more glorious winter in the high peaks of Scotland.

Next month – and next year! – Six degrees will begin with Rules of Civility by Amor Towles (also author of A Gentleman in Moscow.)