Six Degrees of Separation: January 2024

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

For the first chain of the new year we start with Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. This book is very much flavour of the month just now, which unfortunately tends to put me off before I've even read the back cover.

So I haven't, and probably won't. But my daughter-in-law specifically asked for the book for her birthday, and she has very good taste, so I should probably stop being so dismissive.

My first book, then, is connected simply by the word 'tomorrow.'  Spam Tomorrow is Verily Anderson's memoir of her marriage to Donald Anderson, and her life as a young bride and mother (her first baby is born during an air raid) in World War II. Anderson is a very cheerful writer who makes the best of every situation, from rationing to fever hospitals and VADs.

I first read Spam Tomorrow because I remembered her as the author of the Brownie books that I loved so much as a child (though I have to say my own time with the Brownies wasn't nearly as much fun.) I'm just adding a picture of one of those books here for those who might also remember them, but my chain continues with a very well known British face,

Verily was a great friend of the actress and writer Joyce Grenfell. Her daughter Janie Hampton wrote Grenfell's biography, so Joyce Grenfell provides my next link. I read and enjoyed this one some years ago so can't recall all the details. I do remember that Grenfell, having been interviewed by Anderson for the BBC, gave Anderson and her children financial help (even buying them a house in Norfolk) after the death of her first husband, Donald Anderson. (Grenfell was wealthy, and closely related to the Astor family of Cliveden - Nancy Astor was her aunt.) Grenfell was also matron of honour when Anderson married her second husband, Paul Paget, in St Paul's Cathedral in 1971. 

Joyce Grenfell herself published several volumes of her sketches and monologues. A collection of her letters to her American socialite mother Nora Langhorne appeared in 1989, ten years after her death, so Darling Ma, edited by James Roose-Evans, is the third book in my chain. 

Continuing on the epistolary theme, the New York writer Helene Hanff was the author of 84 Charing Cross Road, a collection of the letters she wrote to and received from Frank Doel of Marks & Co, a London bookshop (the book was turned into a 1987 film starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins.) 

And coincidentally, when Hanff was finally able to afford to visit London (sadly only after Doel had died), Joyce Grenfell telephoned her to tell her that she and her husband Reggie were huge fans of the book and would be delighted to invite her to the theatre. After this the Grenfells took Hanff under their wing and entertained her throughout her stay. (Hanff wrote a second book about this visit, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street.)

It was her correspondence with Marks & Co's bookshop that brought Helene Hanff international fame, but bookshops themselves frequently suffer mixed fortunes. In Penelope Fitzgerald's 1978 novel The Bookshop, widow Florence Green decides to open such a shop in the small East Anglian coastal town of Hardborough. 

It is 1957. The town is largely ruled by lady of the manor Mrs Violet Gamart. She is not interested in Florence's wholly good intentions - so far as Violet is concerned, she and only she is entitled to supervise Hardborough's cultural life, so she sets out to dissuade Florence from her project. When this tactic fails, she turns to subterfuge to undermine Florence's plans in every way she can. 

Fitzgerald is such a subtle writer - this book is (I'm glad to say) miles away from the usual 'brokenhearted young woman is left bookshop/cake shop/café by ancient and beloved grandmother/aunt, is convinced she's a city girl, intends only to visit to close the shop down, ends up finding her true vocation - and of course her true love - in the inevitably charming seaside resort/village.' Florence's life is not like that at all.  

I won't spoil the ending for those who haven't read it, but don't expect a Happy Ever After from Fitzgerald. She writes about life as it really is, and on the way she introduces a group of nuanced and memorable characters, from Florence's patronising bank manager to Violet's nice but weak husband The Colonel, and my favourite, Christine, a feisty and practical young schoolgirl who comes to help Florence in the shop.

East Anglia is the link to my final book, Laurie Graham's wonderful The Future Homemakers of America. It's 1963 and an apparently disparate group of American air force wives are marooned on a military base in East Anglia. The story follows them as they make the best of their isolated and often boring situation. Some want to portray themselves as perfect wives and mothers - Homemakers indeed (in those day Future Homemakers was a real club that girls could join in High School.)  Others just want to have fun. But each of them has her own problems, and as these play out Graham introduces some local residents of this remote Fenland country.

I found Graham's descriptions of the day to day lives of people who have never left the area and are continuing the ways of their forefathers especially gripping. As the American women befriend one household in particular, the scene is set for ultimate tragedy. 

So I've managed to start and end with military wives, though Verily Anderson's experience was rather different from that of the wives of the 68th Bomber Wing airmen. I very rarely manage to come anywhere near a full circle, so I was quite pleased by how this one turned out.

For February, start the chain with either the last book in this month's chain or the last book you read.