Six degrees of Separation: January 2022

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

Well here we are in a new year, and it’s already time for 6 Degrees. This is one of the few things I’ve kept up with over the past twelve months; it seems to come round more quickly every time, but I almost always enjoy it, both in the working out of my own chain and the reading of everyone else’s.

Our starter book this month is Amor Towles’ Rules of Civility. I haven’t read this one, but I have read and very much enjoyed Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow. Rules of Civility appears to be set in the Jazz Age in New York, so I am using the location as a link to my first book, which is Eloise at Christmastime by Kay Thompson.

Eloise is the six year old daughter of wealthy parents who have left her in the care of Nanny. Eloise and Nanny live – along with a pet turtle called Skipperdee and a dog called Weenie - in a penthouse suite in the Plaza Hotel in New York, where Eloise knows everyone and runs riot. While it may seem sad that she never sees her own mother, Eloise seems to enjoy every minute of her days, and is as devoted to Nanny as Nanny is to her.

Here is who my absolutely best friend in the whole wide world is Nanny

There are several books in the series, all written in verse and with wonderful illustrations by Hilary Knight.  In this one (first published in 1958) it’s Christmas Eve, and while Nanny is wrapping presents, Eloise is off on a lightning tour of the hotel ‘to spread some Christmas cheer’ (aka chaos) and distribute gifts far and wide. And when she finally goes to bed she dreams;

Of reindeers with sunglasses on

Ice-skating on the stars

With mittens on their antlers

And Mufflers made in Mars

Kay Thompson herself lived at the Plaza Hotel, and was a great friend of Judy Garland; she became godmother to Garland’s daughter Liza Minelli, and it has been suggested that Minelli was the inspiration for the character of Eloise. In later life Thompson moved into Minelli’s Upper East Side apartment, where she died at the age of 88. Hilary Knight has said that his image of Eloise was based on a 1930s painting by his mother, Katherine Sturges Dodge, an American illustrator and writer.

 

The link to my next book is Nanny. 

In Jilly Cooper’s early and much-loved novel Harriet, our heroine is a naïve young woman who goes to Oxford University and falls madly in love with a boy from a much posher background. When Harriet inadvertently becomes pregnant, Simon reveals himself as the cad he is and disowns her, while her own family packs her off to a Home for Unmarried Mothers. Once her baby is born, Harriet has neither home nor income, so in order to be able to keep little William she takes a job as nanny to the children of Cory Erskine, a scriptwriter with a colourful past. She’s just starting to enjoy her job at his country home in Yorkshire when who should arrive but Cory’s estranged wife, his flirtatious brother – and Simon.

Whilst you can probably guess how this all pans out, Jilly is such a good writer that all of her books are a joy to read, and I especially love the first ones – Harriet, Prudence, Emily, Octavia, Bella and Imogen.

A single mother is also the main character in my next book. 

In Lynn Reid Banks’ The L-Shaped Room, when Jane becomes pregnant she is thrown out of the family home by her austere widowed father. With no-one to turn to and nowhere to go, she finds a room in a run-down boarding house;

Five flights up in one of those gone-to-seed houses in Fulham, all dark wallpaper inside and peeling paint outside….There were a couple of prostitutes in the basement; the landlady had been quite open about them. She’d pointed out that there was even an advantage to having them there, namely that nobody asked questions about anybody.

When she arrives Jane has no interest in the other residents, but as she gradually begins to meet them, she discovers that these people, who are eking out a living on the fringes of society, will become an unexpected source of support and friendship.

It’s decades since I read this book, and I see from Goodreads that it is apparently full of racism, so if anyone decides to read it please be aware of this. I can only say that, at the time I read it, I enjoyed it, and that unfortunately that is what London (and probably the entire country) was like in the 1950s. Similarly, it’s sobering to see the prevailing attitudes to women, especially to any woman who dares to get herself pregnant; everything is her fault, she is ostracised, and she has only ‘got what she deserves.’

So in many ways The L-Shaped Room can be read as an historic record as much as as a story, but I do think the actual writing was very good, and I definitely wanted to read on and find out what happened to Jane and her new friends.

 

From one innocent to another, and from one boarding house to another….my next book is Armistead Maupin’s wonderful ode to San Francisco, Tales of the City.  

It’s 1976, and Mary Anne Singleton is on holiday from her safe and boring secretarial job and her equally safe and boring parents back in Cleveland. Enthralled by the freedom and possibilities she finds in San Francisco, she decides to stay. She sees an advertisement for a room at 28 Barbary Lane…and her life is changed forever. A reefer stuck to her door welcomes her to a house of people very different from her mid-west family, and soon she is mixing with a whole variety of interesting characters, including the loveable Mouse, spaced-out hippy Mona and would-be stud Brian. Shepherding them all is Mary Anne’s new landlady, the kind, maternal, but somewhat mysterious Anna Madrigal.

There is of course a whole series of sequels to this first book, and the book itself began life as a series in the San Francisco Chronicle. Maupin said that at the time the paper (even in San Francisco!) was very nervous about running anything featuring gay characters, so he deliberately kept Mouse low key.

One (of the paper’s editors) kept a character chart which Maupin said was intended to ensure "that the homo characters didn't suddenly outnumber the hetero ones and thereby undermine the natural order of civilization.” (Armistead Maupin: San Francisco's chronicler calls time on his saga - Hermione Hoby, The Guardian, 4 january 2014)

The books have been adapted many times; the 1993 TV series (Channel 4/PBS) was excellent and is still well worth watching, with Laura Linney (Mary Anne) and Olympia Dukakis (Mrs Madrigal) both excelling in their roles.

 

My next book is said to have been inspired by my last. 

When Armistead Maupin and the Scottish author Alexander McCall Smith met at a party, they ended up discussing serial novels. McCall Smith included this discussion in a piece he wrote for The Herald; this was read by the editor of The Scotsman, who invited McCall Smith to lunch and proposed that he write a serial novel for that newspaper. (What? You mean this hasn't happened to you?) 

So, like Tales of the City, 44 Scotland Street (the first in the series) began life in instalments, and – also like Tales of the City – it is really a well observed soap about a small section of Edinburgh society. For although Bruce, Pat, Angus, Matthew, Domenica and Irene all live different lives, they almost all live those lives in the New Town, a particularly smart and wealthy area of the city. And although Irene’s son Bertie is (initially) sent to the Steiner School in Morningside (another affluent area), and Angus and his gold-toothed dog Cyril make occasional excursions to Valvolla & Crolla (a well known Italian grocery at the top of Leith Walk  - ie a stone’s throw from the New Town!), they all live in the Neo-Classical streets surrounding Scotland Street.

The Scotland Street novels are immensely popular. I am sometimes a little surprised that books that focus so exclusively on the idiosyncrasies of certain Edinburgh ‘types’ can appeal so much to people who have never lived there, but appeal they certainly do. And as someone who has lived in Edinburgh, I can tell you that people like these do exist. Aspirational, bossy parents (Irene), trust fund beneficiaries (Matthew), long-term arty residents who can only afford their flats because they’ve been there forever (Angus) – they’re all to be found in that little area, although its properties are increasingly only accessible to foreign investors and multi-millionaires. 

I enjoyed the first few books in the series, then grew slightly tired of McCall Smith’s wilder flights of fancy (the poems that started to appear at the end of every book did start to wear me down) and his propensity for name-dropping (he knows everyone there is to know in Edinburgh, and everyone from Guy Peploe [owner of The Scottish Gallery] to Ian Rankin gets a look in), but there’s no doubt that McCall Smith is onto a winner (as he is with his No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series), and good for him.

 

Finally, a novel that begins and ends in Edinburgh, but also takes the reader on a journey to fin-de-siecle France. In Olga Wojtas’s Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Vampire Menace, Morningside librarian Shona McMonagle is visited by the ghost of her late headmistress. Shona is a former – and proud – pupil of Marcia Blaine’s School for Girls, the fictional school (based on James Gillespie’s School for Girls) in which none other than one Miss Jean Brodie plied her profession. But not everybody is happy to have their precious alma mater associated with Muriel Spark’s most famous character. Shona herself thinks Miss Brodie’s behaviour is outrageous, and as for the spectral Miss Blaine – she is incandescent, so much so that when she sees a copy of the dreaded book sitting on the library counter, Shona is in big trouble.

“You must know even Homer nods…”

“I do” she snapped…he nods off only for a couple of minutes. You, girl, are a positive Rip Van Winkle.”

And then, for the second time, Shona is transported back through the centuries. She arrives in Sans-Soliel, the aptly named village of permanent gloom, and (as in her first outing, related in Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Golden Samovar) it’s up to her to find out why she’s there and whom she’s supposed to be helping.

Wojtas is a brilliant writer; she gives us a page-turning plot and manages to combine it with lots of jokes and clever references. Shona, who thinks of herself as an expert in all things, (- she can speak numerous languages and;

All of the Scottish dialects ‘apart from Glaswegian’…)

is mercilessly sent up, but she is a resourceful and sensible woman (who wears Doc Martens under her fin-de-siecle skirts), and we root for her despite her sometimes ridiculous ideas about herself and her frequent inability to see what’s right under her nose. My full review of this excellent novel is here.

So this month I started in New York and ended in France, getting there via Yorkshire, London, San Francisco and Edinburgh. And for once there is only one children’s book in my chain.

Next month the starter book will be No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood.