Six Degrees of Separation: November 2023

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

I haven't taken part in this challenge for a while, but as the winter comes on and we lose the hours of daylight (it is already dark by 5pm here in Northern Scotland) I can't still be walking around the fields at all hours, so I thought I'd have another go at Six Degrees.

This month's starter book is Western Lane by Chetna Maroo, and as usual I haven't read it. It's been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and I have to admit I've never yet met a Booker nominee that I wanted to read. This is probably very unfair of me, but they just all seem so Worthy. I believe that Western Lane is about (among other things) sisters, so I am going with that and my first book is one of my favourites, Some Tame Gazelle by Barbara Pym.

Harriet and Belinda are middle aged spinster sisters living a comfortable life in a 1940s English village. Belinda has been secretly in love with the Archdeacon for years. He is a pompous self centered man whose sermons make very little sense, and he's already married to the long-suffering and somewhat caustic Agatha. Belinda is a retiring, self-effacing woman who loves poetry, whereas Harriet is confident, curious and loud, and frequently embarrasses her poor sister

The women's lives revolve around the church, the friends, their servants, and the Good Works they do for the village. The appointment of a new curate is always a great source of excitement, and this time the arrival of Mr Edgar Donne coincides with a visit from none other than Theodore Grote, Bishop of Mbwawa, who gives a lantern lecture in the village hall, complete with a tribal song during which most of the attendees have to stuff handkerchiefs into their mouths to stifle their laughter. 

Some Tame Gazelle is a comedy of manners, and although very little really happens Pym's observation of social detail is spot on and still makes me laugh in recognition all these many years after I first read this much loved novel.

My second book is also set in the 1940s; Marghanita Laski's The Village opens on 8 May 1945, just as the war in Europe is over. The novel looks at the changes that six years of war have brought to a very traditional community; tradesmen have largely flourished, while the old guard of the upper middle classes is struggling with reduced incomes and the Servant Problem.

Wendy, harassed wife of the ineffectual Major, desperately tries to keep up appearances and get her two daughters married off to suitable men, but the eldest, the kind hearted Margaret, falls in love with Roy, son of Wendy's former cleaner. Although Roy has a good job which actually pays more per week than the income Wendy has with which to feed her entire family, Wendy is still horrified, just as she is appalled by Margaret's idea that she should become a cook.  I love Laski's even-handed treatment of the various characters in the village, none is wholly good or bad and every single one apart from Margaret harbours some sort of prejudice. My review of The Village is here. 

During the Second World War Vere Hodgson lived mainly in London, where she helped to run a charity. Few Eggs and No Oranges is the diary she kept from 1940 to 1945; it's a wonderful record of life in a city under bombardment, where air raids disrupt the nights and food rationing dominates the daily thoughts of the fruit and dairy-deprived residents. Everything, from the arrival of Rudolf Hess in Scotland to splashing out on afternoon tea at the Dorchester, is here. A fascinating read.

And it's fruit that provides my next link. Oranges are Not the Only Fruit is Jeanette Winterson's semi-autobiographical novel about a girl being adopted and brought up by Pentecostal fundamentalists who expect her to become a missionary - an idea that Jeanette at first buys into with enthusiasm, joining her mother in Bible-bashing, tambourine-accompanied sessions to seek out new converts. Her plans are scuppered, however, when she instead falls for one of her converts, and, despite being subjected to exorcisms, decides to leave the church. 

Winterson's memoir Why Be Happy When You Can be Normal? is a non fiction account of the same period of the author's own life. It's many years since I read Oranges; I do remember it having a profound effect on me at the time, so I should perhaps now honour it with a re-read. 

Moving on via another fruit, Apricots on the Nile: A Memoir with Recipes is Colette Roussant's account of a childhood spent mainly at her wealthy grandparents' mansion in Garden City, on the banks of the great African river. She first arrives in Egypt in 1937, her distant, beautiful and newly widowed French mother almost instantly departing to travel and live the life of an international socialite.

Meals are prepared by Ahmet, a highly skilled but unpredictable Sudanese cook, and formally served (every single night) by a servant wearing a white balabeyya with a red sash. Roussant accompanies her grandmother to the colorful local markets, and, being largely left to her own devices by the adults of the household (several different generations occupy various floors of the house), learns how to cook in the kitchens. There are wonderful descriptions of the food, both in the house and on the street corners, and also entertaining (and occasionally tragic) details of the matchmaking that occupies most of Grandmama's time (when she's not playing poker with her smart friends.)

Roussant's childhood is by no means all fun; she is frequently lonely, and her mother periodically turns up to cause serious disruption in her daughter's life, but the overall feeling of the book is still overwhelmingly both comfortable, and comforting. Roussants' grandparents' house, for all its affluence and formality, is a real home for this lost and somewhat neglected child.

Having later married an American journalist, Roussant relocated to New York and became an acclaimed food writer. My review of her memoir is here.

Elizabeth David is best known as a food writer; her cookery books are still celebrated by everyone from Delia Smith to Nigella Lawson and Nigel Slater, and her journalism is rightly praised. David's life, however, was far from happy, and Artemis Cooper's excellent authorised biography Writing at the Kitchen Table  paints a picture of a beautiful, talented, adventurous, daring, but also conflicted and difficult, woman. I very much enjoyed this well written and researched book, and learned so much about an icon of 20th century food writing who, whatever her faults, introduced London's chattering classes for the first time to spaghetti that did not come in tins and soups that had never seen a packet. 

My review of Writing at the Kitchen Table is here. 

Somehow my chain this time has focused largely on food - must be the cold weather making me hungry. I've just noticed that next month's chain is to begin with Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential; it's perhaps lucky that I've several more foody books in my reading repertoire! Or maybe Bourdain will lead me somewhere else entirely.