Wind in the Ash Tree by Jeanine McMullen, with illustrations by Michael Woods (1988)

  

This is Jeanine McMullen's second book on her Small Country Living.  It is about the people she meets, but mostly it is about animals. We know from her first book that Jeanine loves them and feels a need to surround herself with them. That book ended with her receiving a legacy from her father, her mother returning to Australia, and her proposal for a BBC programme called  A Small Country Living being accepted. 

In this book she backtracks a bit as once again she worries about paying the bills and hopes the BBC will take up her idea for a programme. She does not seem to be made for living alone and, after the death of her beloved whippet Merlin, and other animals falling sick, she is relieved to hear her mother, 'Mrs. P' is once again on her way to Wales.

Jeanine's small country living includes dogs, sheep, pigs, horses, ducks, chickens and goats. She is always determined not to buy any more only to succumb to temptation. First she finds a chihuahua called Winston for Mrs.P, then she is anxious to find a replacement for Merlin and a new puppy joins the pack: his great nephew called Merlyn. On one of the final pages we find Jeanine unable to resist a lurcher puppy: Lilly.

 

Most of the animals we got to know in the first book are still at the farm. A few halfbred Icelandic sheep are added when she meets a breeder for her radio show.

Doli, Jeanine's horse starts suffering from an assortment of ailments, which seem to be an indication of boredom, so she is sold to a friend who runs the Smallholder's Training Centre were there is plenty of work for her. A few years later, much to her delight, she is able to buy her back.

 

Halfway throught the book the BBC finally commissions her to make a programme.  Much to her relief it does well: 'For a success it was, in spite of being tucked away on a mid-afternoon slot and quite unpublicized. The morning after it was broadcast, there come a pile of letters which people must have written the moment we were off the air. (..) All of them were ecstatic.' Jeanine travels the length and breadth of the UK to find places, people and animals for her programme.

While this is certainly a book for people who like to read about animals, I enjoyed it because of the interesting people Jeanine meets. I had fun trying to find out more about them.

There is vet Bertie Ellis who had a long career and served on the RCVS Council.

Sue and Darrell Kingerlee ran a bookshop in Llandovery. Darrell wrote Llandovery Album: Pictures of a Welsh Market Town.

Muriel and Jack Sassoon who ran an antiques shop and a second hand bookshop in London.

Ian Wilson who wrote The Turin Shroud.

Gerald and Imogen Summers. Gerald wrote The Lure of the Falcon,  illustrated by 'the Artist ', Jeanine's erstwhile partner, whose name seems to be Duncan McLaren.

Madge Hooper, who wrote several books on herbs.

Antique dealer Barbara Leach.

Andrew and Carry Naylor , Sarah Pitt and Monica Sims, who all worked for the BBC

Diana Joly who bred icelandic sheep.

Artist Leesa Sandys-Lumsdaine.

Sedly Sweeny (who was really called Sedley Bell-Irving Sweeny) and who wrote The Challenge of Small Holding.

 Now I am on the lookout for book number three: A Small Country Living Goes On.

Wil den Hollander - Bronder

While staying at a campsite recently I was browsing the books left behind by other campers and I noticed 'Johanna' by Wil den Hollander. I took it home because I own most of this author's other books though it had been a very long time since I read any. It was only after reading part of 'Johanna' that the penny dropped: these books have a connection with my 'blog books'. It had never occurred to me, I suppose because they are on another floor, on another shelf, with my Dutch novels.

I first encountered Wil den Hollander's stories in my teens, when they were serialised in the weekly magazine my mother read. The author, born in 1915, had emigrated to France in 1947 with her husband and young son to start a farm. In France three daughters were born. She had a very hard life in a strange country, running the household, looking after the children, making cheese, looking after the animals and kitchen garden. She had a taciturn husband who mostly left her to get on with things.

And she wrote. I would say her books are autobiographies disguised as novels. I bought the books in my twenties and found them fascinating, but I had not looked at them until now. There was one thing I remembered most of all: the massive meals Wil had to cook. At times of harvesting or threshing many men came to work at the farm and they had to be fed. In Holland she would have given them sandwiches but in France that just would not do.

Just to give you an idea here is a loose translation from a chapter on threshing. This meant 20 men coming to help and they had to be fed five times a day. Three meals consisting of bread with cheese or meat, cider and coffee with brandy. 

'But it was the hot meals I worried about. Simone helped me draw up a lunch menu: hors d'oeuvres, stock made with three kilo's of beef to which I had to add cream and eggs and tapioca. Followed by green beans in cream, mashed potatoes, cauliflower, four boiled chickens with a creamy sauce, a few fruit tarts, followed by coffee and brandy. In the evening I could serve the leftovers with salad, fried potatoes, and a roast.

The food that had been so carefully prepared was appreciated, but the pudding served with cream and fruit was received with mirth: did Madame think she was entertaining babies? Anything containing milk was not men's food.

I had taken six liters of brandy from the barrel and still they were yelling for more.... 

Wil was a natural storyteller and I was fascinated once again. Apart from books on her farm she wrote about her daughter, who suffered from MS and died young, and her son, who was conscripted into the army at the time of the war in Algeria. I can certainly recommend these books to my Dutch readers.

More information in Wil den Hollander can be found here.