Growing Goats and Girls by Rosanne Hodin (2020)

 

Well, this is a first: a book endorsed by Salman Rushdie! The publisher seems to be hedging his bets by adding a quote from the Sunday Express. These quotes plus the book's title don't do it any justice, they made me expect one of those meant-to-be-funny memoirs of smallholders swimming in mud while the goats eat their clothes, the roof leaks and the electricity goes off. But it is nothing of the kind. Rosanne Hodin can write. And she really ís funny.

Rosanne does not tell us a story from beginning to end but she presents us with a collection of short observations, anecdotes and thoughts, sometimes only half a page long. I assume this makes for easier writing. It is also very nice to read, I would say it is a great bedtime book. However, the drawback is that you don't really get an idea of developments, and that you are kept wondering: what happened next? 

These are the first lines of the book: 'I am hunched and grey, spat out by the hospital. They have battled with my bleeding and doped and stupefied me and the baby has gone.' Wow. Not exactly what you would expect from 'perfect escapist reading'. But after those first lines the tone of the book quickly changes. Escaping from her noisy neighbour Rosanne drives into Liskeard and sees a farm for sale in an estate agent's office. Three pages further on the farm has been bought, the move made.

 

Soon after moving into the farm, bringing their beehives,  Rosanne and husband Michael acquire goats, a cow, chickens, ducks, geese and guineafowl. 'Soon our Large Bottom Farm is ringing with the sound of contented creatures. We feel like Noah and his missus.' Daughter Morwenna is born and Rosanne and Michael find their feet as parents and farmers. A few years later Georgiana is born.

Rosanne goes raspberry picking with Morwenna in a baby carrier. 'I'm suddenly aware that the burble and chat from the baby has stopped and I have a sharp flash of worry that she has fallen asleep before she should. I put my fruit-stained hand on her head to turn it and look down. I find a beaming creature whose face is smeared with mushed berries, juice and the fragments of leaves. Her hands are red and sticky, her face is red and sticky, my T-shirt is red and sticky.'

Michael starts work as a teacher, while Rosanna supplements their income by taking in foreign students who come to learn English. She converts cottages on the property into holiday lets. Later she goes back to university before also becoming a teacher. Combining al these tasks is not easy. At one time she installs goat kids, who need to be bottle fed, into the back of her car, so she can feed them in between classes. This nearly gets her into trouble. 'The NSPCC have been called to investigate why babies needing bottle feeding have been abandoned in a van."

Another time they are going away for Christmas, 'and we can hardly expect anyone to come over to milk the goats', so they also come to stay with Rosanne's parents. The goats are installed in the garage.'They allow us to milk them and feed them and shut the door. But all of this is too strange for them and as we adults are sitting and eating dinner, the call of our baffled goats bleating can be heard up and along the Daglingworth valley.
A sort of Christmas carol.' 

 

 

I will give you some more quotes to give an idea of the book.

Rosanne is invited to a Tupperware party, but there is nothing she want to buy. But wait, 'that box might do for putting a leg of goat in to thaw from the freezer. Oh, no, says the Tupperware lady, you can't do that, it's a cake box. Yes, I argue pointlessly, but it will be fine for the meat and stop the cat gnawing at it and dragging it about the kitchen. Suddenly things seem to have gone very quiet ...'

'The girls have asked for riding lessons. Michael puts on a grim face about this. He has decided that we will never initiate anything horsey, but if they beg, harass, hassle and torment us about having a pony and the begging lasts for at least two months, then we will consider it. Two months have passed and it seems that they have forgotten about horses altogether. Michael is packing away his horse skills with a smug look and is buying sailing magazines. I am alarmed.'

'Buddleia attracts butterflies and me. I see them now fluttering around the two bushes, a standard, pale mauve buddleia that grows in every waste land site, and our garden specimen in deep purple. (...) I am trying not to frighten off the butterflies, but I have my nose buried into one of the marginal flowers, whose point is drooping and not yet blossoming and whose swollen body is a mass of tiny flowers with a coloured inset. The smell is ... summer, laziness, childhood.'

'Someone is coming in through the catflap at night and upsetting dishes of dried cat stars and leaving poo. I ask the cats about this, and we look together at the mess and they give worried looks with big eyes. The girls and I become detectives and look for further clues. (...) Georgie finds another poo and we bend down to inspect it. Too small for fox. Definitely not rat, because rat poo is oval like olive pits. We keep looking until Morwenna sees the culprit curled up between the washing machine and the wall, pressed close to some insulated water pipes.
We have a snoozing hedgehog.'

This is a book about running a smallholding but it is also very much about family life. I loved Rosanne's down to earth attitude to raising children, her  'free range children' as she calls them. 

After thirty years Rosanne and Michael sell the farm and go and work as volunteers in Africa.

'We need to find home for all the critters. They must go because we must go. We have shed creatures before, when there have been too many or someone has wanted to buy; we have culled almost everything if we needed meat or when old age overtook a lingering animal, and we have even dispatched cockerels as severe punishments for bad behaviour. But we feel tender about our assorted flocks and herds and today we are bracing ourselves to hustle twelve ducks into the van and deliver them to a good home at Lantallack.
This is absurdly simple, the trail of food is an easily followed pathway to the van, the future surely is bright for a well-behqved duck. But we have heavy hearts, our innocent ducks will not know the new dangers.
Letting go is harder than I thought.'

A lovely book, highly recommended.

The Island House by Mary Considine (2022)

While travelling in southwest England in June I naturally visited every bookshop I saw. As I did not have room in my luggage for many books I made a note of possible titles for the blog, planning to order them once I returned home. But leafing through this book I suddenly read: "The Atkins sisters" and realized it was a book about their island. Of course I just had to buy it at once. 

As a child Mary Considine, with her family, spent many summers on Looe island, then owned by Evelyn (known as Attie) and Babs Atkins. Later she becomes part of their "shifting army of helpers". Having only read Evelyn's description of life on the island I found it interesting to read about Mary's experiences. It sounds like Babs and Evelyn weren't the easiest people to get along with. They fiercely guarded their privacy and discouraged any visitors to their home: "The sisters, in their fortress, were all-powerfull, fascinating, alarming. Attie, the elder sister, and author of bestseller We Bought an Island - signed copies available in the craft shop - was larger than Babs, more aloof, increasingly only sporadically involved in wider island life. They sported matching grey perms and glasses, but Attie's shrewd eyes were magnified behind thicker lenses, and her mood was always unpredictable. Babs, ten years younger, and not long retired from her teaching career, seemed to us the practical one, who handled bookings for helpers and holidaymakers and met everyone who set foot here. Attie, the nickname from her wartime stint in the WRNS, had been the driving force behind their move to the island in the sixties: ten or twenty or thirty years later, she still wielded powerful charm and was given to expansive passions." When Mary's mother, a well-regarded poet with many publications and prizes to her name, produced a book of island-based poems, dedicated to the sisters, they maintained a stony silence until she finally asked what they thought. "Not a very happy choice, was the frosty response. There was only space for one writer on the island".

Years later Mary and her partner Patrick live in London. They buy a cottage in Looe, the same house the Atkins sisters first bought when they came to Cornwall. After a difficult time with infertility treatment, IVF and Mary's father's illness and death they feel a need to commit to Cornwall full-time (Patrick can work from home). They apply to "island sit"while the regular wardens go on holiday, and they get the job. They love it and the Cornwall Wildlife Trust allows them to live permanently in Island House. This is five years after Babs' death. The plan is "for us to renovate the house, sympathetically (it is unlisted) and with as much use of "green" technology as possible, in return for a long lease. (...) I kept wondering what Babs and Attie would have thought: of their house being lived in by other people, of those other people being me and my husband. I wondered if Babs would haunt me."

Mary and Patrick move to the island and start on the renovations. With the weather being very unpredictable, transport to the the island proves difficult. They employ builders and also get a lot of help from family and friends. They keep pigs, chickens and bees and have a fairly successful vegetable patch. Mary dreams of flowers and buys lots of plants. "The trembling plants are doomed by my relentless optimism, by the gleeful snails, and most of all by the wind, careering in from the south-east with salt in its mouth to burn and wither almost everything I plant."

They don't seem to get on with boats and machinery. When they try out their first boat the engine fails and they only just manage to return to the island. Other boats don't last long and the range cooker, generator, wind turbine and quad bike all give them endless trouble.

 

 

After their first winter, they settle "into the good life, chipping away at painting the outside walls (...), fine-tuning the electrical and water systems, scrubbing old slate floors and making endless fixes to the house. Patrick and Justin's (Patricks business partner) business is still in its infancy and money is tight, but we're not worried yet. We are content with each other, our dog and cats, the sound of the gulls and the light on the water". Actually, I could not really tell if Mary was really happy on the island, living there seemed to come with a lot of stress.

After a few years Patrick (who is profoundly deaf and gets help from "hearing dog" Skip) develops health problems and for a while Mary is in and out of hospital. They realize they will have to leave the island. After a final Christmas party and a final summer they move to Devon, having spent 6,5 years on the island.

Mary has a tendency to jump from past to present and back again in her story, while mixing present and past tenses. This made for confusing reading. I wanted so much to like this book and found that I did not, I got stuck half way and had to force myself to finish it. I don't really know why. Evelyn's books seem to have been written as one long chat and could have done with some editing. Yet I found them fascinating. Mary probably put a lot of thought into her book and had the help of experts, and I find her book boring. If you have read the book, please let me know what you think.

 

My posts about Evelyn's books can be found here  and here

Love in the Sun by Leo Walmsley (1939)

A few weeks ago, while looking for titles to buy for my e-reader (I'm stocking up because we are off on a trip again) I came across Simon's post on Love in the Sun by Leo Walmsley. It is described as a novel and the subject matter sounded right up my street, so I ordered it. When I started reading I was confused because it felt like non fiction: very little plot and endless technical details of doing up a house and a boat. After reading articles on the website of the Leo Walmsley Society I understood it was a thinly disguised autobiography. It is the story of a young man and woman with very little money who hire an old hut near a Cornwall village. They do up the house, create a garden and manage to scrape a living.  That's the basic story, really! I found it very entertaining. Simon mentioned there are sequels, so I will look out for them too. 

And yes, while the books were meant to read on holiday I have already read four of them, so I will have to find some more.  Anyone else find it hard to resist the temptation of a new book?

Looe and Looe Island, then and now

When Evelyn and Babs Atkins bought their cottages in Looe they looked like this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today they are Grade II listed buildings

After Evelyn died in1997 Babs remained on the island alone until she passed away at the age of 86 in 2004. AS far as I can tell, Evelyn is buried in Looe, while Babs' grave is on the island. 

Additional interesting information on the sisters can be found here
and here .

Babs left the island to the Cornwall Wildlife Trust

Who knows, I may get to visit it this summer. Last year we had a holiday planned in the Scilly Isles.  It  was postponed to June this year and I have just postponed it again to August. When we do get to go I want to plan some extra stay on the South West Coast, so maybe . . .

 

Tales from our Cornish Island by Evelyn E. Atkins (1986)

 

This is one of my recent buys, 2nd hand from the UK. It came with that typically musty 2nd hand book smell.

I ended my last post by wondering what life on the island would be like for the sisters. This book gives the answer, and it can be summed up in three words: Very Hard Work.
Evelyn writes: We have often wondered how, on that radio programme Desert Island Discs, the castaways had the strength left to put on or listen to their eight records, let alone the time to browse through Shakespeare, the Bible and the tome of their choice. For us, in those early days, surviving was a full-time occupation - and often still is.

She starts by telling us she constantly gets questions on what it is like to live on an island. The book is an attempt to answer these questions. It is impossible to cover everything that has happened to them, so she has written a series of tales, each dealing with a different aspect of island life.
When she first moved to the island (in February 1965), Evelyn was on her own, helped from time to time by friends and volunteers. Her sister Babs, teaching in a school in Looe came over during weekends and holidays, sea and weather permitting.
The consensus of local opinion was we would last three months if we were not drowned before then.

Evelyn and her helpers face many challenges: taking care of the water supply, fixing the AGA and the generator, establishing a vegetable garden, harvesting the daffodils that grow on the island etc. They learn as they go along and adapt.
When you live close to nature you have to get your priorities right, and fussiness over food and drink gives way to thankfulness that you have any at all.

They buy a goat, a number of cats, and become bee-keepers. They do up the two cottages to let to tourists and to house volunteers. They grow lots of fruit and vegetables, and harvesting starts in July, going well into November and even December. Seaweed is used as manure.
In winter, storms cause the island (which has no harbour) to be isolated for long periods. On one memorable occasion Babs was unable to land between Christmas and Easter and I just had fleeting glimpses of her as the all-important mail was tossed to me over the raging surf.

In summer things change, and they discover that while owning an island may be many people’s dream, owning an island only a mile from shore comes with a lage fly in the ointment: visitors.
In the summer visitors come to Looe in their masses and the bay teems with craft. The previous owner has warned them about this: To keep your privacy you wil have to bring out a shotgun.
This Evelyn is not prepared to do. She tries to put off visitors by charging an entrance fee, but people happily pay. What I cannot understand is that she goes so far as to prepare food and drink for them, thus having to work all day and every day in summer.
Volunteers from the Conservation Corps and students come for working holidays. At first they cook for the volunteers too, which only adds to Evelyn’s workload.

They often wonder „why they are doing this"? They are having to use their own income to keep the island open to visitors and to feed the helpers. However it seems such a worthwhile project and appreciated by so many.  So they carry on.
Often we are tempted to close the island and revert to help of friends and the offers of voluntary organizations for the conservation and cultivation of the island which is our primary aim. We often dream of a more leisurely life . . .
Their are moments when we do not think our efforts are worth the strain on our energy and finances, then along wil come someone whose encouragement wil put us on course again.
Such sentiments sustain us and enable us to carry on, and so we shall - as long as the money lasts.

This is a bittersweet tale. It is clear that Evelyn and Babs love the island, but owning it has come at a price.
Visitors say they would do anything to exchange their lives for ours. But would they? We understand their envy but doubt if they understand the responsibilities involved.
Christmas holidays were very precious to us for it was,  and still is, the only time we take a „ holiday”. We have the usual chores to do, the generator and the water pump must be attended to, but we do relax mentally. It is then that we also can appreciate the sheer joy of our island paradise. We feel, on those rare summer days in the depth of winter that sparkle like a jewel in the darkness, that we are on another planet; that we are privileged for a short spell to be part of a timeless universe, where there is nog beginning, no end, only an magical limitless „now”.

This photo made me smile: Calvé Pindakaas is a very popular brand of peanut butter here in The Netherlands. I wonder how that bucket ended up there?

Evelyn and Babs Atkins.

More on Looe Island in my next post.

We Bought an Island by Evelyn E. Atkins (1976)

 

 

In the early 60’s sisters Evelyn and Babs Atkins live in Epsom, Surrey. Evelyn has a demanding job at I.C.I. in London, Babs is a deputy head of school. They have busy social lives and many hobbies. Following an accident and a period of ill health Evelyn takes early retirement. She takes up pottery, buys equipment and takes courses.
Evelyn and Babs decide to buy a cottage in Cornwall. They find two adjoining cottages in Looe, one of which Evelyn wants to use as a pottery studio. 

 

While exploring they discover that there is a small island (St. George’s Island) close to Looe and during they first summer there they find out the island is for sale. Having always entertained fantasies about living on an island, they immediately head for the estate  agent, and after only a short visit they decide to buy it.

 

Evelyn will live on the island permanently while Babs will try to find a job in Cornwall and live in Looe, visiting the island during her holidays. By some miracle there is a vacancy in Looe and Babs is appointed senior mistress at a school there, They quickly make friends with Wren Toms, who ferries furniture and equipment to the island. A giant removal van takes all their stuff to Looe. 

Moving to the island is not going to be easy:
Like a douch of cold water it hit us that late December is hardly the best time to move furniture in an open boat in darkness to an island that did not have a harbour.  What sent our spirits plummeting however was when Wren Toms said several journeys would have to be made and that the would have to be at the top of the spring tides.

 

 
As spring tides come twice every month with the new moon and again with the full moon, it is going to take some time to move everything to the island. Almost half the book is devoted to these, sometimes very hazardous, trips. In February 1965 Evelyn  definitely moves to the island

The book seems one long friendly chat. Evelyn takes her time and clearly thinks we should have all the details: the parties they give, the people they know,  the cameras she owns, her family’s history etc.  This is mostly very entertaining although I could have done without the seemingly endless tale of all the boat trips needed to transport all their stuff to the island. What you would like to know is what life on the island will be like. But then the book ends.
Like the title says the book is about the Buying of an island. If you want to know what life on the island was actually like you will have to read the sequel: Tales from our Cornish Island. More on that in my next post!