Two years of blogging

 I have been blogging for two years now and so far I have reread my way through most of the books on my shelves. There are a few left, most of which are obviously the ones I am not very keen on. We'll see: will I get round to them or will I indulge in some book buying? After all, I have dozens of new (to me) titles to choose from, thanks to all your comments and emails.

Recently I took a look at the statistics to see which posts are the most popular. Much to my surprise the most read post is the one on My New Forest Home by Irene Soper, a book that, until last year, was unknown to me. Other popular posts are on Copsford by J.C.Murray and, of course, on two of the Elizabeth West books.

This year I plan to feature a few unusual books in this genre, such as The Farm in the Green Mountains by Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer (German refugees take up farming in Vermont in the 1940's) and No Matter How Many Skies Have Fallen by Ken Worpole (about Frating Hall Farm, set up in 1943, which provided a settlement and livelihood for individuals and families and a temporary sanctuary for refugees and prisoners-of-war). I also hope to receive information on the life of Dorothy Campion (author of Take Not Our Mountain).

Too many books!

 I buy mainly secondhand books, and since they are so cheap, I'm often tempted. If I don't read them right away, they usually end up on one of a few shelves, and there they will staaayyyy ...  Recently there was an article in a Dutch newpaper about this phenomenon and I thought it was time to do something. So, for the time being: no more reserving books in the public library and no more ordering e-books. I will be working my way through these books and will decide if they will earn a place on my regular shelves or if they will have to go. Here a some titles you may find interesting (I will of course also be reading "farming" books for this blog).

Indian Summer by Alex von Tunzelmann ('The Secret History of the End of an Empire'). Bought on our last visit to India (a fab trip combining sightseeing and cooking lessons).

Remnants of a Separation by Aanchal Malhotra ('A History of the Partition through Material Memory'). Also bought in India. I really like the idea of this book. The author tells the stories of people affected by partition and the (often very few) objects they were able to take with them, such as a bag, kitchenware or a shawl.

War Gardens by Lalage Snow ('A journey Through Conflict in Search of Calm'). I read about this book of gardening against the odds in places like South Sudan and the West Bank and ordered it immediately. When it arrived I was disappointed as I was expecting pictures and the book is mainly text.

Prairie Fires by Caroline Fraser ('The American dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder'). I started reading this, then got sidetracked. Will start again, I'm sure I will find it fascinating.

Himalaya, a Human History by Ed Douglas. So full of information I will probably not read this in one go. It will find a place with my books on India and Nepal (countries I have visited many times).

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. I started to read it and by the first line knew I had read it before. I read it again, it is a marvelous book. "A remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant,"

Love in the Blitz by Eileen Alexander. Read several recommendations, so I bought it, but I got stuck on page 30. Will try again.

Do you have unread book piles or shelves?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Island on the Edge: a Life on Soay by Anne Cholawo

 

 

 

 

 

As described above Anne buys a house on Soay (which was where Lilian Beckwith lived) on a whim, having little idea what she is putting herself in for. When she was seven she wrote an essay which began: 'When I grow up I want to live in the middle of nowhere". Well, this is it. Having little idea of what she is going to live on (apart from some savings), she sells her house and moves north. As she says in a newspaper interview : "I was naive: I thought I would come here, live in a lovely little cottage, look at the view, paint pictures, sell them, and just enjoy the ambience of the place. I didn’t really understand anything at all"

Kind people help her move her stuff to the island and introduce her to how things work (the mailboat, which also carries all supplies she has to order, only calls once a month). It is not the first time she has to depend on the kindness of strangers. Prime example of course is Robert Cholawo, who succeeds in having a navy helicopter move her piano to the island. She later marries Robert.

I liked the first chapters of the book best: Anne describes how she sets up home and gets to know the island and the people who live there, among them the couple Tex and Jeanne Geddes (Tex was Gavin Maxwell's partner in his shark oil factory, which he set up in the late 1940's). She often goes out fishing with Tex. Anne's house has no electricity, water comes from a well.

 

Anne and Robert organize an exhibition on the island of Muck, to which both contribute paintings. Selling some of them brings in some money as does selling winkles which she picks on the shore. She becomes more involved in island life, helping Jeanne and Tex round up sheep and assisting with slaughter and butchering. I was very surprised to read that she had not had one thought about being self-sufficient (well, she did say she was naive ... ) and only starts growing vegetables because her neighbours convince her to. To her suprise this is a success.

 

Over the years she adjusts to living on the island and to looking after herself. I would have loved more details on day to day living and a map of the house and the island. Instead, a  large part of the book is devoted to stories about the boats she uses, which I must confess I did not find very interesting.

When Anne comes to live on the island there are 17 inhabitants. From the early nineties the population starts to decline and when she writes the book there are only three people living there. A recurring theme in the books in this blog: living this way is hard work. "People often ask us how we fill our time. Unless you actually live on Soay it is impossible to understand what is required to maintain a decent and comfortable lifestyle on an under-developed island. It's a bit like constantly spinning plates on poles. You have to run from one to another to keep them going before they fall off. " But: "Today, as I write this on a cold, blustery evening sitting by the wood-burning stove, I think of how priviliged, blessed and lucky we have been to have had the chance to live out so much of out lives on such a magical and peaceful island. Even if it had to end tomorrow, we could not have asked for more."

Here is a very nice podcast where you can listen to Anne. This dates from 2021, so it would seem she and Robert are still on the island.

A little more on A Patch in the Forest by Elizabeth West

Blogreader Philippa tells me that she was able to find a copy of Elizabeth West's 'A Patch in the Forest' for £4 in Hay on Wye! Lucky her!

She also shared some information on the location of the house Elizabeth and Alan lived in:

I think that the house Elizabeth describes was in the Parkend area - the drawing of the church in the final chapter is unmistakeably St Paul's at Parkend, it is one of three churches in the Forest that are old enough to match her description - and the only one that has no stained glass and is surrounded by trees.  She mentions the local silver band being formed in 1893, and while Parkend Silver Band folded in the mid 20th century, it was then restarted a few years later and would have been active while she was writing the book.  I'm not aware of any other Silver Band in the Forest that started at the right time and was still active when the book was published.  Also, the tourist attractions she mentions in her book - Clearwell, Puzzle Wood, Mallards Pike, Soudley etc. form a circle with Parkend at the centre.  Of course, it is not possible to narrow down the house any further, but I thought you might be interested at least to know the name of the church. I certainly was!

Drawing of the church

Photo of the church

A Fenland Smallholding by Pam Bowers, with illustrations by Pete Westcott (1986)

 

 

 

 

 

"This is the story of small beginnings; how a family started with nothing and worked up to seven acres. It tells of all the mistakes we made along the way; and rather than being a "how-to-do-it", a more apt title would have been "How not to be a smallholder."" Pam and Rick Bowers certainly made a mistake buying Ivy Cottage (with one acre of land and three glasshouses) near Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, without taking expert advice. The house needs so much repair that, in Pam's words "just the walls and window frames were to remain". Fortunately, they qualify for a council grant.

At Ivy Cottage "we did all the things we had moved into the country to do, with such serious dedication that it amounted to near fanaticism; we bought the chickens and the goat; we worked the land and reaped the harvest, storing it as housewives of bygone days always did." They also grow strawberries, while husband Rick finds work to supplement their income. I always find it fascinating when writers include lists of their expenditure. Here's Pam's (from 1975):

After five years they move to Fir Tree Cottage in Lincolnshire, which comes with 7 acres of land. "This time round we had more idea of what to look for when buying an old property".

When they move to Ivy cottage they have one son, Jade. They later have three more children: Dicken, Clyde and Bryony. Pam does not give us much domestic detail, nor does she tell us much about family life; instead she concentrates on all the activities on the farm and readers can certainly learn from their experiences and mistakes. There are chapters on growing strawberries and flowers, picking fruit, making cheese, making hay, keeping chickens, goats, rabbits, pigs, bees, sheep, cows, geese and turkeys. Pam becomes interested in dying the wool from their sheep with vegetable dye and she explains the process and includes a list of plants to use. Still needing extra income they install and fit out a caravan, which they rent out to holiday makers.

 They suffer draughts, blizzards, heatwaves and very cold winters but even with setbacks there is no place they would rather be: the last chapter is titled: "But there is nothing else we would rather do".

After all these years the farm is still going strong. "Strawberry Fields", as it is now called, is run by Pam and her children. They now specialise in growing vegetables. Listen to their story on On Your Farm

Pam can be followed on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Organic_pam

Take Not Our Mountain by Dorothy Campion (1957)

 

 

 

The book starts with this quote, and you know hard times are to come.

This is the story of Dorothy and Whay Campion and their life at Nyth Bran, near Capel Curig in Wales. Whay has lived there for six years, "rebuilding his health and his nerves". Coming from a privileged background Dorothy needs time to get used to life in the hills, in a house with no running water or electricity. Her first winter is a very cold one. At first they only keep sheep. Though the fox kills a number of lambs their first lambing season is successful and they make a profit.

During the following years they slowly expand their flock, keep chickens and pigs and start plowing the land to grow crops.  Life on the farm is tough and they have a hard time getting by. But fate deals them more blows: when Dorothy is on her own the roof catches fire and the house can only just be saved. Worse still, Dorothy is hit by a falling tree and her injuries mean she cannot have children. Some time later they decide to adopt, and a baby boy, Robert, enters their life. Strangely, they decide to pretend Robert is their own baby and Dorothy even goes so far as to wear a pillow under her clothes to pretend she is pregnant. The story then takes a very strange and sad turn: an anonymous letter to the authorities about Whay's past illness sets wheels in motion and Robert is taken way from them.

This book is unique in my collection because it deals with the author's personal life, her feelings of guilt at not being able to have children and the couple's sadness at losing their adopted boy. Dorothy is very much in awe of "her man" but she also stands up for herself and, perhaps unusually for the fifties, makes Whay and herself talk about little Robert to deal with their grief.

The book ends on a positive note: "So we renewed out hope in life and in ourselves and out future plans. Next year we would clear a further six acres adjoining the three we had already ploughed. We would sow another crop of rape. Rape would be followed by rye grass, rye grass would make hay. Eventually we would try to run a few cattle on the land."

"The heartaches and the happinesses have given us all we could ask, and our land will live for others when we are gone. I'm proud to have been able to share your life, your work, your sheep and your lovely green mountain. Thanks so much, Whay".

 

As far as I know Dorothy wrote two further books: The Perfect Team (1959, about police dogs), and 1,000 Feet Up (1955, selling for 342 pounds on Abebooks!)

In the late nineties, on a visit to Wales I went to Capel Curig and found Nyth Bran (it is marked on Ordnance Survey maps). The house was surrounded by trees, bracken and a barbed wire fence and looked very dilapidated. I could not get very close to take a better photo.

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

Katharine Stewart: A Croft in the Hills (1960, my edition from 1994), illustrated by Anne Shortreed

 

In the 1950's Jim and Katherine Stewart long to get out of the city and when they see an ad for a house plus 40 acres, they quickly set off to see it and buy it. The croft is situated in Abriachan, nearly 1000 feet above sea level and can only be reached on foot. When they move in (with their small daugher Helen) there is no piped water supply and no electricity. A winddriven dynamo provides them with light (after a few years a hydro-electric scheme will provide electricity).  They get to know their neighbours and begin to understand "what good-neighbourliness can mean in lonely places. Since that day, we have borrowed and lent everything from a loaf of bread to a broody hen and have exchanged services of every kind, from a hand at the dipping to the rescue of a snow-bound truck. We are all faced with the same fundamental problems and we have learnt how utterly dependent we are upon one another in dealing with them." During their first spring they buy a small tractor and a plough and start to work on their farm. They are able to buy a neighbouring property to extend it. This also gives them access to a road. This farm comes with cattle, hens, sheep, goats, ducks and Charlie the pony. From the start they realize that what they are doing can never be more than subsistence farming. "As a business proposition its appeal was abolutely nil, but, of course, we had never looked at it strictly in that light. As a way of life it had endless fascination and reward."

Their aim is to be as self-sufficient as possible. They need to buy little, except clothes. During the years that follow they sell and buy cattle, buy more chickens, grown corn, keep pigs, grow vegetables, cut peat and keep sheep.

To make ends meet Jim needs to take a job and Katherine starts to write. "In a flash it came to me: might not people who were forced to spend their working hours between walls like to hear about what went on in a hill-top croft, of how it was possible to get an immense amount of fun and satisfaction out of lifting loads of mud into a cart, even though your boots were leaking and you knew there was not enough in the kitty to buy another pair?" She sends off an article to a Glasgow newspaper, who are not interested, but much to her suprise and joy The Weekly Scotsman accepts it.

Daughter Helen thrives, making friends with neighbouring children, and walking home from  the school bus on her own: "She has always had to do the last bit of the road from school on her own, along the track, through the heather. Sometimes, if the day is really bad, we have hurried to meet her, for she still seems such a minute scrap of humanity, set against the vastness of hill and sky. But not once have we found her in the least disconcerted by snow, gale or thunder. She plods along, with a twinkle in her eye, taking whatever comes."

This is a classic, loved by many.

"There is certainly little room for dramatic highlights in this story of ours". This is very true. This is not a book to read if you want to know how to run a smallholding. This is about the rythm of the seasons and the joy in caring for oneself and sharing everything as a family. Describing it to someone the other day, I realised it sometimes reminded me of a children's book where there may be storms,  the farm may be completely snowed in, but inside all is warm, safe and cosy. "The following morning we awoke to the now familiar sound of a northerly gale tearing at us all day. We struggled out three times to see to the animals. The rest of the day we spent huddled at the livingroom fire, swathed in woollen garments, heating panfuls of broth and making tea and cocoa. Helen loved those days of storm, when we were marooned together cosily, in the firelight, with the world whirling madly outside the windowpanes."

My edition features a new postscript by the author, written in 1979. She describes how many things have changed in Scotland and some remain the same. Jim has died and Katharine now lives in the old school-house where she runs a (tiny) Post Office. Daughter Helen and her family live nearby on their small farm.

Kaherine went on to write many more books. She died in 2013. A very interesting obituary can be found here here .

Phil and Maureen Rooksby

Years ago I used to follow Elspeth Thompson's blog about her garden by the seaside, and I was shocked and saddened to read about her death in 2010. Yesterday I was leafing through her book A Tale of Two Gardens, and came upon a piece called 21st-Century Self-Sufficiency, about books written by Phil and Maureen Rooksby. I had never heard of them, so naturally I googled their names. And found a website called A Simpler Life , which includes free PDF's of their books. Worth a look!

Living in The Netherlands: bridge poetry

London has Poems on the Underground, we have Bridge Poetry. As we spend quite some time waiting for ships to pass, there is time to read, and many bridges in Amsterdam and Rotterdam now feature poems:

 

Yorkshire Cottage, continued

A very kind lady from Quaker House sent me the following information, on children being excluded from WWII evacuation schemes, as mentioned in Yorkshire Cottage by Ella Pontefract and Marie Hartley (see earlier post):

I think this book has slightly mis-represented the situation at the time. Firstly, Quakers could only bring over children under the government scheme, so they would not have been able to bring over any refugee children who did not meet the criteria of the scheme. The criteria for rescuing refugees would have been about establishing whether the children were ‘in danger’ from the Nazi regime as opposed to their racial profile – although of course it was the Nazi’s racial profiling of citizens which led to them being in danger.

The Jewish relief agencies, and the non-Jewish relief agencies (Quaker, Catholic etc) in the UK, agreed amongst themselves to divide up the refugees into those who identified as Jewish, and those who did not identify as Jewish (but whom the Nazis decided to persecute as ‘non-Aryan’, usually as they had mixed parentage or a Jewish grandparent). So, Quakers tended to support refugees who were non-Jewish, or had mixed heritage, but not from any particular ethical stance, just as an effective way to organise the available resources and manage the caseload.

As far as I know, the government let the relief agencies on the ground assess who should qualify for the scheme – i.e. they let the relief agencies decide who was ‘deserving’, i.e. at risk of the Nazis. All the government was concerned with, was that financial support of a certain amount had been arranged for each child. You can read more about the Kindertransport here: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/kindertransport/

There are records for the Kindertransport children here: https://search.findmypast.co.uk/search-world-records/kindertransport

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has information here: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/kindertransport-1938-40

I am not sure the child in question came over with the Kindertransport, as she was French and fled with her mother and brother. But it did make me feel better that  Ella Pontefract perhaps misunderstood the situation.

A Curious Thing in a Yorkshire Cottage

In my earlier post I wrote about Yorkshire Cottage by Ella Pontefract and Marie Hartley. On page 101 of this book I came across this paragraph:

The text refers to a three year old girl who, with her mother and small brother, has fled from Belgium. Her father is 'interned' (= in a concentration camp) in France. She is being evacuated to Yorkshire and spends some time with Ella and Marie. 

According to this book being mixed race barred you from benefiting from Government evacuation schemes. Can this be true? I keep coming back to this paragraph as is just sounds so cruel. I have contacted a few organisations about this, but so far have received no replies. If anyone can shed any light on this, or if you know of any sources I could use, I would be most grateful.

Yorkshire Cottage by Ella Pontefract and Marie Hartley (1942)

 

 

  

This book was bought by Marjorie and William Blake on 29 October 1942, and the authors signed it on 15 April 1943.

Ella Pontefract and Marie Hartley wrote about the social history of the Yorkshire Dales. In the late 1930's they buy an old cottage in a Yorkshire village. The name of the village is not mentioned in the book, but Wikipeda tells us it is Askrigg. 

(a garth is an enclosed yard)

The first part of the book tells the story of how they rebuild, decorate and furnish the house. We also learn a lot of the people (especially local craftsmen) they meet, with conversations in the local dialect.

Only part of the rebuilding is finished when war breaks out. 'For us life altered in a night. It became a confused programme of learning to drive ambulances, of attending first aid and antigas lectures, and of helping to sort the scanty A.R.P. equipment which was all that was allowed us in those early days. (...) Amid these duties the cottage seemend unreal, as if it were something we had known long ago.' Materials and men become scarce, but two and a half years after they bought the cottage they move in as permanent residents. Some of their furniture they buy from Thompson's in Kilburn. This furniture was and is famous for having a mouse carved somewhere on it. 

The second half of the book describes their first year in the cottage.

There is some talk of soldiers, refugees and evacuees, but otherwise the war does not seem to impinge very much and life goes on in the Dales much as it always did. I can see why this book might have been popular during the war. It is like one long cosy fireside chat about things that have always been so and will never change. The landscape, the climate, the well, the garden, the village: life goes on. Parts of this book I found, dare I say it, a little boring, but I am sure lots of people will find it the ulitimate comfort read.

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