Writing about the Seventies

Caroline asks why I set my novels in the Seventies. Good question and one I’ve asked myself occasionally, without getting a proper answer. My first novel Out Of Love was set in 1969 and the next in, as far as I remember, 1972. I briefly reintroduced the heroine Diana (or Daisy) from the first one so that readers would know what had happened to her and I’ve continued that pattern ever since, which means the novels must have a chronological progression. (The work in hand is set in 1983). Actually, I think I did this because I longed to see and hear my heroines again, however briefly, because when you’ve worked on a book for a long time you get deeply attached to your characters and you miss them painfully when the book is finished. How absurd is that? Several years ago I met a literary agent at a party. We talked about him, of course so he never knew I was a writer. (I say that with amusement not bitterness). He told me that all novelists had to be unbalanced because sane people could not stick working for such long periods in such isolation, weaving so many thousands of words without feedback. Well, perhaps he’s right. I don’t know.

So why did I start with 1969? One reason is that I didn’t want to comment on contemporary popular culture, which could have tipped over into the journalistic tone of some novels that have been enormously successful but which I don’t like much. Also as I’m rather bossy by nature I was anxious to keep myself out of it as far as possible for fear of repelling my readers, which is why I write in the first person.  Of course it is all ME, it must be, but I THINK I’ve become someone else, Marigold or Viola or Freddie,  when I’m writing.  You get a feeling of detachment when writing retrospectively which is enticing, a sort of freedom, as though you’ve got a bird’s eye view. And of course the ghastly truth is that I was young myself in the Seventies. Though I don’t feel a day older than twenty-seven the fact is that cultural trends nowadays look pretty thin and unsatisfying to me and I don’t know that I can be bothered much about Pete Doherty, Wife Swap or Coldplay. Perhaps I’m missing something. On the other hand, when I was in my late teens and early twewnties, I knew Syd Barratt of Pink Floyd fame. I thought him  amiable and good-looking but he didn’t strike me as being extraordinarily wonderful, a demi-god, so this could just be a question of taste. Or lack of it. I’m being disingenuous. Of course I don’t mean that.

I still haven’t found a satisfactory answer to Caroline’s question. Perhaps it is that a novel set in the past seems like an enclosed, discrete world in a way that one set in the present day can’t quite do, and it is finding the passport to that world, over which I have absolute control, that draws me into the madness of solitary word-spinning.

The Morville Hours by Katherine Swift

This book was Book of the Week on Radio 4 a month or two ago. It was abridged of course so it is much better to buy it, as I did. It is a hardback with an ENVIABLY attractive cover so is well worth ten pounds. It is about gardens, yes, but so much more. A little journey with a mind of large compass. What could be more satisfying? Being a gardening fanatic I went to The Dower House of Morville Hall to see the garden, whose evolution Dr Swift writes about so alluringly. It did not disappoint. If weeds upset you, don’t go. It was romantically wild but you could still see what its creator had in mind. That is what I liked so much, the divurgations of a mind stuffed with interesting facts and associations laid out in flower beds, hedges and trees. I could  imagine its creator lying in bed watching the dawn creep in, thinking ‘Yes, the path shall be like this. I shall plant that there. When money permits I shall build a temple, a canal, a fountain.’ It is not a large garden, perhaps an acre and a half, so easily held in the mind in detail.  As it was raining I had a cup of tea in the kitchen. Dr Swift made me a pot of Lapsang Souchong. An absurd English reserve came over me. I was too shy to say I had read the book and enjoyed it for fear of being the hundreth person to gush in the identical words and phrases, which was silly of me. An author can never have too much praise! Instead we had a brief chat about roses and I resolved to make another visit. I do hope I will.

Juvenilia (sp)

My husband has pointed out that I can’t spell juvenilia …oh well, I did say I had a  poor education. Also that my last post will offend publishers, teachers and politicians and all other sensitive people. But, as I say, there are those who do not deserve to be called lazy, moronic, dim and so forth and they know who they are.

Juvenalia and Age-Banding

When I read in The Times that Frank Cottrell Boyce thinks the sentences in E.Nesbit’s ‘The Story of The Treasure Seekers’ and ‘The New Treasure Seekers’ may be too long and the language too antiquated for today’s children I am plunged into gloom. I remember reading those books as a child without difficulty and loving them. Clearly he did too. Were we infant phenomena? No. Speaking for myself, I was of average intelligence and had an ordinary State educationuntil the age of 12 when I went to stupid girls’ boarding school and thereafter learned practically nothing. What little knowledge and understanding I have since acquired was gained through reading. What a disservice we do our children and our children’s children by our feeble acquiescence to the dim and lazy teaching establishment and the even more moronic standards of politicians. What I am coming to here, via a characteristic rant, is the question of age banding (i.e. this book is suitable for ages 5-7)  on children’s books, currently being debated. Philip Pullman is owed huge gratitude by the entire population of this country and for generations to come for the hours he has already spent on trying to countermand the  idiocy of publishers who want to fit reader to book in this ludicrous and arbitary and deleterious fashion. I suppose they would put E.Nesbit’s well-written, entertaining, child-friendly corpus into the adult section. Of course no one likes being told what to do. Publishers particularly  hate being told what to do by writers, whom they regard as a necessary evil. It wouldn’t matter if you had  Aristotle, Leibniz, Pascal and Betrand Russell lined up to explain just why age-banding is illogical, publishers would simply stick their chins out further, while making notes not to give their books any more publicity.  Okay, so I’m cross and  perhaps being unfair to teachers, politicians and publishers, not all of whom are idle, ignorant creeps courting popularity, but something MUST be done about the drop in standards of reading which must affect every aspect of our lives, from ethics to simple happiness right across the board. Perhaps we could turn off our individual domestic electricity supplies during daylight hours so that children could not watch television or play on computers and would be forced to read, intially through boredom?  How green it would be and how economical. As our heating and cooking is gas I think I might. CHEAT!

Melissa Nathan Award

Good things about the evening. An excellent tapas bar opposite the nightclub where the award ceremony took place at 62 Kingly Street (behind Regent Street). I had stuffed deep-fried courgette flowers.

Jo Brand, the presenter, was excellent, very funny and relaxed and professional. Melissa Nathan’s husband, Andrew Saffran, gave a speech and was also funny, polished and immensely likeable. Her son, a dear little thing, probably about five years old, thanked us all for coming to his mother’s party. I’ve no doubt that at that moment every woman in the room felt tears rise and perhaps some men did too. Joanna Trollope was elegant and charming. She kindly gave me an award for the most loveable rogue. Lisa Jewell won the big prize for 31 Dream Street. I never read contemporary fiction for fear of being influenced/ depressed by other people’s brilliance so I can’t say anything about any of the novels on the short list. Excerpts from some of them were read out and I got the impression I wasn’t quite in the right genre but probably everyone in the world feels this about their paintings/ concertos /  blown-glass animals. 

Not so good things; Two of the writers on the shortlist got no mention at all the entire evening. Considering they bothered to get dressed and turn up, wasn’t this perhaps a little discourteous? My chief grumble is nothing to do with the award really but the requirement for noise. The Studio Valbonne is not particularly large but everyone used microphones, the volume was head-splitting and at one point a man sang romantic songs so loudly I thought I was going to pass out. In addition we had coloured lights flashing all evening as though we were little children. This is not just grumpy middle age. When I went to Annabel’s and Sybilla’s in my late teens and early twenties I was reduced to crying into my drink at the feelings of loneliness and angst induced by the din and atmospheric lighting which failed to convince me that we were having a wonderful time. When you think how quiet the world must have been a mere two hundred years ago, no cars, no planes, no amplification, no television, just the rattle of carriages and the clopping of horses and birdsong …well, yes, there would have been the screams of the mob at public executions so I’m romanticising a bit … 

 

 

Turning Over A New Leaf

All right, so I’m on the shortlist of the most hopeless bloggers in the history of blogging, not having written anything since May 2007 but my excuse is that the installation was faulty and I got so enraged trying to publish my entries that I gave up in disgust. The installer says it is now working properly. We shall see. A fresh start. And not all about gardening. I’ve given my word.

Um, er … the thing is, gardening is the perfect antedote to writing and to the credit crunch, Iraq war, and so on but of course it’s a dead bore to many people. Well for once I’ve got something else to write about. Today I’m going to London for the Melissa Nathan Award ceremony for which Girls’ Guide to Kissing Frogs has been shortlisted. Melissa Nathan was a very successful writier of comedy romances…how I LOATHE these categories marketing people have to have …and, very sadly, she died at the age of 37. Her husband has set up this award to commemorate her.  The judges are Jo Brand, Alan Davies, Joanna Trollope, Sophie Kinsella, Jessica Hynes and Gaynor Allen.

I was once shortlisted for the Romantic Novel Award. After a rather disgusting lunch the guest speaker who shall be nameless (a red-haired actress who also makes cakes) began her speech by saying that she NEVER read romantic novels and went on to talk solidly for twenty minutes about herself and her own career. The chairman of the panel of judges, Derek Parker, said that the quality of the entries had been poor and gave us tips on how to improve our writing. We sat smiling stiffly while scorn was heaped on our heads. What’s more, to add injury to insult I didn’t win.

I don’t expect to win tonight. But I hope they will be generous to us poor old dears, trying to earn an honest crust in our own foolish, misguided way. I shall tell all tomorrow

 

Horticultural Hates

Continuing the subject of standards —plants not morals —I was surprised to find good little rosemary and French lavender standards (excellent for the centre of large pots) in the garden tent of our local Tesco. This is usually a mortuary for green things as they don’t water them properly and indeed ours is encircled by plastic troughs filled with gingerly dead dwarf conifers. Some would say that the only good dwarf conifer is a dead one and I’m sure the late David Hicks, interior and garden designer and arbiter elegantiarum would agree. He gives a long list of hates in his enjoyable book but does not mention conifers of any kind, perhaps because he swept them from his mind long ago as loathsome things. It is important not to feel snubbed or swayed if one’s loves are despised by these self-appointed judges of taste. He hates flowerbeds, rockeries, aster, aubretia, marigolds, tapestry hedges, arboretums, mixed avenues, orange lilies, forsythia, valerian, scarlet geraniums, salvias, aubergine-coloured shrubs, fuschia, lupins, Michaelmas daisy, red hot poker, lavatera, impatiens, snapdragons, begonia, Leylandii hedges, pampas grass, dahlias, gladioli and commercial chrysanthemums.

I really like snapdragons and lupins so long as they aren’t dwarf. I also like valerian and adore the tender salvias such as involucrata, patens, uliginosa, microphylla and buchananii which I find invaluable for the second half of the season. Could he have meant those scarlet fluffy things that people used to grow everywhere with white alyssum and blue lobelia in a flourish of patriotic fervour? You never see that now. Has the nation grown more sophisticated or less proud to be British, I wonder?

Well, it now IS Spring but when I wrote my first blog entry it was definitely Winter. Then my husband accidentally erased it which put me off writing another for several weeks.

Now: Standard honeysuckles. Very easy to make and a perfect addition to the garden if, like me, you are addicted to topiary. They add height and another texture to box and yew and are a wonderful bright green, particularly at this time of year, tying in beautifully with Euphorbia characias wulfenii which is THE essential plant in my opinion before the tulips come out.

Get hold of a honeysuckle …I have used Graham Thomas, scented cream flowers. Hammer a metal pole about 1″ diameter approx 18″ into the ground. You want it to reach about five or five and half feet so that’s seven feet in total but it all depends what final height you think is best in your garden. We used a chrome shower rail from Focus which we roughened with sandpaper and painted green.

Right next to the pole plant the honeysuckle and select the two strongest shoots, cutting out the others. Wind them in opposite directions round the pole as far as they will go, criss-crossing like Malvolio’s yellow garters and tie them with twine. After that you can leave them to snake up the pole all on their own which they will do very neatly. By the end of the season they will have thickened and become woody.

When they reach the required height slip one half of a hanging basket frame …a hemisphere over the pole and tie on. Invert another so you now have a ball-shaped metal frame. sphere. Fasten together with wire as this needs to be permanent.

Now you let the honeysuckle grow, continually clipping off any shoots that extend more than an inch or two beyond the frame. It will look odd at first but will bush up pretty quickly until you have a mophead. Keep trimming, any time of the year, avoiding cutting off the flowers, of course. Rub off any shoots that appear on the winding stem and cut out any that spring from the bottom unless you would like to add a third twiner for strength. It will all grow surprisingly fast and look marvellous. Two either side of a path or in opposite flowerbeds look good or four in a round central bed …possibilities endless, satisfaction guaranteed!

When Winter comes can Spring be far behind?

When Winter comes can Spring be far behind?