60 Going On 16

Essential reading

The other day, I found myself, by chance, on a blog whose writer* was involved in so many reading 'challenges' that I felt quite giddy by the time I reached the end of the post. Ten books on this challenge. Tick. Fifty books on that. Tick. Twenty on another. Tick. And more challenges on the horizon. She was hurtling through the literary world faster than the speed of sound. I can see the attraction of the odd challenge here and there - for example, to stretch one's reading horizons but working my way through lists reminds me too much of school. And, to be honest, I'd be useless because, on the whole, I like an element of chance (see, we're back to Hardy's influence again), and move, in no particular order, from novels to biographies to poetry, from history to art, and so on.

Apart from that, I've spent most of my professional life writing to other people's deadlines, so I'm rather enjoying having fewer to deal with these days.

All of which leads me to . . . Biff (bear with me, all will become clear) and I was reminded of Biff when someone landed on 60GoingOn16 having done a search for 'biff courtesy chris garratt'. For those who are not familiar with the works of the mighty Biff (the combined talents of Chris Garratt and Mick Kidd), their brilliant cartoons ran for years in the Guardian, although, sadly, no longer. But my daughter and I came across their work almost 30 years ago at Camden Market and, for ages, friends and family members would receive nothing but Biff cards on birthdays and special occasions. For Mother's Day, 1983, she bought me The Essential Biff (see above), and wrote inside the front cover that she hoped I'd have "hours of fun in the phone booth of memory". (Very Biff, that.)

I missed the Biff retrospective at the Guardian two years ago (kicks self hard) but the web page led me to - oh joy, oh rapture - Biff Online. Last night, I whiled away far too much time revisiting old cartoon friends and discovering others I'd missed the first time round.

And it's where, by chance of course, I found this, Biff's inimitable take on speedreading, and suddenly felt very comforted about meandering rather than racing through the wonderful world of books. As my mother used to say about all sorts of things in life, "It's not a race and it's not a competition."

*The reader/writer in question is American and it did make me wonder if our transatlantic cousins, given their pioneering history, are inherently and instinctively more competitive than us. (The American wing of my family is fiercely competitive; we British cousins look on in amazement.) For example, while many, but by no means all, Brits love sport - watching sport, that is, rather than taking part - I'm not sure that we are, by nature, a particularly competitive lot. This may be attributable to that time-honoured Anglo-Saxon viewpoint that it's not winning or losing that matters but how you played the game. Or, in this case, not how many books you read but how you read them. I expect I'll get shot down in flames for this and British readers by the dozen will tell me that they love book challenges and regularly play at least six different types of competitive sport. Meanwhile, plenty of American readers will say they like the individual, unhurried approach to reading and have zero interest in sport. But, hey, it's Friday, and I thought I'd liven things up a little.

Surf's up - Devon style

Amazing - it feels like summer at last here in the UK. So, yesterday evening, my friend V and I headed up to Saunton Sands on the North Devon coast with our dogs. (This means that we joined the unwelcome line of traffic that daily passes through the home village of blogging chum, M, at Random Distractions. Sorry, M - we don't do it often! We would have called in but M was away in London being Wonder Granny.)

The dogs had a wonderful time, as you can see, and we agreed that if we were 16 again, the surfing lifestyle would be very tempting.

The light at this time of the evening has a warm, luminous quality and falls softly onto Braunton Burrows.

When the dogs had finally managed to run themselves to halt, we walked back along the beach into an English sunset and spectacular cloud formation, which I'm including here for Juliet at Musings from a Muddy Island, who loves clouds. The smoky aroma of beach barbecues was carried along on the evening air and we could have been on a Greek island in the 1970s.

We would have completed our archetypal British beach experience by stopping for chips here but the Edinburgh Boy's chum had swallowed some sea water and was sick, so we went straight home. It 's just like taking toddlers out, really. And driving back to our village, we agreed that walking along a beach in the evening sun, watching the dogs running in and out of the surf, brings out the inner child in us, whatever our age.

Looking for Lily Ludwig

When my daughter was at school and studying A-level German, I bought her a very small, secondhand book that had once belonged to a girl called Lily Ludwig, who was living at 39 Chrisp Street, Poplar, in London's East End in 1914.

These details, and many more besides, are contained in handwritten notes in the book, entitled Christliches Vergissmeinnicht, which roughly translates as A Christian Forget-Me-Not. Lily used it as a birthday book and to mark other significant dates.I bought it less for the religious associations than for the ornate High German typeface and for Lily's notes and their historical interest.

There had long been a German community in England but, by the outbreak of the First World War, it was sizeable, especially in East London. Dalston, for example, was the location of the famous German Hospital, opened in 1845, specifically for German immigrants - a hospital that was to inspire Florence Nightingale to train as a nurse.

Unlike many other London streets, Chrisp Street has retained its name and still houses, as it did in Victorian times and later, in Lily's childhood, a busy, cosmopolitan market. There are excellent local historical archives that enable us to build a picture of what everday life may have been like for the family.

But Lily's notes give us a more personal insight. With anti-German feeling growing, she and her family would have felt increasingly insecure. Thousands of German nationals were interned during World War I; Lily records that this was the fate of 'Fred' on 29 January, of 'Harry' on 3 April, of George Baust on 23 January and of Fred Redfoot on 5 July. Even sadder dates are included: a Charles Pearcey was killed in action on 20 January; a Jack Robbie killed in India on 1 August. What we don't know are the precise years in which these events took place.

What else do we know? One of Lily's grandfathers was living in Neuenstein; her sister Louise was born on 29 March in 1912, and Lily's own birthday was 24 April, just a few days before her mother, Louise's, on 28 April. Her father, Charles Ludwig, celebrated his on 12 July; her brother, also Charles, on 15 December.

Other German family names that feature prominently are Binhammer, Leibbrand, and Stolzenberger. The 1901 England and Wales census lists a Binhammer family - pork butchers by trade - living in South East London. Lily's friend, Elsie Stolzenberger, was born in West Ham in the autumn of 1907.

At the back of the book is a section for personal notes, in which Lily mentions that, on 28 May 1914, "Dadda went to Hendon . . . to see the flying", a reference, no doubt, to Hendon Aerodrome. Her last handwritten entry, opposite page 384, says simply, "Charles said he would buy me some skates."

We don't know what happened to Lily - although, according to official records, a Lily Ludwig married a man with the surname Feaver in 1914. Could this be the same Lily? The location makes this a possibility but would our Lily have been too young for marriage in 1914? Whatever happened, her name and address at the front of the book have been crossed out. As have many other names. The one that remains is that of C Ludwig, this time at 42 Chrisp Street. Lily's brother?

Items like this small book are grist to the historian's mill: personal testimony, a primary source. To the writer, they can be a stimulus to the creative and imaginative process. But, perhaps Lily became a mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and, just possibly, somewhere out there are the descendants of a German family who once lived in London's East End. And if one of them just happens to stumble across this post, I hope they will get in touch, so that I can return to them this small but significant fragment of their family's story.

VW and Ursula

Ursula Vaughan Williams

I know from my previous post on Ralph Vaughan Williams that some of you love his music as much as I do. In which case, you have just seven days to Listen Again to a delightful BBC R4 programme, Vaughan Williams: Late Love, Late Life. Presented by cellist, Julian Lloyd Webber, it looks at the impact that VW's long relationship with, and eventual marriage to, Ursula Wood had on his music. One of those R4 gems that are so easily missed at the time because of the scheduling.

Happy listening.

The short and tall of it

Although I write about books fairly regularly, I like the freedom to tackle a range of subjects, as the mood takes me. Apart from which, there are already plenty of book bloggers around; some very good indeed and others . . .well, let's not go there. So, not being, exclusively, a book blogger, I don't have freebies arriving by the truckload from publishers and tend to write about books that I come across by chance or about old favourites. If I had a purely literary blog, I'd probably call it Serendipitous Books.

But as a LibraryThing Early Reviewer I do now receive a trickle of forthcoming titles and then there's a Big Book that I'm half way through, courtesy of Blog a Penguin Classic, which I will do in due course. Early Reviewing got off to a great start, with a copy of Andrew Sean Greer's The Story of a Marriage. This has a haunting opening line: "We think we know the ones we love", which I am now at liberty to quote, although I wasn't when I wrote my review for LibraryThing; I was working from an uncorrected proof and would probably have gone to jail if I had let slip a single word. I'm not sure when or if I would have read The Story of a Marriage, had it not been for LibraryThing, but I am very, very glad that I did.

I was delighted to hear that I'd bagged another LibraryThing review copy by a writer whose work was new to me, Gerard Donovan. And a collection of short stories to boot - Country of the Grand. (I do love a good short story.) Its arrival coincided with Susan Hill's article in last Saturday's Guardian on short-story prizes, in which she makes some salient points about the genre:

"The best short stories are perfect examples of how to write - how to make few words do the work of many, how to encapsulate and to crystallise. When I need a writing lesson, I go to a great short story. That is why they are so beloved of creative writing courses. People can be taught more easily via short-story writing, and they are shorter to assess. But they are by no means easier to write. The short-story form is unforgiving. Beginners begin there at their peril and yet they continue to do just that."

Imagery, for example, has to work two or three times as hard in a short story as it does in a full-length novel. And some of the best short stories begin with a memorable, single image.

Country of the Grand made it to the shortlist of this year's Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award (mentioned by Susan Hill) so I was still expecting good things. According to the publisher's blurb, Donovan's themes touch on 'New Ireland', a country in change but that, unfortunately, reminded me of James Joyce's Dubliners. I say, unfortunately, because for me, Dubliners will always be at the apex of short story writing. Joyce casts a long shadow and was also writing at a time of enormous upheaval in his mother country. But there the parallels and comparisons stop. It must be 25 years or so since I read Dubliners but much of what I read, especially the imagery, is still fresh in my mind. I doubt, sadly, that I would be able to say the same of Country of the Grand.

There is a flatness to the writing which makes it hard for the reader to engage with the characters, even those who are going through some sort of emotional turmoil: couples caught up in marital meltdown appear frequently. If I hadn't been in review mode, I would probably have put this book aside after the second story but I soldiered on - and it did feel like a duty rather than a pleasure. In Harry Dietz (set in the USA), an elderly and increasingly confused man tries to negotiate his way around the city he has known all his life. At the end, I was as confused as Harry; I'll probably remember the story but for all the wrong reasons. In an otherwise patchy collection, two stories stand up reasonably well, however: Archaeologists, in which two Irelands, ancient and modern, are juxtaposed, and The Summer of Birds, which captures a 10-year-old girl's sense of loss when her mother leaves the family home.

Gerard Donovan's novels, including Schopenhauer's Telescope and Julian Winsome have generally been well received so perhaps his writing is stronger in the novel form; I'd like to think that Country of the Grand is untypical.*

Any disappointment I might have been feeling about this collection rapidly evaporated when I opened today's Guardian Review section to find a double page article by James Campbell on a master of the short story genre, Tobias Wolfe. I first came across Wolfe not via his books but watching This Boy's Life, which starred a very young Leonardo di Caprio and Robert de Niro. Towering, unforgettable performances from both of them. It's an extraordinarily painful but ultimately triumphant film, based on Wolfe's superbly written memoirs of the same name. Wolfe's stepfather, Dwight, was a monstrous figure, who bullied and terrorised the young boy and his mother, bequeathing an legacy that was "still there". Was it "still there" now, asks Campbell. Wolfe's reply makes me want to go back to his work immediately.

"Not in the sense that I think of him, because I don't any more, but I have pockets of rage that I think come from that time. I hate cruelty. I hate a bully. I hate the government of my country, because it's a bully. There's something in my president, in that hectoring, self-confident way he has, that reminds me of my stepfather and I have to turn the TV off when he comes on. So it's there, but it's been transferred to other things. It's become a little more general, I guess."

(*My good friend, M at Random Distractions, also received a review copy of Country of the Grand. On her blog, she has rightly noted the lyricism in Donovan's prose but was, like me, disappointed overall. To her credit, she reread it, the second time "hearing, rather than seeing the text and found it far more satisfying". So, for another perspective, why not hop over to her post, which you can find here?)