http://www.amazon.co.uk/People-Privilege-Hill-Jane-Gardam/dp/0701177993
]]>Intrigued to discover if Jane Gardam's writing could be included among our Kent literary finds, I was encouraged to find that Kent Libraries and Archives has over 50 copies of her books, and Sandwich Library even has some signed copies! So plenty here to keep us busy .....
Jane Gardam, who was born in 1928, has written extensively for both adults and younger readers. She spent her childhood in North Yorkshire and Cumberland, and many of her books are inspired by vivid childhood memories, but she clearly draws on a rich variety of sources, and is still creating great fiction. Last September she published The Man in the Wooden Hat, a story featuring barrister Edward Feathers and his wife Betty. It covers a wide time-scale, from late 1940s Hong Kong to present day Dorset. I confess I haven't read this book yet, but I did catch part of it when it was serialized last year by BBC Radio 4, and it's definitely one I must read.
Local influences may not be obvious in her latest novels, but an article by Jane Gardam in the Review section of The Guardian (Saturday February 21st 2010) reveals that she has recently turned her hand to other activities in her local market town. Working in partnership with a friend, she set out last autumn to make "random droppings" - dropping poetry at various locations in and around the town. The reason she gives for making these poetry drops is "pleasure"! How wonderful for the inhabitants of Sandwich to be at the receiving end of this generous act!
Jane Gardam says in her article that she and her friend have tried to avoid parochialism, but, desiring to act with courtesy, some of the poems which they selected do have local resonance. (More food for Reading Detectives here!)
Initially, it seems, these droppings did not go well. But, adapting their tactics a little, offering local shops poems for their windows, the activity soon proved to be a great success. Apparently the Sandwich independent bookshop filled two windows with pieces by Gawain Douglas, a local laureate who lives in nearby Deal. Children did not miss out, being treated with verses by Spike Milligan, nor did patients waiting at the doctor's surgery, who were uplifted with a poem by Francis Burroughs. On Valentine's Day the town was given All for Love.
I'm beginning to visualize a way to give our "forgotten" poets an airing. Perhaps we could make a start with poems from our Tramp Poets? (Or would that risk being too parochial?)
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Kitty Danby and her brother have been uprooted from London during the Blitz, and are living with their aunt and uncle near the village of Charing. But in the summer of 1944 the war has been taken to a new level in the skies over Kent .....
It is a poignant story of love and passion, with moments of intense sadness and pain. Initially the story might seem simplistic and predictable, but it is beautifully told, in a very readable, flowing style. Moving through three different time frames, the reader becomes aware of webs of secrecy surrounding events; a secrecy which still has a hold 60 years later .....
There is more about Val Rutt and Out of the Blue on her website at:
http://www.valrutt.com/ootb.html
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Describing how the story evolved, Val Rutt writes:
Reading the letters of survivors who had witnessed the tragedy, I started to think about the men who lost their lives that day and all the people who had been affected by it. The bereft loved ones, the survivors, local people who were sworn to secrecy.....
..... the loss of life in a Kent field that June morning is as significant a part of D-day as the Normandy landings and should be remembered.
(Out of the Blue was published earlier this year by Piccadilly Press as a 'Teen Book', and I've reserved a copy at Maidstone Library. I hope to update this blog if this website is still open when I have read the book.)
H E Bates and Flying Bombs over Kent
A tip-off from Rob led me to discover that, during World War 2, the literary career of H E Bates was given a boost when he was appointed writer-in-residence by the Air Ministry.
Initially Bates wrote a number of stories on service life, and these were published in the News Chronicle under the pseudonym Flying Officer X. (Later they were published in book form as The Greatest People in the World and How Sleep the Brave.)
Bates was also instructed to prepare an official history of the concept, design and use of the ferocious V1 and V2 flying bombs, which were being sent over from Germany in a last-ditch attempt to turn the tide of the war immediately after the D-Day landings in June 1944. Drawing on his detailed knowledge of his subject, Bates conveyed a vivid picture of these "vengeance weapons" and their impact. He described the tense atmosphere of the time, when the people of Kent, living in "V1 alley", were constantly under the shadow of these air-borne weapons; he explained their highly skilled design; he described the devastation they caused, and he showed how they were finally repulsed by the men and women of this new front-line Battle of Britain. But, in 1945, the Government immediately imposed an embargo on Bates' manuscript for 30 years. It was kept locked away in the Public Record Office where it was forgotten about until nearly 20 years after Bates' death. It was discovered in 1993 by the Kent writer Bill Ogley, who was carrying out research for a book on flying bombs. With permission from the Bates family, Bill Ogley published the manuscript through his own publishing company, Froglets, in 1994, giving it the title Flying Bombs Over England.
An article published in January 1994 in The Independent reports on this discovery:
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In this essay and a chapter of The River and the Downs : Kent's Unsung Corner, Michael Baldwin offers a distinctive view of the literature of Kent, (and North West Kent in particular.)
Michael Baldwin grew up in Gravesend and Meopham. His work includes autobiography, poetry and novels. I am surprised that Kent Libraries do not have a copy of There's a War On a novel that is set in a small town in North West Kent during the Second World War. In his 1970 Times review, Roger Baker suggests that the novel "shows how the war was used- purposely and fortuitously- as a cover, or excuse for an alteration of standards..."
If I can't get hold of this novel, i'll try and write a little more about The River & the Downs which is a blend of the topographical and the literary. The book is punctuated with Baldwin's poems, including elegiac verses on Amy Johnson whose famous transatlantic flight of 1936 began at Gravesend Airport.
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Philip Ardagh (aka Beardy Ardagh) divides his time between Tunbridge Wells and the fantastically filthy world of Grubtown, a town full of oddballs, including Farflung Heaps, Acrid Scorn and an outsized mayor who is knitting himself a new house. But one resident of the town, Manual Org, is too repulsive even for the inhabitants of Grubtown. In fact his hair is more grease than hair .....!!! Then Jilly Cheeter and Mango Claptrap discover a gargantuan diamond, and they begin to uncover the truth about Manual Org and his disgusting habits .....
Michael Rosen, one of the Funny Prize judges, described Stinking Rich and Just Plain Stinky as a book "with a cast of characters crazy enough to wake Spike Milligan from his home on the Nin Nang Nong".
The illustrations by Jim Paillot are wonderfully crazy too!
Never mind the 7-14 age category, this book is a feast for all ages!
(In any case, aren't the books which we read as children the books which leave a marked impression on us for life?)
More on Philip Ardagh can be seen on his website at: http://www.philipardagh.co.uk/
]]>John Blanford was a soldier poet, inspired by the
Apart from the text on the book jacket of his Poems collection, I have little information about John Blanford.
He was born in
He saw further military service with The Buffs (The East Kent Regiment,) and, by the Second World War, he gained the rank of Major and was awarded the DFC.
His poems like Yangtse Flood and The Temple in the Clouds reflect the fact that between the wars he lived and travelled widely on business in North China and
However, from other titles like The Pilgrims' Way,
Thus, when at Zutphen Sydney fell of old,
I think his dying eyes saw not his Queen
Nor proud
Dappling the water-meadows' glowing green...
O pearl, O Penshurst scene!
As a war poet he is more straightforwardly patriotic than Sassoon, Blunden or Aldington, yet a poem like It Is No Use questions whether the political landscape of post- WW2 Britain was worth fighting for.
I think that Man of Kent is one of Blanford's most effective poems. In it, the soldiers who have fought in eigthteenth and nineteenth campaigns rise from the distant battlegrounds where they died to march with the Buffs of the twentieth century:
-Queer garb, newfangled muskets- but they bore
Our Dragon badge, 'twas our blood manned their veins:
And where they marched and fought we marched beside,
Filling the files left blank by them that died.
...
And when at last the bells of victory pealed
And bugles sounded "No parade today"
-Still the old soldier's cue to fade away-
We melted like the dawn-mist on the Weald
The book tells the story of a young scientist, Edgar Appleton, who has recently moved to a fruit farm in Kent where he is carrying out research into disease in plants. This research is starting to have disastrous effects when a government official, interested in bacterial warfare, offers Appleton security to continue his research, but this raises important issues over moral responsibility .....
Appleton's neighbours, Miriam and Silas Cage, trying to establish a fulfilling self-sufficient way of life in the country, realize the full horror of what is happening, and they are forced to take desperate action .....
The book reflects the widely diverse interests of its author, Edward Hyams, from ecology and horticulture to politics and social reform.
Edward Hyams was born in 1910 in Stamford Hill, London, but completed his formal education in Switzerland, where he acquired a passionate interest in the French language and culture. After graduating from Lausanne University, he had a number of jobs, mostly in the newspaper industry, and then, during the 2nd World War, served in the RAF, the Royal Navy and the RNVR. After being demobilized in 1947, he and his wife decided to settle in the countryside, and they bought a derelict cottage with three acres of land on the outskirts of the village of Molash in Kent. There they grew fruit and vegetables and also planted a small vineyard. Drawing on his horticultural knowledge and experience, Hyams became gardening correspondent for The Spectator and Illustrated London News, and he also started writing novels.
Experimenting with gowing grapes and producing wine developed into a consuming passion, and, in 1949, Hyams was commissioned to write a book, The Grape Vine in England, which was received with much public interest. (This work helped to spark a revival of viticulture in Kent, where the Domesday records show there had been 3 vineyards back in the 11th century. Today in Kent there are over 40 vineyards, and 2009 is proving to be a bumper year.)
Hyams became a prolific writer, writing books and articles on topics ranging from horticulture and gardening history to political terrorism, as well as novels, poems and translations. At the time of his death, in 1975, he had written, translated or edited over 120 books!
It is too late to include Edward Hyams in our list of favourite 'forgotten' local writers, but if we make a revised list, he certainly gets my vote.
A number of his non-fiction books are still readily available through our library service. His fiction is not so easy to track down, but the copy of Not on our Stars which I read is in the collection at the Centre for Kentish Studies in Maidstone.
The Molash community website has some useful biographical detais on Edward Hyams at:
http://www.molash.com/archive/hyams.htm
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This is an exchange between the main characters in One True Void by Dexter Petley.
The novel is set in 1970s Hawkhurst & Tunbridge Wells.
Copies of the novel are available to borrow at Hawkhurst Library & Tunbridge Wells Library.
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At 47, George Ellidge was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. According to the text on the book jacket, the book is about how "he and his wife... come to terms with his illness." However, the energy & charm of their family story overrides the illness narrative. Their immediate reaction to George's diagnosis is to travel across Portugal with limited funds and without tents.
Even more quixotic is their plan to move to a "dream house" in Kent. In 1956, their purchase of Wellington House in the village of Lydden is the realisation of this dream. It is a house that an estate agent might label as a spacious, character, period property- needs some work... The family pull together in making Wellington House habitable and even more characterful.
This is the place that would be a refuge and inspiration for the musicians who formed bands like The Wilde Flowers, Soft Machine, Caravan & Gong.
http://soundsfromthespring.blogspot.com/2009/02/in-honour-of-honor-wyatt.html
Usually, Rock biographers strain to reveal the childhood of their subjects. So, for fans of Robert Wyatt, this book offers an unusually intimate portrait of the musician as a young boy. He builds forts under the tea table, enjoys family jokes about sausages, plays a full part in adult conversation, thrives during a term in a French primary school and forms his own skiffle band in the cellar.
I was shocked to read that, like his youngest son, George Ellidge had a very serious fall, (down the stairs of Wellington House, breaking his neck.) Why Pick On Us? was published in 1958 and, sadly, George died just five years later in 1963. His generosity, stoicism and optimism in face of the illness is remarkable.
Honor Wyatt had a long career as a journalist & broadcaster. She wrote a novel called The Heathen which H.E. Bates described as "a really unusual novel... the story of a woman who sets more value on things than on the people who own them... its writing is a mature and a continual delight." [Morning Post.] Her literary friends included Robert Graves and Barbara Pym. She co-authored A La Pym, The Barbara Pym Cookery Book.
]]>Jean Rhys took many years to write The Wide Sargasso Sea, which was finally published in 1966.
During the early 1950's, Jean Rhys, whose life was often peppered by turbulence, went into hiding. Apparently she spent 2 years secretly living in rooms above the Ropemakers Arms, in Bower Lane, Maidstone. She had come to Maidstone in order to be able to visit her husband, Max Hamer, who had been convicted for fraud and was serving his sentence in Maidstone Prison.
Clearly this was a particularly low point in Rhys' life, but out of it came a manuscript, written in a small brown exercise book, From a Diary: At the Ropemaker's Arms, subtitled Death Before the Fact.
(To check this document, we would need to visit the McFarlin Library Archives at the University of Tula, USA, but, according to Elaine Savory in The Cambridge University Introduction to Jean Rhys, C.U.P., it is a remarkable document.)
*The Kent Messenger cites an article by Geoff French in Bygone Kent as the source for this information.
For information on Jean Rhys, see http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/rhys.htm
]]>To my surprise, I've come across another 1st world war poet & novelist with strong
Richard Aldington was born in
This poem must comprise one of the most negative reviews that
According to Aldington, in pre-First World War Dover, the weather was awful, the streets were dull, the civic buildings grim, the shops shabby, the school and church uninspiring and even the museum was substandard (!)
It is a striking poem, but almost comic in its petulance.
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/childhood-6/#
In fact, Aldington's attitude to
In her edition of the letters of Aldington and his first wife Hilda Doolittle, Caroline Zilboorg comments that the young Aldington "relished the countryside in the South of England, its flowers, hills, chalk cliffs and seas... he became a great walker, setting off for long hikes... in the rural South Foreland... He enjoyed swimming and dreamy afternoons in the sun... and collecting butterflies."
His preoccupation with sea swimming leads me to think that a local girl may have inspired his poem Daisy.
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/daisy-3/
Aldington became a key figure in the "Imagist" poetic movement that included Ezra Pound, F.S. Flint, Amy Lowell and his first wife H.D. (Hilda Doolittle.)
His active service, both as a private & an officer, in the First World War was a formative experience. Aldington was a prolific writer but best known for his war poems and his novel Death of a Hero.
Having read the early chapters of his autobiography, Life for Life's Sake: A book of Reminiscences, I understand more about Aldington's love/hate relationship with East Kent. It seems that, in the Summer months, Aldington and his family lived at South Foreland. He revelled the wildness of the place and the freedom that he had there. A move back to town (and school,) deprived him of this: "You can not experience the force of such elemental powers in a town... In the town I was being manufactured into the sort of human product a not too intelligent provincial society thought I should be; whereas in the country, I was busily but unconsciously developing into something on my own."
Aldington was fascinated by the contrast between the bleak chalk coastline of South Foreland and the fields of wheat, barley, hops and the orchards only 6 miles further inland.
He marvelled at the natural and man-made heritage of East Kent in the early 1900s: "By a wonderful stroke of luck I had glimpses of an England, a nook of it, which had changed little since Shakespeare or even Chaucer."
But, in his sweeping fashion, he asserted that, by 1910, all of this heritage was lost!
Since this year marks the hundredth anniversary of the 1st aeroplane flight across the English Channel, i'll leave you with another of Aldington's acid comments:
"In 1909, the conservative inhabitants suffered the unbearable affront of having Bleriot land his airplane on their cliffs."
2
I don't know exactly when Aldington's family moved to Dover, so it's been been nagging at me that I ought to find evidence that the poem Childhood is set in Dover rather than Portsmouth. (I don't want to besmirch Dover with this poem unnecessarily!)
"I was taken to a High Church;
The parson's name was Mowbray"
said Aldington. I think that this must have been St Bartholomew's church on the corner of London Rd & Templar St, (which was demolished in 1972.)
In the early 1900s the vicar of St Bartholemew's was the Rev Edmund George Lionel Mowbray.
So, there you have it- unfortunately, Dover IS likely to be the hated town of the poem.
http://www.dover.freeuk.com/church/stbarts.htm
3
This is confirmed by passages of a letter of 20/11/1917 from Aldington to Amy Lowell: "I hated
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4
Much to the embarrassment of her literary son, Aldington's mother, [Jesse] May Aldington, published several novels. According to the Oxford Companion to Edwardian Fiction her works like Love Letters That Caused a Divorce, Meg of the Salt-Pans, The King Called Love and A Man of Kent were confined "more or less exclusively to Kentish village life."
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http://www.lulu.com/content/hardcover-book/mr-finchley-takes-the-road/6115744
The book was also dramatised on BBC radio:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007k0qs
Mr Finchley sets out in a gypsy caravan to travel across
Thanks to his popular books and work as a screenwriter in
"Bartenden" is a fictitious location, but most of the
"It put on no airs, displayed few beauties, but it was an honest, plain market town... It had a history yet made no ostentatious show of it. It was content to be what it was, a market town...It seemed to stand beside the brown Medway and say to all comers, "Here I am, just a plain, ordinary sort of fellow, a bit careless about my appearance maybe, a bit rough in places, but I know my own business and I stick to it."
I'd like to assure readers that we make more of an ostentatious show of
Canning used
John Higgins maintains an excellent website celebrating the work of Victor Canning: http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/wordscape/canning/index.html
NB. John Higgins took part in the BBC quiz, Mastermind and chose the Birdcage books of Victor Canning as his specialist subject. The relevant programme is due to be broadcast on Friday 13 November 2009 at 8 p.m. on BBC 2.
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The Tramping Methodist is a historical novel, set in the closing years of the 18th Century. It was published in 1908, when Sheila Kaye-Smith was just 21, and was her first published novel. In total she published 31 novels. She also wrote in other genres, including biography, collaborating with G B Stern on two books on Jane Austen.
The setting at the start of The Tramping Methodist is rural Sussex. The story moves briefly into Hampshire, then back through Sussex, and on into the Dens of Kent - Rolvenden, Benenden, Biddenden, Tenterden, Plurenden ..... It follows the path of Humphrey Lyte, a young man who has decided to turn his back on his home, determined to spread the Gospel in the countryside, working as a farm labourer and sleeping rough as he travels.
Kaye-Smith clearly knew her counryside and the ways of country people intimately. Sights and sounds are portrayed distinctly and affectionately, but this is a countryside in all its earthy rawness, and never sentimental. As the tramping saga develops, drama, passion, moral dilemma, murder and romance are all woven into the story. A gripping read!
Perhaps its time to give more of Sheila Kaye-Smith's novels an airing?
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