Personal experiences

Yesterday was my father-in-law’s birthday. If he were still alive, he would have been 103; he was already old enough to be a grandfather by the time his first child was born. My husband was the youngest of three boys, the first of whom was still-born. My parents-in-law had their children late because the Second World War intervened.

Already thirty, Dad volunteered for active service early in the war; because of his age, this was long before he would have been officially ‘called up’. In retrospect, it was a smart move: it meant that he ‘had a good war’ and, although he certainly found himself in some dangerous situations, he was not often in the forefront of the fighting. He elected to join the Coldstream Guards and was employed as the batman and driver of a brigadier who was also an aristocrat – someone whom the government wanted to keep out of harm’s way. Ironically, the brigadier was killed right at the end of the war, when the armoured car in which he was being driven to a strategy meeting in the field went over a Teller mine. By some fluke, he had taken a reserve driver with him on that day, so my father-in-law survived.

He didn’t talk much about the war or, indeed, about his own youth. I know that he was the eldest boy of a family of seven (he had one elder and two younger sisters, and a younger brother; two other siblings died in infancy). His father was a chicken farmer who was gassed in the First World War (like one of my own ancestors). I don’t know how long he survived after this, but he certainly didn’t work again. When Dad married my mother-in-law, he was still taking responsibility for his own family and continued to send his mother money regularly until she died.

He wasn’t bitter about the war, nor did he question the way it was run. He had a small fund of stories that he told, but he always related them in a matter-of-fact way, as if what happened was inevitable. For example, he was part of the second wave of D-Day landings. He said that he and his colleagues ran inland from the beach, saw a German tank ahead and ran back towards the sea again (discretion the better part etc.) – hardly the glorious unstoppable heroics celebrated long afterwards in books and films! (I remember noting the very gradual shift away from unrealistic, partisan and fictional representations of the war to a more balanced and gritty portrayal of its truths.) Soldiers were issued with cans of corned beef as emergency rations – the type that had a metal strip round its middle that you pulled to divide the can into two halves. He remembered that, when it was very hot, as soon as they pulled the can apart, the meat was covered with blowflies. But they ate it, anyway. As they worked their way up through France and the Netherlands towards Germany, one of the more amazing tasks that befell Dad was to dig daily a ‘foxhole’ in the ground for his superior; though the trench was a defensive measure, he would arrange a waterproof tarpaulin and fill it with warm water so that the brigadier could take a bath. Shades of Blackadder indeed! He also remembered the many corpses of bloated cows that littered the French countryside, dead because their owners had fled and no-one had been left to milk them. Always an enthusiastic but never obsessive gambler, Dad made modest but often successful bets on dog- and horse-racing, which still took place in various places along his route, and had to obtain permission from the brigadier to send his winnings home.

From my observation of my father-in-law and my own father and the fathers of my friends who were half a generation younger, I’d say that there was a great dividing line between those who fought in the war and those who didn’t. Dad belonged to a generation which dealt in absolutes. He believed in authority, hierarchies, decorum and The Queen. There was a way of doing things and he liked it to be observed. My husband relates that his father met him off the train after his first university term with: ‘That’s a very disgraceful pair of shoes that you’re wearing.’ He didn’t ‘get’ that his son didn’t value polished toe-caps. He always meant well, having a kindly heart, but wasn’t very attuned to the sensitivities of others. When I first met him, we drove to find him on the day’s estate shoot; at the time, I was not keen on any kind of meat, but, since he happened to be carrying a brace of duck, he thrust them into my hands as an intended kindly gesture! Later, when I revealed that I was scared of moths (a phobia that I’ve since conquered), he caught a large one and informed me: ‘Now I’m going to show you what a beautiful creature a moth is.’ When he discovered that I disliked Christmas pudding (an aversion to which I have remained constant), he lay back in his chair, shut his eyes in disgust, and announced: ‘Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without Christmas pudding.’

It interests me, though, how people can be cut off from the era in which they live by an event that those younger than themselves cannot wholly relate to. Dad survived the war by more than forty years, but he never really belonged to the era that succeeded it, which, in this case, saw the children of retainers (like himself) to the landed classes develop through educational opportunity an independence that challenged the authority of the class system. I suspect that this has also been true of others who have lived in previous centuries through sudden seismic shifts of values: from the Civil War to the Restoration, for example, or from the Regency to the reign of Queen Victoria.

I haven’t talked to my husband about yesterday’s date, but I’m sure that it won’t have escaped his notice. His father was a more remote ‘father figure’ than fathers are today, but he was loved and respected and is still remembered; indeed, his last generous act, shortly before he died, when he was not really fit to drive, was to take his car and head off to a local orchard, in order to bring us back a whole box of Cox’s apples. He lived up to his own very high standards. They were just different from ours.

Last week my husband and I were looking after the neighbours’ dogs – all twenty of them – for two shifts a day. This may sound like a lot of dogs, but in years gone by there have been more than twice as many. Let me explain. The neighbours used to be professional greyhound trainers. They’ve almost given this up now – they’re both approaching seventy – but they haven’t given up on the greyhounds. You may have read about how racing greyhounds are often maltreated by their owners: beaten, starved, abandoned or put down once they have become useless for the track. Well, our neighbours have always stood by their dogs and taken care of them until they die naturally, sometimes at a great age (in greyhound terms) because they are so well cared for. These dogs live in a greyhound hotel.
There are seventeen greyhounds left now (the other three of the twenty are house dogs), all residing in a converted turkey barn. All but four of them have a kennel each. Then there are two pairs sharing: Tiger and Kim, and Imogen and Bonnie, who are litter sisters. Looking after them takes the best part of the morning each day, starting at 06.30. It would take longer if there weren’t a strict routine which the dogs understand. Nevertheless, they love a rookie and miss no opportunity to get one over on you if they can. For example, Imogen and Bonnie are apt to dash out of their kennel when you go in to collect their food and water bowls, so it has an elaborate strap attached to the door, allowing you to hold the door to behind you while you’re in there. Both sat demurely on their beds watching me struggle with this contraption. If I hadn’t bothered with it, I’m sure they’d have slipped out to race around the barn.
My husband mucks out the kennels while I supervise the walks. First on the rota are three stately old gentlemen, Des, Laddie and Woody. They’re all black (which is why I haven’t taken their pictures: they don’t photograph well), apart from their now slightly grizzled noses. They walk out together, sedately. Unlike ‘the girls’ who come later, they don’t knit their leads into knots as we go round the paddock, twice. All the dogs wear muzzles, not because they’re dangerous to humans (they’re extremely affectionate), but because kennel dogs have a pack mentality and can’t be relied on not to gang up on each other. By the same token, several of them together would chase and kill a domestic dog if they got the chance. When I’m walking them I hope they won’t spot a pheasant; otherwise I know I’ll be flat on my face and they’ll be disappearing over the horizon!
When we return, if the old boys’ kennels aren’t ready, their leads are hung on hooks while they wait. Usually they stand patiently, but on one occasion last week when the four girls – Imogen, Bonnie and Harriet, who are sisters, and Katie – were being prepared for their walk, they danced at the old boys and got them all worked up. I was worried that one might have a heart attack, like overly-titillated businessmen with weak hearts at a lap-dancing session. The girls are much younger than the other dogs – though youth is now a relative concept in the turkey barn. I’ve taken a picture of the girls, and one of Harriet (Hattie) on her own, because she’s my favourite.
Meantime, Charlie, cunning but quite decrepit, and Norman, fairly robust but not very bright, are released into the pen, an indoor exercise area, because they’re not up to going out. Charlie has always been a sickly dog and is usually on some kind of medication: last year just pills, this year a different kind of pill and an ointment rubbed between his toes every day. Charlie is a bit of a lead-swinger and sneaky with it. Because of his sore paws, he has to be led carefully out of his kennel and helped over the kerb on the pavement outside, but when he’s allowed back to eat he’ll take every chance to shoot slyly past me, with a sprightliness that defies expectation, sideways into Norman’s kennel so that he can consume both dogs’ breakfasts.
Finally, there’s the crew round the corner in a row of converted stables: eight dogs in late middle age who are allowed out for a romp round the paddock on their own: Tiger and Kim, Lottie and Pete, Walter and Minnie, Holly and Buster (this last a beautiful dog, a gentle giant who always comes for a cuddle, a prizewinner in his day). These dogs are considered too elderly to leap the fence of the paddock if a rabbit has the temerity to pass in the adjoining field: though I wouldn’t want to put it to the test, especially as they hurtle out at high speed for their temporary freedom!
Breakfast for the dogs is cereal and milk with an egg in it; their main meal, during the second shift, consists of biscuits, meat and gravy with a dollop of margarine. The gravy is a kind of everlasting stew, heated up daily in an old First World War field kitchen boiler. The barn is full of such useful relics: the scoop for the milk is a handle-less saucepan, and this year, as in previous years, I’ve had to hold my thumb over the holes where the handle used to be riveted as I fill it. The dishcloth is recycled from domestic use, and in ribbons. The food is stored in a series of old chest freezers, to deny the vermin.
After the dogs have had their main meal, bowls are collected and washed and the whole of the kennels settles down. There is no more whimpering, squealing, jumping up and down or barking, just a deep sense of peace: all needs met, all dues paid.
It’s exhausting work, but I still look forward to next year, albeit with a certain sadness that some of these dogs by then will be no more. There’s a blackboard in the kitchen in which the food is prepared: it carries an ancient message: ‘Hugo: if doesn’t lift his head and look at you, he doesn’t want his breakfast. Pedro: doesn’t like beef, chicken only.’ It’s an informal memorial to two departed friends (they were brothers) and simultaneously bears witness to the standards of quality maintained in this magnificent rest home for greyhounds.

I live in a small village in the Pennines. It’s just in the lee of the Pennines, in fact: I used to say that it was ‘in the foothills’, until someone told me that I was making myself sound like Sherpa Tenzing. But I was right – these are foothills. Anyway, our house is served by an excellent local authority (very hot on value for money and citizens’ rights! It is in the People’s Republic of South Yorkshire, btw).
I’m mentioning all of this because the week started with a public holiday. Public holidays are fabulous (though if you work from home you hardly notice them), but in this village, as I guess in many towns and villages up and down the land, they cause a major anxiety: will the dustman (no, I’m not going to say ‘dustperson’) come on the same day as usual or not?
I have to say that our dustmen are usually excellent and although they may come late after a holiday, sometimes accompanied by relief workers, they try to stick to the correct date. But there is another, related, angst: will the bank holiday have caused the rubbish collection schedule to go awry?
For the past several years, collecting, storing and disposing of rubbish in this community has become, if not a fine art, then at least an activity requiring more patience and practical intelligence than I, for one, possess. I leave all this to my husband, who on Tuesday evenings may be observed standing outside engaged in earnest conversation with a knot of neighbours. All are keen to get it right – otherwise Armageddon may come lurching round the prettily carved millstone which heralds the start of the village, and the streets will be strewn with detritus.
I’m not the expert, as I’ve said, but I’ve worked out this much: We have four bins, which are blue, brown, grey and green… and a green box. The bins are for paper, glass/cans/plastic, garden rubbish and ‘domestic waste’ (I think that means everything else). The box pre-dated the bins, but I understand that it’s for bottles and cans (I am now reliably informed that it has been superseded by a bin, but passes muster as an overflow when the grown-up children come to stay) . Each household is issued with a rota. For groups of houses, there is a bin collection point, to which owners must trundle their ‘wheelies’ (rumbling characterises Tuesday evenings). One bin, the grey ‘domestic waste’ one, is emptied on alternate weeks; the three others and the plastic box in the intervening weeks. Woe betide anyone who puts out the wrong bin, puts the bins out in the wrong place, puts the wrong rubbish in any of the bins or fills a bin so full that it won’t close. The dustmen will then ignore them, refusing to empty them. Recalcitrant or exceptionally stupid householders might even be reported for fouling up the process!
The twenty-first century has debunked or devalued many occupations. Lawyers have lost their gloss and bankers are positive pariahs. Teachers and nurses are still respected by ordinary people, but continue to have scorn sprayed on them by the government. Jobs in high street retailing, always a young person’s industry, have been decimated by out-of-town shopping centres and semi-automated check-outs. It is with a mixture of irony and amusement, therefore, that I observe that the opening decades of this century have witnessed the rise and ever-upwards-rise of the dustman. Dustmen today are no longer Alfred Doolittles or Lonnie Donegan’s ‘My old man’. They are not shuffling, shifty or half-sharp. They are tough and businesslike, assiduous workers running a streamlined system, a system that is vital and in which they are all-powerful. These dustmen are not the bent-over, bandy-legged figures of my youth. They are tall, strong men*, rather smartly dressed in their donkey jackets, uniform overalls and fluorescent gilets, all sporting safety boots and brightly-coloured industrial rubber gloves. Anger one of these dustmen at your peril.
It is a supreme example of social justice at work. Having been a bookseller, which I admit is a privileged career, certainly at what is known as the ‘high end’ of retailing, I’ve often reflected how much we undervalue those who perform the services that make our daily lives run smoothly. Waiters and waitresses have always been near the top of my list of the under-appreciated, because, as a student, I worked as a waitress (also as a chambermaid, which was close to being a slave, in a posh hotel). I’ve no first-hand knowledge of emptying bins (a job at which I’m sure I would be very bad), but I do know that, for at least a century, dustmen were practically the British equivalent of untouchables. How magnificent that they have turned the tables now! More power to their elbow! May their spirits ever increase!
Perhaps by the middle of this century, when we’re told that most of us will be living in cities and have to find new ways of working together with less personal space, dustmen will have climbed much further up the ladder-rungs of the career hierarchy. As university degrees become more devalued and more bright young people choose apprenticeships or go straight from school to manual work, perhaps ‘You might consider being a dustman…’ will be one of the options offered from the career adviser’s portfolio. And, rather as in Eastern Europe over the past fifty years, perhaps some of our greatest future authors will have supported their early writing years by emptying dustbins.
I feel inclined to refer readers of this post to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s wonderful poem, ‘Two Scavengers In A Truck, Two Beautiful People In A Mercedes’, which just about sums up my feelings. Sometimes it’s great to be grungy ‘in the high seas of this democracy’!

[*In July, in Germany, I watched a refuse collection team; it included an immaculately groomed young woman, who engaged in all the tasks and in the banter.  I have yet to see a dustbinwoman in this country; even though there may be some, they are a rarity.  I blame the grunge ceiling.]

I’ve been a Ruth Rendell fan for a very long time; in fact, since before she was famous.  I remember a conversation that I had with the Hutchinson rep (a delightful man called Frank Storey, who was then on the verge of retirement) when I was the purchasing manager for a library supply company in the early 1980s; I enthused about The Master of the Moor.  Frank had given me a proof copy of the novel on his previous visit.  I told him that I thought Rendell had huge possibilities, especially for the library market; he said that Hutchinson was committed to her, but that sales were still disappointing.

They must have improved dramatically soon afterwards.  I no longer have the proof of The Master of the Moor (nor several other Rendell proofs that have passed through my hands, probably because I gave them to librarians), but I’ve just taken down from my bookshelf a proof of The Bridesmaid (published in 1989) and see that on the title page is inscribed ‘No 413 in a limited edition of 500’.  I think that it’s safe to assume that an author who can prompt her publisher to pay for a proof-copy print run of 500 and then take the trouble to number each volume has arrived!  In the intervening years, I’ve continued to read Ruth Rendell and also enjoy (perhaps even prefer) the psychological thrillers she writes as Barbara Vine.

Opening The Saint Zita Society, her latest book, at its title page, I see that Rendell’s been loyal to Hutchinson and Arrow, both now Random House imprints.  I’ve just completed this novel; it has been a fascinating read.  It’s about the owners of the houses in a well-heeled street in London, Hexham Place, and (especially) their servants.  (Saint Zita, apparently, is the patron saint of servants.)  One of the key characters in the novel, June, is that fictional stereotype, the elderly female retainer.  She’s worked loyally for her employer (a sort of fake princess) for more than sixty years.  June is one of the prime movers in the Saint Zita Society, which the servants of Hexham Place decide to set up as the vehicle of a collaborative effort to improve their lives.  I’m certain that the portrayal of June is deliberately hackneyed, because the other servants in the novel are anything but stereotypes.  They range from the exotically-named Montserrat, who is supposed to be an au pair but never seems to do any work, to the mentally challenged and rather sinister Dex, a jobbing gardener who takes instructions from a deity called Peach who lives in his mobile phone.  Dex has served time in an institution for the criminally insane for attempting to murder his mother. Rendell has always excelled at black humour and the scenes featuring Dex are some of her best.  Then there is Thea, who insists that she is not a servant, yet nevertheless acts in that capacity (unofficially and unpaid) to her landlords, a gay couple.  Thea is a professional doormat.  Even though she knows that people are making use of her, she can’t say no and thus ends up romantically entangled with Jimmy, the chauffeur of an eminent academic who is soft on his servants – and incidentally responsible for introducing Dex into the community – because he started life in humble circumstances.  It is another of the novel’s delights that the many gradations of snobbery pertaining in Hexham Place are captured to a ‘t’. My favourite character is the beautiful and tragic nanny, Rabia, a Muslim woman whose children and husband are all dead because of a genetic disorder perpetuated through intermarrying.  Her father wishes her to give up her post and return home so that another marriage can be arranged for her with a certain Mr Iqbal.  Iqbal himself is a nurseryman whose work brings him several times to Hexham Place.

If all of this is beginning to sound more like a comedy of manners than a modern crime novel, it means I have managed to capture some small part of its essence.  Hexham Place and the characters who frequent it – despite their wholeheartedly embracing the paraphernalia of twenty-first century life, including  Smartphones, satnavs and civil partnerships – do not really belong to a particular time or place.  There is an elegiac quality to The Saint Zita Society and a timelessness that puts me in mind of the later works of another female writer whom I greatly admire: Muriel Spark.  Rendell’s novel has much in common with Spark’s The Finishing School (2005), another work that takes a traditional subject – in this instance life in a girls’ boarding school, instead of Rendell’s tale of servants – and whisks it to a higher plane.  Neither of these books is really about the everyday situations with which they purport to deal.  Both are timeless studies of humanity itself.  There is, however, an additional twist to The Saint Zita Society, because although it deserves to take its place alongside some of the greatest human comedies in the language, it is also, as the reader expects from Rendell and then almost forgets, a crime novel.  Among its many other qualities, The Saint Zita Society is a fiendishly clever murder story.

Since returning from my holiday at the end of July, I’ve spent a considerable portion of my time freezing fruit and vegetables.  My husband has been growing produce for several years, a neighbour having generously allowed him to fence off part of a paddock for the purpose.  This year is the first year that we’ve had a glut, so, in the interests of both quality of life and thrift (quickly skating over the cost of a new freezer and pasteuriser and their running costs!), I’ve taken up food preservation on an almost industrial scale.  I wasn’t going to mention this, as I thought it might bore you, but now I am, since today’s newspaper contains half a page of tips from the wife of the new Governor of the Bank of England on how to avoid spending too much on pencils, folders and pencil cases when preparing for ‘back-to-school’ (she recycles everything: I’d have hated her if she’d been my mother, as I loved buying stationery at the start of a new term, the more colourful and expensive, the better; besides, imagine her embarrassment if one of her kids were to flaunt a pencil with ’10 Downing Street’ inscribed on it! I recommend that she visits Poundland – of which more anon).

So, here are my top five dos and don’ts for successful freezing.  I’ve included some advice on harvesting the crop as well – think Nigella Lawson (I wish!) with a touch of Alan Titchmarsh.

DON’TS

• If you have to pass beehives on your way to your vegetable garden, DON’T walk across the front of the hive.  This will annoy the bees, particularly if your favourite colour is blue and you are wearing blue clothes, which to a bee is (pardon the simile) like a red rag to a bull.  Instead, walk round the back of the hive, even if this means bumping your head on the low-hanging branches of any apple trees that might just be growing there.  (In the good life, experience is everything.)
• If a horse should put its head over the fence that separates your garden from the paddock, DON’T offer it a handful of whatever it is you’re harvesting, however much it appreciates your friendship.  If you do, next time you look round, you’ll find four or five horses, all of which seem to have the necks of giraffes and the effrontery of Barbary macaques.
• DON’T allow marauders into the kitchen to steal handfuls of the raw peas or fruit that you’ve harvested and prepared.  Bolt the door and make them go out and pick their own.
• DON’T bother to blanch peas.  They’re fine placed straight into the containers from the pod and you can munch them as you work – after all, you picked and shelled them.  (But you will have to blanch beans, otherwise they turn brown).
• It’s a good idea to chill the water that you plunge vegetables into after having boiled them for one minute to blanch; but DON’T do this by adding ice cubes.  It is sossy, inevitably causes you to skim across the kitchen on the one that got away and requires a new batch of ice cubes for each lot.  Instead, place a freezer brick in the water.  My mother-in-law, who never did culinary tasks by halves, once gave me one only slightly smaller than Sisyphus’s rock; but two ordinary ones will do the job.

DOS

• DO use small plastic boxes (rather than bags) in the freezer.  They stack better and protect the contents.  Recycled Chinese takeaway cartons are excellent (although on no account allow this as an excuse for increased male consumption of chop suey).  My rather poncy local supermarket sells boxes at £2 for eight.  I bought up all its stock (three packs of eight) and, in desperate need for more, for the first time entered Poundland’s less portentous portals, where I found similar packs of eight costing what it says on the shop.  While there, I also bought a book that I’d been looking for about British colonial Africa, which is probably the most unlikely literary find I’ve ever made!  Poundland rules, OK?  But never let it be said that Christina is cheap, like Maureen 118 212.
• If you think ahead and buy ice cream to accompany your defrosted fruit, DO conceal the tubs behind items unlikely to appeal to the male psyche – e.g., ‘cubed beetroot for borscht’.  Understand that this may not be a sufficient deterrent: the tubs may also need booby-trapping.
• DO label the boxes with the date and note of the contents – though there is no need to go overboard.  Mine say ‘Peas, July 2013’ or ‘Beans, August 2013’.  It is a mistake to convert labelling into an art form: “White Lady, sliced.  Harvested 6^th August at 06.00 on a dewy morning, sun just peeping through.  Blanched and chilled between 10.10 and 10.20 hours.  Put to freeze at 10.30 hours.  Twelve ounces: serves four.”  Apart from the time that it takes, it will turn you into a freezer nerd.  And no, I don’t harvest beans at 06.00.
• DO fill the freezer pretty much to capacity if you can.  I can’t prove this personally, but all the electricity companies say that this cuts down on fuel consumption (and who would doubt their integrity?).
• DO remember how much stuff you’ve got in there, especially when you’re shopping for fruit and vegetables in the winter.  You don’t want next summer to come round and find that you’re still eating last year’s produce, having in the meantime absent-mindedly spent a fortune and incurred thousands of airmiles on asparagus from Peru.

Finally, I have one tip that can be either a DO or a DON’T, depending on your point of view:

If you want to pick and freeze blackberries, you may choose to ask your husband to accompany you, as he will probably know all the best places, can reach higher and further into the brambles than you can, and may be impervious to their thorns.  However, be aware that he may also be paranoid about other blackberry pickers discovering his favourite spots, especially if these are close by a road.  He may therefore expect you to squat down behind the brambles every time a car passes by, in order to avoid drawing attention to your blackberrying activities, which is not only murder on the knees, but will convince your dog and other dog-walkers and their dogs that you are mad.  The choice is yours.

I hope that this has been useful… and at least as interesting as pencils.  Happy freezing!

Disclaimer: All characters in this post are fictitious.  No husbands or mothers-in-law have been harmed in the freezing process.  (Though chest freezers do lend themselves to…  no, I won’t go there.)

I’ve not had a gripe about words and their usage for some time. However, last night an old irritation re-emerged as I was preparing dinner.
I hate colloquial abbreviations that turn a perfectly serviceable – and sometimes quite beautiful – word or phrase into a much more humdrum, not to say unintelligent, expression. This is an irk (I’ve just made a noun of that!) that goes way back into my childhood. I grew up in an era when the relative affluence of the 1960s was taking consumerism to new levels and my mother frequently sent me on errands to our local shop, which (even then) belonged to Spar. As part of the independent retailer drive against the supermarket chains which, even in towns like Spalding, were just beginning to take hold (my Uncle David, who also kept a shop and didn’t belong to any kind of co-operative, was always railing against them), the shop usually displayed a few items marked ‘special offer’. As a nine-year-old or thereabouts (I admit that I was probably an insufferable little prig!), I remember the strong sense of semantic outrage that I felt on the first occasion that I heard the shopkeeper describe one of these as ‘on offer’. Now, of course, this is such a familiar term that ‘special offer’ has almost disappeared from usage; many retailers even use the term ‘offer’ without a preposition.
Since then, many similar slimmed-down inventions have offended my ear. The term ‘Brussels sprouts’ is a case in point. My father frequently abbreviated this to ‘Brussels’, which I felt gave the vegetable, although it provided good, solid English fare, a hint of continental exoticism. I was not so delighted when I came to live in Yorkshire and found that the locals always call them ‘sprouts’ – a less attractive word I could hardly conceive of!
Then there were ‘high heels’, those potent rites of passage into womanhood that girls aspired to and were once not allowed to wear until well into their teens. I’m not quite sure when this happened – possibly longer ago than I realise – but I note that now they are always called ‘heels’. Ugh! If you’d used this word to my grandmother, who was not particularly enamoured of the male sex, she would immediately have understood that you were referring to a couple of less-than-satisfactory men, not a pair of glamorous shoes.
And, while we’re on the subject, what about ‘mains’, as in ‘main course’? It’s another one that’s crept up on me. When was the second word dropped? Did restaurants not have enough space on menus and billboards to write the whole phrase? It sounds like an apology for a waterworks.
And now – wait for it! – as I discovered yesterday evening, Sainsbury’s is describing its garlic ciabatta bread as ‘a classic and Italian side’. A classic and Italian side of what? Of course, I know that it refers to ‘side dish’, or, as the Americans would say, something to be presented or eaten ‘on the side’. But why not say so? Why mangle the language in this way and diminish both the magic of the words and their sense?
Perhaps I’ve now become an insufferable much older prig… or perhaps I have a point.

Last Friday, I experienced the rare treat of visiting Blackwell’s Broad Street, the Blackwell bookshop chain’s flagship shop in Oxford. It is a bookshop that I know quite well, though it is two or three years since I was last there. It is one of a handful of large world class bookshops in this country – as readers of this blog will know, my own particular favourite is Waterstones Gower Street, but that is partly because it holds strong personal associations for me and is therefore much more of an old friend than Broad Street. Gower Street is like a rather quirky intellectual woman of a certain age, always coming up with racy surprises of which you might not have thought her capable. She’s one of the liberated ‘new women’ of the early twentieth century, as her Arts and Crafts clothing and the pedigree of her creator, Una Dillon, both demonstrate. Broad Street, on the other hand, is the grande dame of British bookshops. She is an eminent Victorian, offspring of the sternly teetotal Benjamin Henry Blackwell, whose fine bookselling tradition was carried on by his son, also Benjamin, and very famous grandson Basil (‘The Gaffer’) who presided over this shop and its sister stores for more than sixty years.
It was not the first of Oxford’s bookshops that I visited on Friday, but, once through its surprisingly modest front door (it could be the entrance to any moderately well-to-do person’s house), I wondered why I had bothered with the others. Here were riches indeed! And cared for by very professional staff who seemed never to intrude on browsers except at that vital moment – which they must have sensed by some kind of invisible booksellers’ radar – when I was stumped and needed help.
I didn’t actually find the exact book that I wanted – I’m not sure that this book even exists, as I was searching by topic rather than title, but I spent an enchanted two hours in the shop nevertheless. I came away with three purchases, but could have splashed out on many more. I was also delighted to see four copies of Almost Love and two of In the Family on the shelves of the crime fiction section. I happen to know from my previous life that the crime fiction buyer in this shop is probably the best in the country, so I am doubly appreciative that he has chosen to stock my books.
Blackwell’s Broad Street also has a great coffee bar in which people may really be seen looking at and talking about the books they have just bought (instead of just reading the paper or examining their shopping); it has also several brilliant, if eclectically-arranged, second-hand sections. If you know Oxford, I am sure that you will have visited this bookshop. If you don’t know it and should ever find yourself in the city, I recommend that you include Broad Street in your itinerary!

Today has been one of those perfect late summer days that you look on and savour when it’s the bleak middle of winter. The sun has been shining, but a gentle breeze has prevented the heat from becoming oppressive. When we took the dog for a walk this morning, the wheat was almost ripe and straight, unspoiled by the rainstorms of a couple of weeks ago; the barley stubble was pure gold. By lunchtime, I’d written my quota of words for the novel I’m working on. The garden is a pleasure to be in: it hasn’t yet matured into its blowsy, trollopy autumn look and the late summer flowers are still blooming. The clematis étoile violette is at its spectacular best.


The flowers of our golden marjoram and oregano are attracting our honey-bees and the many kinds of bumble-bee that seem to be flourishing this year (I like the red-bottomed ones!) and there are more butterflies than I’ve ever before seen here – the peacock butterflies have been especially prolific and one popped in to be photographed before we helped it back to the yellow buddleia.

There will be a good apple crop later, as the ripening Cox’s orange pippin shows. And there is crab for dinner tonight!
Aside from the beauties of nature, the day got off to a wonderful start, with two very generous reviews of Almost Love, by Elaine Aldred and Trish Nicholson, to join Valerie Poore’s excellent one; all are on the DI Yates page of this website! May I wish you, all three, a summery bounty – you spent a great deal of time and care over these, as well as over the reading of the novel – and may I also extend warm greetings to all who visit and comment here.
A wonderful day. And a shameless excuse to share some photographs.

A week ago today I took the day off and went with my husband to meet friends in order to walk up Pendle Hill in Lancashire. I’ve been meaning to write about it ever since and have finally been spurred to do so by a book review I’ve just read – of which more shortly. I’d never been to this part of Lancashire before and had no idea of how beautiful it is.
Pendle Hill, which is perhaps best accessed via the picturesque village of Barley, is well worth the steep climb that it demands of those intent on reaching the top. It is a windswept plateau unprotected against the elements, even on a fine summer’s day (though a stone circle, grouse-butt style, has been erected as a kind of refuge); once you have arrived at the summit, it is possible to see much of the Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales (including the Three Peaks), Derbyshire’s High Peak, North Wales and, on a very clear day, so I’m told, the Isle of Man. The 360˚ view is truly spectacular.
Aside from the wonderful panorama of Pendle Hill, the area is famous as the home of the defendants in the Pendle Witch Trial, in 1612. Twenty people from the Pendle district, sixteen of them women, were tried at Lancaster Assizes for witchcraft. The crimes that they were accused of committing were diverse, varying from murder by witchcraft to ‘bewitching’ people or animals, usually by causing them to fall sick or die. Some of them were sentenced to death; others had to stand in the pillory in the markets of Clitheroe, Padiham, Colne and Lancaster.
Their stories make sobering reading. Those indicted of witchcraft were usually, but not always, old women. One of the most renowned of the Pendle witches was Ann Whittle, alias ‘Chattox’, who lived in the Forest of Pendle. She was indicted on several counts of sorcery and admitted (probably under duress) that some fourteen or fifteen years before her arrest she had sold her soul to the devil. Her daughter was also accused of witchcraft. The nineteenth-century chroniclers of the witches conclude their account of her story as follows: “… no longer anxious about her own life, she acknowledged her guilt, but humbly prayed the judges to be merciful to her daughter, Anne Redferne; but her prayer was in vain.”
The roots of the Lancashire Witch Trials were political: they formed part of the Protestant response to the Counter-Reformation that reached its peak in this country during James I’s reign. More locally, they played on much older superstitions that had survived in rural societies, possibly from pre-Christian times.
What I didn’t know when I visited Pendle Hill was that there was a Lincolnshire equivalent to the Pendle Witches. Two sisters, Margaret and Philippa Flower, were hanged for witchcraft in Lincoln in 1619. They were therefore the exact contemporaries of the Lancashire witches. Their story is told in Witches: a tale of sorcery, scandal and seduction, by Tracy Borman, a newly-published book which was reviewed in The Sunday Times on 11th August and which I shall certainly buy and read. Yet more interesting, from my perspective, is that the Flower sisters were employed as maidservants at Belvoir Castle by the Earl of Rutland and were accused of bewitching his children, one of whom died. Belvoir Castle and Burghley House were the two great houses of the area in which I grew up and I visited them several times during my childhood. I also knew Lincoln well. The present prison was built in the late nineteenth century, in gothic style, and before that prisoners were held in the eighteenth century gaol at Lincoln Castle; the Flower sisters were probably locked in the Castle dungeons. Public hangings took place above the upper town, from the north-east tower, until 1868. (My stepfather’s mother’s family kept a theatrical boarding house in Lincoln and she was a small child there, almost, though not quite, within living memory of the hangings: she died in the 1980s, when she was well into her nineties. She remembered tales of the scene, with cheers and jeers from the watching crowd below.) Taking them as a yardstick of how little progress civilisation had made in the intervening three centuries perhaps makes it less surprising, if no less shocking, that women were being put to death for witchcraft only four hundred years ago. Even more shamefully, old women have been persecuted simply for being old and misshapen during my own lifetime. When I was a primary school child, there was a row of tumbledown cottages that I had to walk past every day. Two of them were home to two ancient ladies with wispy white hair. One was almost bent double. She walked very slowly with a stick, her eyes usually fixed on the ground. She had warts on her face and the prognathous chin that very old ladies sometimes develop. It’s difficult now to say how old she might have been: as she’d spent most of her life without benefit of the National Health Service, she may not have been as aged as she looked. But I remember quite clearly that schoolboys used to shout ‘Witch!’ at her as they passed, if she happened to be standing outside. With hindsight, I shudder at the pain she must have felt, and that she had to suffer because she was old and ‘different’. It can be a pale reflection only, I know, but still it offers some insight into the anguish and terror that the Lancashire witches and Margaret and Philippa Flower had to endure before rough hands finally put them out of their misery.
Could such persecution happen today? In Western society, not in its literal form, perhaps, but Arthur Miller’s inspired choice of the Salem Witch Trials in The Crucible to illustrate Senator McCarthy’s irrational pursuit of communists and the Cleveland child abuse investigations both illustrate that modern parallels still exist. Old women may no longer be the prime targets, but we still harbour primitive fears of people who are different, and, motivated by fear, are still capable of turning upon them savagely.

Today, August 9^th, was my grandmother’s birthday.  Already an old lady in my first memories of her, she was born in 1892.  If she were still alive today, she would be 121, making her only slightly younger than Jeanne Calment, the longest-lived woman ever (reliably) recorded.  I always remember the date of her birth when it comes round, partly because it is only a few days after my own birthday.

My grandmother was eighty-seven when she died.  Although she was nine when Edward VII (whom she saw when he visited King’s Lynn shortly after his coronation) came to the throne, she remained a Victorian all her life.  She dressed in high-necked blouses and ankle-length skirts.  She never bought an article of clothing from a chain store; instead, she was fitted by a dressmaker twice a year for a new summer dress or a new winter dress, for ‘best’, plus two or three more of the almost-identical perennial skirts and blouses.  Every few seasons, there would also be a new coat and a hat to match.  She always wore a hat and gloves in the street and kept the hat on if she were visiting someone’s house.  People in Spalding used to say to me, ‘Is your grandmother that old lady who’s always so beautifully dressed?’ Her shoes were handmade, too. She went to church several times a week and always twice on Sundays.  She had standards.

You’d almost think that the twentieth century was an irrelevance to her, yet she was a bystander at some of its most significant events.  Aged nine, she was lying in bed with rheumatic fever when her mother came in and said, ‘The Queen’s dead.’ (She meant Queen Victoria).  She was working as a nursery nurse in London when her upper middle class employers told her in hushed tones of horror of the murder of the Russian royal family.  Like many other young women, she knew young men who never returned from the trenches.  She witnessed one of the Zeppelin raids on London, and was still living and working there during the General Strike.  She remembered the suffragette processions and was flattered when she was told that she looked like Nancy Astor, the first woman MP.  After she moved to Spalding (to be near her ageing parents) in the mid-1930s, she watched a rally held there in the marketplace by Oswald Mosely and his blackshirts.  She and my mother were making a bed together towards the end of the Second World War when a doodlebug immediately overhead stopped buzzing; they each froze and waited, but thankfully it fell in Bourne Woods, some fifteen miles away.

These are just some of the reminiscences that she shared with me when I was a child (and I was always spellbound by her memories, never bored by them).  Today, I thought it would be interesting to find out a few of the other things that happened in the year that she was born.  It turned out that 1892 was a very eventful year… and, to list just a few of the significant happenings I’ve discovered that happened in that year:

• Thomas Edison received a patent for the two-way telegraph.
• Ellis Island began accommodating immigrants to the United States.
• Rudolf Diesel applied for a patent for the petrol ignition engine.
• The General Electric Company was founded.
• The Dalton Gang was apprehended by local townspeople and most of its members shot dead.
• An anarchist’s bomb killed six people in Paris.
• The Nutcracker ballet was premiered in St Petersburg.
• Andrew Carnegie (later a huge benefactor of English and Scottish libraries) amalgamated his six companies into one business and gained monopoly of the American steel industry.
• The father and mother of the suspected murderess Lizzie Borden were found dead in their Massachusetts home.  It was one of the first murders to arouse widespread public interest.
• Conan Doyle published The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
• It was the birth year also of Oliver Hardy (of Laurel and Hardy), Haile Selassie, Pearl S. Buck, Vita Sackville-West and Hugh MacDiarmid.  Hugh MacDiarmid was my grandmother’s very close contemporary: he was born just two days after her and died five months to the day before she did.

The story that this miscellaneous list of facts tells is that the seeds of the twentieth century – scientific, cultural, literary and political – were being sown by the beginning of the 1890s.  There can be no period of time that has seen greater changes than the years that my grandmother’s life (1892 – 1979) spanned.  When she was born, motor-cars were in their infancy and girls waited impatiently to be allowed to ‘put their hair up’; when she died, it was already eighteen years since Yuri Gagarin had been launched into space and Flower Power, The Beatles and the mini-skirt had been and gone.  Yet she was not impervious to these events; rather, she seemed to take them in her stride.  In the meantime, she carried on wearing long skirts, visiting her dressmaker and attending church, confident, I have no doubt, that one day the world would wake up from its madness and proper decorum would be restored.

All, apart from my memories, that I have of her are a few presents that I treasure; they include a brass carriage clock of hers, which, as it stood on her mantelpiece, and now stands on mine, seems a symbolic link of time to a bygone age of which she was very much a part.