by Susan Hill
SEVERAL WRENS IN AND OUT of the bushes this morning, which is a welcome sight after their absence for some time. Delicate little birds. But I remember when I once examined a dead one closely, it seemed both frail and strong as wire. I think they have nested in the hedges on either side of the house. Milder winters for the last five years must be responsible, but if we have a hard one this time, they will suffer. They used to huddle together right inside a big old pile of straw and wood shavings and twigs in the old place and, so long as there are some shelters of that kind, they should be fine. Manicured gardens are a bad thing in more ways than one.
There have been morning mists, beautiful soft mounds of it lying over the water, but today there was a dense fog. Apparently, ambulances were not able to go out last night, it was so thick – visibility down to a few yards in places.
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
THAT CONJURES UP my first term at King’s, and the smell of London as we came out of college on the Strand and walked down to Temple tube station. There was that river smell and a lot of boats and commercial traffic on the Thames in those days. The skyline always seemed to be scarlet in the evening.
The snatch of T. S. Eliot’s Preludes floats about my head, as do so many snatches or poems – or indeed whole ones, learned between the ages of, I suppose, five and twenty-five. After that one stops being a sponge for verse.
I re-read poetry occasionally but very rarely anything new. I thought the other day, as I turned the page on which the week’s new poem was printed in the Spectator, without so much as glancing at it, ‘How many people who read this journal ever read the poem?’ The same goes for the New Statesman and the TLS. But they go on printing them. Maybe it is out of kindness to poets. They should do a survey. There are surveys about every other bloody thing.
I HAVE BEEN TRYING TO DISCOVER how many novels have been published about the First World War, since I wrote Strange Meeting in 1971. There were very few English ones then, although Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front was popular in translation and R. C. Sherriff’s play Journey’s End was revived from time to time. But I began working on my book in trepidation. Not only was I audacious to be attempting it at all, I was a young woman, not yet thirty. Since then, of course, there have been dozens of novels set in the period, and plenty by women.
It isn’t as crowded a field as the one in which Second World War fiction resides. I have never thought of setting a novel then. I was born into that war, I still remember – just – some things about life then. It was my parents’ war. They talked about it all the time, during it and forever after. ‘Beforethewar’ – spoken as one word – was like some sort of Garden of Eden, in which treasures were freely available, whereas sweets were rationed until my tenth birthday, in 1952.
I have no writerly feeling for the time. There are so many novels set during those years and many are, frankly, bad, and often sentimental. If I want to know what it was like, felt like, to live then, I read not only the Olivia Manning trilogies, I read Elizabeth Bowen. When I went up to King’s in 1960, there were still plenty of bomb sites in London, with broken walls like teeth in a blank mouth and rosebay willowherb growing among the ruins. ‘Ivy Gripped the Steps’, as Bowen’s short story has it. She gets the feel of wartime London better than any other novelist I know, but her style is absolutely hers, clotted and sometimes even opaque and it does not do to read her if I am writing myself. She is a fine influence in general – in her creation of places, people, situations – and wonderful on what we now call ‘the built environment’, but her style is hers alone, and very catching.
How do we ‘catch’ another writer’s style? Theirs has to be distinctive to begin with. Good plain correct prose, without any individuality, the sort the best non-fiction writers employ, is exemplary and one learns from it, but that is not what I mean. Nor, really, is writing which stretches the boundaries of language, punctuation and grammar. You could not ‘catch’ the prose style of James Joyce by accident, yet you can, until you go back over what you have written and notice, pick up the style of Muriel Spark or William Trevor, say. I know because I have done it in both cases. Maybe creative writing courses should give their students a page or two of writers like that to read carefully and then imitate, to show how easy it is and how it ought not to be done. Ivy Compton-Burnett was a novelist about whom I was warned when I was a tyro. She wrote almost entirely in dialogue – formal, short, sharp exchanges which are the very devil to get rid of once you have started to copy them, albeit accidentally. And all this copying usually is by accident – or I hope so.
NOT SURE WHAT TO READ tonight. Nothing suits. I feel like a child rejecting every single sweetie in the bag. Discontented.
I have been sent a couple of proof copies of new thrillers, one by Denise Mina, one by a first-timer. I am not sure if I feel like a thriller. Do I feel like the Dickens I usually fall back on? Not really. I always used to read P. G. Wodehouse at times like this. I might get on with Book 3 of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. It has taken me five years to get this far, though. Henry James? A short story. Ah, now you’re talking. But not quite. I feel like an essay and, looking through the shelves, I have found three volumes of The Best American Essays. Some of the American writers I least enjoy in their novels have written wonderful essays. David Foster Wallace’s novels are impenetrable to me, but his essays are so intelligent, wide-ranging, crisply written – and you learn from them. Zadie Smith is one of the best essayists now writing – especially, but not only, in the field of lit crit.
And then there is James Wood, another ‘best now writing’, towering genius of the New Yorker, who has taught me more about novels, the reading and writing thereof, than anyone else since Virginia Woolf. Yes. Time for a re-read of James Wood, I think.
BONFIRE NIGHT SEEMS to have been three-quarters replaced by Halloween. Remembering the Yorkshire Bonfire Nights, with the obligatory treacle toffee and parkin. Do they still have that? Halloween was Mischief Night and I was not allowed to take part. Actually, I think everyone at the covent was forbidden to have anything to do with it because it was un-Christian. I still think in essence that it is, but it is much more about fun and dressing up. Jess reports that their area of Brighton had streets full of tiny witches, ghouls and ghosties. People decorated their houses, and lit them up, everyone stayed in and the full treats buckets rapidly emptied, only to be filled up again on the other side.
But the smell of bonfires and the sparks flying upwards, and the crack and crackle and whoosh and bang takes me back in a way no Halloween ever will. The last Guy Fawkes Night I remember in Yorkshire, we had a local bonfire on the rough ground at the end of the close, and some people came, visiting relatives, who stood back in the shadows so that their faces would not be seen. I asked someone who the people were, and they asked someone else. Nobody knew, until a whisper went round that they were The Mitchells. No one believed it. But it was true. The Mitchells had won the jackpot on the Football Pools the previous month – that was £75,000, the most anyone could win – and like winning several millions on the Lottery today. They ate our parkin and drank our cocoa, standing in the dark. Everyone edged nearer and stared at them through the flame-lit darkness. They left once the fireworks were over, without speaking to anyone. In their new car.
AFTER THE MILDEST OF OCTOBERS, we now have a cold snap. But what is cold now, after the North Yorkshire winters of my childhood?
The geese are all coming in. The hedgehog has not been seen for a week. Probably he has buried himself for his long sleep.
Time to find the best story about a long winter sleep that I have ever read, Moominland Midwinter, in which the Moomins close their house up bit by bit and settle down in their beds under deep soft quilts. And as they sleep, the snow comes, covering Moomin House in a soft quilt of its own. And then there is the long sile
nce. I think this is one of the most beautiful books I know.
But what is a beautiful book? Beautifully written? Yes. But much more. Easy to suggest a frightening book. A sad book. A funny book. But a beautiful book … I go to bed, and the question haunts me before I fall asleep.
I WAS REMEMBERING the library bus that used to visit our Oxford-shire village when the children were small. They loved waiting to hear the bus horn sound and then walking up the lane with their books to exchange. The children’s shelves were set low and just right for them to reach. There were not many children but there was always a queue of older villagers. Detective stories. Romances. Local history. Biographies of famous politicians and military men. Cookery books. These were the most borrowed.
Thirty years later, and the children are grown women. My grand-daughter visits the library and loves not only changing and choosing her books, but going to ‘visit’ my books and those her mother has written. But her parents never borrow books from the library. They buy them from Amazon, or are given them. I never borrow books, either. I buy them or am sent them free by publishers, although I do browse the many charity shop book offerings regularly. There is never anything for me except the odd crime novel. The answer is not that we do not read but that we are too prosperous, although none of us are rich. Younger daughter reads avidly but I don’t think she would know where her local library branch was situated – just one of the results of being a young person who works in London and rents their living space, and so is never in the same area for long enough to put down what you might call Library Roots.
We have a very good small library near here. I take them all my free copies of new titles and very pleased they are to have them. There is never a crowd in there but always a few mothers and children, and adults, too – mainly over fifty. Why not? None of this is a problem and the librarian told me recently that not one of our county libraries is under threat. Good again.
But today I heard the horn of the library bus as it parked on the corner. This is a tiny hamlet – how many people live within the sound of that horn and are at home during the day? A dozen?
I have been observing the library bus for the five years I have lived here, and I have never ever seen a single person visiting it. No mothers. No toddlers. No children. No older people. No one. It stays for thirty minutes. How much does a library bus cost to run? I have no idea. And in really remote rural corners of the county I am sure the bus is much appreciated. Used, even. But when the good local library is a mile and a half away, it is redundant. Most people have cars and there is a good bus service. If they are going to make savings, then perhaps they should make them by getting rid of the library buses which visit areas where most people have cars or can get local buses with some ease. The people who really benefit from having them are those in very remote rural corners, and whose residents are not only isolated but on low incomes, either because they are pensioners or are on basic wages. And perhaps places which are full of second/holiday homes do not need the library bus either.
I daresay I have started a hare, as usual.
I OPENED THE DOOR at about ten this evening for Poppy to go out, expecting a chill blast, but it was milder. Soft air. I walked down the lane to the ford, Poppy trailing behind, to sniff every blade of grass, Orlando emerging from nowhere to accompany us. They started playing hide-and-seek, dodging in and out of the bushes and hedge. No moon. No stars. No people. The river was running gently over the stones – and the water was low. The mill at the end of the road controls the level, according to its own needs. Not many people live near a working mill that grinds the wheat into flour and bakes the bread. I always half-expect to see the Little Red Hen.
Nothing else. Not the slightest movement of the branches. I am never afraid, walking down here in the dark alone. It is a gentle place. I sit on the bench beside the water for a few minutes, and the animals come up and sit beside me, and then we just stay there, companionably, quietly, listening to the water.
Back home, I wonder yet again what book to start reading. I don’t feel like one about rivers and streams. And what does that mean – ‘feel like’? Books have to slot into a mood, I suppose – or else oppose it.
A new Michael Connelly arrived today but I am saving it for … I have no idea. Just saving it. Proof copies of two more nasty-looking thrillers, way too violent for me, and all about missing children. I am guilty of writing about them, but I would not do it again. Enough already.
I feel thoroughly discontented with every book in the house, until I hit upon Diarmaid MacCulloch. The church historian and Christian commentator, singer in an Oxford choir every Sunday – who is an unbeliever. Strange. But then, I could study the theology of Islam and even become well versed, without believing any of it. Diarmaid writes with great clarity and simple elegance – not true of many theologians. I admire Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, and always tackle his book reviews and try hard with his books … but dear God, his prose is something so clotted as to be impenetrable. He is erudite and widely and deeply read. A thinker. A philosopher. A poet. A man who appreciates literature at many levels. Yet he finds it hard to write a simple sentence. Is it to do with being Welsh? I can’t see why.
Back to Diarmaid MacCulloch’s All Things Made New: Writings on the Reformation. The Reformation is not my favourite period, probably because of having done it to death for A Level History. I don’t care. I have no interest. Henry VIII was a thug, the sixteenth century’s Saddam Hussein. Every time I visit Walsingham, and go to look at the beautiful arch, all that is left of that great priory, I am saddened once again by the destruction of so much holy magnificence, such prayerful architecture. He was a vandal, no more, no less. All the psychopaths of history who murdered people whose beliefs did not accord with their own first started on their buildings. Holy architecture.
But I know so little. Diarmaid MacCulloch knows so much. I carry his book off to bed, hoping for enlightenment.
IN CAMBRIDGE FOR A COUPLE OF DAYS. I love the town because I have known it for, well, nearly sixty years, and first discovered it before the tourists and cars and shopping malls gave it a major heart attack and then tried to repair it with a botched coronary bypass. I went around on foot and on the back of a boyfriend’s scooter. Few tourists, many bicycles, undergraduates in gowns, men stomping back to their colleges wearing muddy rugger shorts, men carrying hockey and lacrosse sticks over their shoulders and the smell of tea urns wafting down the narrow streets. It was all men. The women’s colleges were out of town and females in general few and far between.
But I saw its beauty then, and I still see it – the Backs, the view of King’s College Chapel from the river, the misty water flowing under the bridges. And the buildings. Those buildings. It has always been more compact and self-contained than Oxford and, in spite of everything, still is. But now you can barely walk down the pavement because of the gangs of tourists, there is nowhere to park, the streets are choked with traffic and traffic fumes and, of course, the bicycles, still the bicycles.
Apart from the architecture and the river, the best of Cambridge is its bookshops, large and medium, but not small. There is a lot to be said for a small bookshop, but Heffers is iconic. I have never come out of there without having bought too much. Which makes me realise that, setting aside supermarkets for groceries and essential household supplies, bookshops are virtually the only bricks and mortar shops I ever shop in now. Everything is done online. So are some books, come to that. But though I can easily walk straight past every other kind, I cannot resist a bookshop. Small. Medium. Large. Gigantic. The best are those in which are set before you treasures you might never have found – books from very small publishers, and the less obvious new titles from the big ones, who are busy hyping something else. And shelf after shelf of ‘backlist’ titles – if you want to find all the books in print by, say, P. D. James or Elizabeth Bowen, there they will be, neatly arrayed.
Small bookshops are different. There will be – or should be
– a table of the latest bestsellers, but otherwise the stock bears the mark of the proprietor’s own taste. I like that.
Cambridge was humming. Full term, smoky sky, mist over the river, playing fields alive with football and rugby and lacrosse players like Brueghel figures in the golden late afternoon. I took my two carrier bags of books happily back to the car. Unpacking those is so much more exciting than unpacking the groceries, if only because I will have forgotten what I bought by the time I get home.
I GOT INTO TROUBLE once for criticising some small independent bookshops. Naturally, every owner, omitting to read the article with care, jumped to the conclusion that I was damning all of them, and theirs in particular. I certainly was not, but the reaction made me realise not only how touchy and defensive people can be, but how paranoid.
I was actually talking about the moribund small bookshops where those working behind the counter have clearly lost the will to live. The stock is uninteresting, the displays more so, and the whole place has an air of those dolls’ houses consigned to attics and abandoned there because the children who played with them have grown up.
A few years later, most of those bookshops have closed down, unable to compete with the high street chains. Good. That has made room for some bright, welcoming, lively new ones, full of children reading on bean bags and people having coffee in corners, with handwritten cards stuck to the shelves enthusing about this or that book. ‘Recommended by Annie, who wants everyone to read it. A beautiful and moving novel.’ That sort of thing.
