by Susan Hill
I walk past the huge Hotel de Paris. In its day it was one of the smart places to holiday – like the Grand Hotel, Scarborough, where Winston Churchill used to stay during Conservative party conferences, and I saw him on its steps – twice.
The Hotel de Paris boasts Oscar Wilde and ‘Bosie’. I have never quite bought into the Saint Oscar stuff, but one would go a long way to find a wittier playwright. His stories are good, too – he knew how to shape them. He was a craftsman. Any aspiring writer – any writer, indeed – should be made to read The Picture of Dorian Grey and study the way The Importance of Being Earnest and Lady Windermere’s Fan are constructed. OK, so then you are at liberty to ignore it all and do the opposite. But you cannot understand how not to do it until you have first studied how to. That is why architects who end up designing buildings shaped like eggs, or aubergines or waves, first learn about angles and planes and weight-bearing loads and straight walls.
THE BLACKBIRDS HAVE STILL NOT FINISHED munching their way through the windfall apples. The robin bobs along the top of the wall, in defiance of the cat. And so many of the leaves hang on and still it is mild. I half expect the hirundines to return and start building under the eaves again.
The swans came on to the pond for half a day. They stay very still, upturned meringues, and hiss fiercely if you go too near. But it is the dog not the people they want to frighten.
Starry night skies, which can be so stunning here, have been sulking behind low cloud and mist. But it is quiet weather. One waits for some cataclysm. They rarely come, but when they do …
There are some parts of the planet man really should not inhabit and New Zealand seems to be one. How can people live under the shadow of an earthquake all the time? And they happen. It isn’t like the volcanoes that never erupt. Never say never.
‘COLD DECEMBER’S BARENESS everywhere!’ as Shakespeare says in Sonnet 97.
Meanwhile, the Christmas requests have started to come in. Elder daughter is first off the mark, as usual, with a list as long as your arm. Younger one will be ages yet, but when hers does come, among the fripperies, I will read, ‘Books you think I would like.’ I ask you.
FOG. SEA MIST. Sea fret. Different names for much the same thing. And wherever the sea is, the adjacent land will have one hovering about many times a year, especially in winter. Today, I walked out at Blakeney. A fret was swirling about but not settling. There was a mass of thin white cloud with, above that, blue sky and, above that, more misty cloud. And then the sun came striking through and more geese than I have ever seen at one time were suddenly arrowing high up in the blue. Four, five great flocks of them, turning and re-forming, dropping down, soaring up, but always in their arrow shape. After a few moments, they re-assembled and flew lower and directly overhead, making a loud racket.
It was a bit like the RAF, who fly their Tornadoes from nearby. It struck me that both geese and planes accommodate one another in the skies of Norfolk – mostly. A collision between them would be catastrophic for both parties. It happened one winter night when a USAF helicopter flew very low over Salthouse Marshes and disturbed hundreds of resting geese, which rose as one, cannoning into the helicopter and bringing it down with the loss of four lives, as well as of many geese. There was a change to the rules for helicopter flying after that.
HERON ALL OVER THE MUDFLATS. I counted seven, which is most unusual as they tend to be solitary birds, still as statues, waiting patiently, ever watchful. But these were pottering about. Were they herons?
It was very cold.
Came home to light the wood burner and read Hugh Aldersey-Williams’s biography of the great eighteenth-century scientist Sir Thomas Browne.
ASKED TO PROVIDE 250 WORDS for Foyles’ Christmas promotion on which books I would like to both give and receive this year. Difficult. I spend a lot of my time clearing out unwanted books to make room for the stream coming in. But those are what I call ‘disposables’ – the best, most handsome books stay, even though some of those have been sent to the charity bookshop recently. I am never again going to spend an evening turning the pages of a huge tome about Rembrandt, or read the 3-volume biography of the nineteenth-century landscape painter Samuel Palmer, beautifully produced though both of these are.
Still, anything to help a bookshop, and books I can give is easier. Jack, the son-in-law, was always easily pleased as he regularly asked for the latest Terry Pratchett – alas. Otherwise, anything new by Andy McNab. After that, he is difficult. He is slightly dyslexic, and he is a musician. He has no heroes or – dread word – hobbies, but he is an excellent cook, of an obsessive and unusual kind, so I will dig about among the new books to find one that covers weird ways of cooking a whole leg of pork or a 15lb piece of best organic beef.
Various children are taken care of with the latest Jacqueline Wilson/David Walliams/anything about dinosaurs. It’s sounding dull. I want to give everyone something that will wake them up – but the risk is that they won’t like it.
Pity dogs and cats don’t read.
IN THIS, THE PEAK SEASON for non-books, even the museums and galleries are on to them, but the British Library has had the originality to design and publish a series of books people might actually want to read. Their growing list of 1930s/1940s/1950s classic crime novels, with some of the best covers I have seen for many a day, is so well chosen. I bought half a dozen when I went into the bookshop to get a copy of the new David Walliams story for a child. Freeman Wills Croft. Anthony Berkeley. Writers of those vintage, well-made, tightly plotted detective novels set on ocean liners, in vicarages and country inns and stately homes and smart old-fashioned hotels and Oxbridge colleges. Characters are pasteboard, narrative line and scene-setting are all. Some are much better than others, but they all serve to divert one for a couple of days in bed with a bad cold.
Meanwhile, the rest either have coffee table books about their own collections – Greek vases and statues, exhibitions of fashion designers, illuminated manuscripts which weigh a ton and cost a fortune, or else small facsimile books – ‘Navigational Instructions for Spitfire Pilots’, ‘The Workings of the V2 Bomber’, ‘Parachuting for Recruits’, that sort of thing. And then there are the nostalgia books. The things we knew – ‘Thirty Days Hath September’, ‘Times Tables’, ‘Collective Nouns’, ‘French Conjugations’, ‘Recipes from the 1940s WI’ …
There is no end in sight for these, so long as someone has an archive they can plunder. They come and go, they have their day, everyone gets at least one at Christmas, after which they are dead as dodos again.
They are really upmarket stocking fillers, bought by people who disdain wind-up grannies on mobility buggies and plastic nuns who do the splits. And rude things. It is a book. It will improve you/occupy your mind, or at least Take You Back.
Harmless, of course. But somehow they still annoy me. All except those British Library detective novels.
HAVING DISMISSED ALL THE NON-BOOKS, of course I bought one this morning. The new series of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books are non-books but clever and funny. So probably not non-books. Whatever. I bought three copies of Five Go Gluten Free for various GF friends – only one of whom is coeliac and so has a serious medical reason for it.
I also bought last year’s new Andy McNab for son-in-law because I think I missed it last year. The new Zadie Smith novel for younger daughter. Roy Strong’s latest volume of diaries for the SP – which will be a waste of money because he is sure to have bought it for himself, in that annoying way he has of spending money on everything he likes during the last weeks of December.
TIDE OUT AT BLAKENEY. Very mild. Few birds. Seagulls, of course, but there always used to be masses of over-winterers, until they let the estuary silt up. Waiting to see something very rare. A man came towards me and said in a low voice that on the old gate down there was an arctic finch. I followed his pointing finger to it. Pretty, nervous little bird, but sitting bold as brass on the top strut of the gate, and unmistakeable. No one much was about, but a
s I crept away I met an army of twitchers, tripods and long lenses over their shoulders, bobble hats on heads, chattering away as they marched. Word had got out. It only takes one text message.
I hoped the little arctic finch flew away – it probably did, the racket they were making. I walked back to the car hugging myself with secret delight that for a moment or two, the quiet man and I had had it all to ourselves.
HAS DONALD TRUMP ever read a book?
CHRISTMAS, LIKE SO MANY OTHER THINGS in life, is all anticipation, that and lists. And money.
But if by today, the 25th, it isn’t done, it won’t get done. Today is the day to feel the strange tingle that is Christmas. It comes with the sound of the first carol. But even more, for me, the carol as played by a Salvation Army band, in a high street, at a railway station.
There are family Christmas rituals. One man I knew always ate pork pie for Christmas Day breakfast. Another always goes for a swim in the sea. Our children were always allowed to open just one present on Christmas Eve, just before going to bed. It takes the edge off the nausea of over-excitement. It’s pot luck, of course. Sometimes the present pile under the tree, dithered and dithered over for ages, the one chosen, put back, chosen again … then, finally, chosen for good … sometimes, it is the best possible one of all. A night light that sends gentle softly coloured pictures moving around the bedroom wall, to soothe to sleep. A pair of new furry slippers with rabbit ears on the front.
But not always. Like the Christmas when the present elder daughter finally settled on turned out to be an umbrella. A brown umbrella, and from her godfather of all people. I still believe he wrapped up the wrong item because what godfather with half a brain would give a 5-year-old a brown umbrella for Christmas?
I LOVE HAVING BOOKS that you can only read once a year. When the daughters were small we had a table of only-for-Christmas picture books set out. Lucy and Tom’s Christmas. Christmas at Bullerby. The Jan Pieńkowski gold and red Christmas pop-up book, Christmas Kingdom. Thomas and the Christmas Tree …
I always read the story from St Matthew’s Gospel in the Authorised Version on Christmas Eve, and usually think about the characters who only walk on. Who they were. What they thought. How they felt. The innkeeper’s wife. One of the shepherds whose young son was left tending the sheep, while they all raced off downhill to Bethlehem. The pages to the Three Kings. Real people? Real people. It is like those who happened to be out in the streets when Jesus was being taken to Golgotha, carrying His cross. Because this seems such a momentous event to us that we think everyone must have been watching, silently. But crucifixions were an everyday occurrence. They would have seen such a man being goaded along often enough. Jesus was well-known, of course. Many had heard him preach and word about his trial and sentence at the hands of Pontius Pilate would have got round. Even so, as it was Passover, people would have been going about their business, busy preparing. Some went to stare at the procession of the man carrying his own cross, but probably not many.
Whatever the truth of the matter, or of who Jesus was, these things happened. And even if the events of the Christmas story, as related, did not, it doesn’t matter. It is a powerful fable and a beautiful story, or why else would there be dozens of shepherds and angels and kings and Josephs and Marys dressed from the costume wardrobe, performing the story as a play in hundreds of schools and churches across the country every year. Every year. That is a powerful fable.
After that, I have to re-read A Christmas Carol, though I scarcely need to, I know it almost by heart. It is moving, frightening, funny, heart-warming, instructive. It has a moral. It has everything. Dickens got it right. The ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future – especially the last – have the power to move and to change us. I don’t know of any other book set around the Christmas season which does that and so memorably – other than the story in the Gospel according to Luke.
BY NOW, THE TURKEY is in a big pot making soup and those who came to stay have probably gone.
Presents hastily unwrapped, thanked for and set aside to be looked at carefully later, sit waiting and there is always, always a pile of new books.
AFTER THE CHRISTMAS GHOST STORIES I am reading, as ever, a classic English detective story – and they are different from crime novels, it isn’t just a question of a change or even an update of genre name.
It has to be by Dorothy L. Sayers or Freeman Wills Crofts or Michael Innes or one of their fellows, though I rarely re-read Agatha Christie now. At any rate I like them set in the 1920s and 1930s or just occasionally immediately before the war.
This year it is Marjorie Allingham’s masterpiece, The Tiger in the Smoke, a dark and sometimes rather frightening book. At its heart is ‘the ancient smell of evil, acrid and potent as the stench of fever’, in the form of a ruthless murderer, Jack Havoc, and of the albino pack-leader, Tiddy Doll.
This is not a whodunnit but a whydunnit, a complex novel of character, and at its heart, it is also about the essentially Biblical and Miltonian conflict between good and evil. The devil is Jack Havoc and the angel comes in the form of the saintly Canon Avril.
One of the marks of the good novel of any genre is that it bears frequent re-reading, and that it yields more each time. The plot of The Tiger in the Smoke, once known, is known for good. It is not the plot that matters on subsequent readings.
If the characters are the best Allingham ever created, there is another character that she was very familiar with and loved, that was not a human being but a city – London. She knew it as Dickens knew it, she walked about its streets and courts and alleyways and beside its great river over many years and she wove its streets and its characters together and they know London as intimately as she knew it. It is a city of light and dark, and the good and evil of men and women are mirrored in the two faces of their city. Canon Avril’s vicarage is warm, comfortable and comforting, an oasis of muddled and challenged but still essentially happy family life. And then there is the other London, where a rag-tag street band of ex-soldiers and vagrants live in one bleak cellar, when they are not wandering the streets playing a cacophony of instruments and through which they go in fear of their leader, Tiddy Doll. There are dark side alleys where a man can be trapped and swiftly murdered, the soulless public houses where people meet briefly, and secretly. And over them all, there is the fog, a Dickensian ‘London particular’, spreading like a stain, insinuating itself into every crack and crevice, muffling and blinding, choking and confusing. The fog is sinister and frightening and anything may happen within it and be concealed – secrets, evil deeds, swift, cunning movements. The fog gets into nostrils and lungs and eyes – and in some strange way, into hearts and minds, too.
The detective in the novel is Albert Campion, who in earlier novels was a cross between Bertie Wooster and Lord Peter Wimsey – chinless, receding hair, posh voice, willowy figure. An irritating man. But here he has changed totally. He is now married with a son, and he has become a man of courage and intelligence and foresight, with a well-trained clever mind, one who energetically assists the police and is appreciated for it. He knows evil when he encounters it. He can sense it. He can smell it. And about Jack Havoc, he is right.
I think The Tiger in the Smoke has survived and grown in stature since its original publication – if that can be said to happen with a book. It does so for the same reasons that Dickens survives and reads to us with the freshness it read to its original public. Some compliment for a detective story.
I settled down with it again last evening and was lost in it, and tense from being caught up in it, for hours. What else are winter nights for?
The tawny owl believes they are for sitting on the chimney pot and hooting so that the eerie sound seems to be emanating from within the room itself. We never see it, though, unlike the barn owl, which is so bold in daylight, so close to hand and fearless and familiar.
DULL DAYS NOW, half in half out of Christmas. The town streets full of people mooching en famille. They look in shop wi
ndows as if they have forgotten that now they have actually finished buying last-minute presents.
This is the time of year for battening down the hatches and getting a lot of work done. Everybody in the media world has forgotten about us writers. They won’t wake up and remember us until at least 6 January, so let’s leave them dozing and tiptoe away.
ONE OF THE BEST PRESENTS anyone can give you is the name of a writer whose books they believe will be ‘you’ – and they are. Someone you would almost certainly never have found for yourself. They expand your horizons, they enrich you, they lead you forward, they chime with truths you already know and confirm them, they share new truths of their own with you.
Not being a great reader or explorer of contemporary poetry, I am quite sure I would never have discovered Mary Oliver for myself. She is an American, now in her old age and living in Province town, Massachusetts, a Pulitzer Prize-winner. She writes with both eyes, ears and most of her mind focused on the country. She knows natural life intimately, she knows the names of things and their habits and habitats. She loves every living creature. She says that she believes everything has a soul. This sort of thing so often goes towards the making of a bad poet, someone soft and sugary, sentimental and wispy. But there is backbone to Mary Oliver, and she says things she wants you to hear.
There is a beautiful poem, ‘Blake Dying’, about the poet William Blake, in Oliver’s collection A Thousand Mornings.
