LGB – Memoranda

What I’ve Been Reading: Non-fiction about Mid-20th Century England

'London's Lost Department Stores' by Tessa Boase

London’s Lost Department Stores: A Vanished World of Dazzle and Dreams by Tessa Boase was a short, engrossing history of the grand and not-quite-so-grand department stores of London. In the early 1900s, there were more than a hundred of these stores, offering an extraordinary range of specialised services and products. Galeries Lafayette was renowned for its Parisian fashions and realistic wax mannequins with real human hair arranged in chic tableaux in the windows; Kennards in Croydon had a rooftop zoo and miniature steam railway; Gamages “sold alligators, Scouts’ kits, magic tricks and motor accessories”; Army and Navy Stores had a 1000-page catalogue from which its members could “order anything from dinner gongs, to laxatives, to ear trumpets, trusses and hair restorer.”

This book contains lots of fascinating photos, maps and anecdotes, as well as a discussion of how the stores reflected societal changes – for example, when shop assistants rebelled against being forced to “live in” (that is, pay rent to the shop owners to live in cramped dormitories above the store where they worked) and went on strike for better working conditions. Many of the department stores closed down in the 1960s and 1970s, followed by further decline with the rise of shopping malls, online retail and, of course, the COVID pandemic. I worked as a teenager in the old Grace Bros store on Sydney’s Broadway (now closed down, gutted and turned into a Westfield Shopping Centre), when the cashiers still used a pneumatic tube system to transport cylinders of cash from the service counters to the cashiers department and we would be regularly herded into the decaying ballroom for staff motivational speeches, so this was a fun, nostalgic read for me.

'1950s Childhood' by Janet Shepherd and John Shepherd

1950s Childhood by Janet Shepherd and John Shepherd also covers a lot for such a short book. There are chapters on post-war family life, changes to the school system following the 1944 Butler Education Act, how child welfare was improved by the introduction of the NHS, and what children ate after rationing ended. I especially enjoyed the photos – children playing in the street with no worries about traffic, entertaining themselves with Meccano and Dinky toy trucks, reading Beano, and gazing enthralled at a black-and-white television screen the size of a shoebox.

'School Songs and Gymslips' by Marilyn Yurdan

School Songs and Gymslips: Grammar Schools in the 1950s and 1960s by Marilyn Yurdan was a “light-hearted investigation” prompted by the author’s memories of her education at Holton Park, a girls’ grammar school in Oxfordshire. It includes a foreword by then Home Secretary Theresa May, who attended the school in the 1970s. This was a gentle, nostalgic look at hideous school uniforms, pointless school rules, eccentric teachers and disgusting school dinners, as well as more enjoyable experiences outside school involving pop records, cinema, dancing and fashion.

'Don't Knock the Corners Off' by Caroline Glyn

Don’t Knock the Corners Off by Caroline Glyn is an even more vivid and interesting look at school life in the 1960s, because it was written by a fifteen-year-old girl in 1963. No ordinary schoolgirl, it must be said – this was written as she was preparing for her second exhibition of paintings, her first poem had been published at the age of seven, and oh, she was also the great granddaughter of Elinor Glyn. This is a clearly autobiographical novel, about a free-spirited, artistic girl who doesn’t fit into the rigid English school system. Antonia starts off at a tough state primary school where she’s bullied mercilessly; then she applies to a posh girls’ grammar school where she’s forced to do homework and follow nonsensical rules; then she moves to a slightly more relaxed co-ed grammar school where she drifts along fairly happily until the headmaster realises how clever she is and tries to force her to do some work. She spends a term at the Sorbonne, then ends up at an art school where she finally feels she belongs. The voice is authentic and lively, often funny and very clearly the work of a teenager, full of complaints about how dull and stupid the other students are and how awful the teachers are and how much she hates maths.

Caroline Glyn, as would be expected from this novel, led a far from conventional life. She had published five novels by the time she was 21, lived in a tiny houseboat near Cambridge, studied art in Paris, became a nun, moved to Australia and died alone at the age of 32 while scrubbing the convent floor. Her former boyfriend wrote:

“Caroline was far more than merely ‘unusual’, she was unique … She had a terrific sense of humour and sense of fun, and we laughed all the time. Of course she had deep neuroses which defy all analysis, as she well knew … her flame flickered so momentarily before she went away to the Other Regions in which she so steadfastly believed. God was as real to her as the dacquiri in the photo, and she absolutely believed in angels and archangels, and often talked about them. She was only half here, and she left so soon to go back to where she belonged.”

'The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me' by Sofka Zinovieff

The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me by Sofka Zinovieff was a fascinating family memoir by the granddaughter of Robert Heber-Percy, the Mad Boyfriend of Lord Berners. Lord Berners, who was immortalised in Nancy Mitford’s novels as Lord Merlin, was a composer, writer and painter who threw beautiful parties at Faringdon House, where a flock of dyed pigeons circled over gatherings of famous guests – the Mitfords, Evelyn Waugh, the Lygon family who were portrayed in Brideshead Revisited, Gertrude Stein, H.G Wells, Elsa Schiaparelli, Salvador Dali, the Sitwells, the Betjemans, Diaghilev. Lord Berners and the Mad Boy made an odd couple, as Robert was three decades younger, uneducated, violent, “a hothead who rode naked through the grounds”, but the household situation became even odder when Robert suddenly married his pregnant girlfriend Jennifer Fry and moved her in to Faringdon during the Second World War. Unsurprisingly, the marriage didn’t last and Jennifer and her daughter Victoria moved away, but Victoria’s daughter unexpectedly inherited Faringdon after her grandfather decided she was the only “sensible one” in the family. Although she has now sold the house, she did own it for decades, attempting to restore it after years of neglect and discovering some of the secrets of its famous inhabitants and guests. This book is beautifully written and illustrated, with intriguing anecdotes and photographs, and will appeal to fans of the Mitfords and Brideshead Revisited.

My Favourite Books of 2022

What a year. At least it ended slightly better than it began, at least for me. However, 2022 was not a year when I read a lot of new novels. Looking at my book journal, I either didn’t read many new (to me) novels or I forgot to note them down. Probably my favourite novel was Gideon the Ninth — although having just finished its sequel, Harrow the Ninth, which was very much not my cup of tea, I’m afraid I am now done with this author and this series.

My favourite non-fiction books were Unfollow by Megan Phelps-Roper and Feminism for Women by Julie Bindel. I also liked The Edible Balcony by Indira Naidoo, which helped me re-establish my balcony garden. It was a good year for spinach, silverbeet, lettuce, sorrel, parsley and lavender, but some of my other plants struggled. Here is my entire annual crop of radishes, with a twenty cent coin for scale:

Two extremely small radishes next to a 20 cent coin

I don’t think I’ll be taking up professional radish farming any time soon.

My favourite books for teenagers and children included Sugar Town Queens by Malla Nunn, Are You There, Buddha? by Pip Harry, and Fly on the Wall by Remy Lai. All by Australian authors!

I’m hoping to be able to read more in 2023 and possibly even get some writing done. Here’s my pile of holiday reading:

Holiday reading pile 2022

I hope you all have a happy, relaxing holiday season and that 2023 brings you lots of good reading.

‘Gideon the Ninth’ by Tamsyn Muir

'Gideon the Ninth' by Tamsyn Muir

Gideon the Ninth, the first in the bestselling speculative fiction series, The Locked Tomb, written by Tamsyn Muir, is not the sort of book I would usually pick up. It’s described as weird, dark, science fiction horror, full of swords and skeletons and necromancy, which is not usually my cup of tea. However, I’d read a lot of hype about this book and was eventually drawn in by the tagline on the cover: “Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space!”

This turns out to be misleading. There’s no sex, lesbian or otherwise, and almost no romance. Gideon, the point-of-view protagonist, isn’t a lesbian necromancer, although she is female and same-sex-attracted, as are several other characters. The word ‘lesbian’ doesn’t seem to exist in this world, possibly because the default in this world isn’t heterosexual relationships or male authority. Women can be soldiers, scholars, healers, powerful magicians and leaders, just as men can be, so that’s nice. The ‘in space’ part is also misleading — apart from a quick shuttle ride between planets and some passing references to battles going on outside their galaxy, there’s almost nothing in the book that is traditionally ‘science fiction’. So that’s also nice for me, because I don’t usually like science fiction.

There is a lot of Gothicism, though. Gideon is a maltreated teenage orphan with mysterious origins, brought up by the House of the Ninth, an ancient death cult on a planet in the furthest reaches of their galaxy. Gideon spends her time reading dirty magazines, hitting things with her sword, and trying to escape the planet so she can join their Emperor’s army. The only other person her age is Harrow, Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House, a skilled necromancer whose speciality is making skeletons move about. Harrow hates Gideon almost as much as Gideon hates her and they both seem utterly miserable. But when their Emperor summons Harrow and all the other House heirs to his First House, in order to appoint his next eternal, all powerful assistants, Harrow and Gideon are forced to work together, to travel across the galaxy to the First House and solve the Emperor’s mysterious challenges.

The book gets off to a slow start, but once Gideon and Harrow reach the decaying palace of the First House, I was completely engrossed in the story. I liked the atmospheric descriptions of the palace, with its crumbling terraces and overgrown conservatories and rotting rooms, staffed by an army of animated skeletons and ruled by three very odd priests. The House necromancers, each with their own rapier-wielding cavalier, aren’t given any guidance about what they actually need to do to become immortal Lyctors (‘I am certain the way will become clear to you without any input from us,’ says the main priest cheerfully), so there’s a lot of mystery and intrigue as clever Harrow and brave, reckless Gideon explore the palace to identify and solve all the puzzles. It becomes even more exciting when they realise a serial killer and/or malevolent supernatural force seems to be killing off the House necromancers and cavaliers, one by one, and they understand how deadly their tasks have become.

I found this book very intellectually challenging, I must say. Simply keeping track of the characters was difficult. They have names like ‘Palamedes Sextus, Heir to the House of the Sixth, Master Warden of the Library’, who is variously referred to as ‘Palamedes’, ‘Sextus’, ‘The Warden’, ‘The Sixth’ and ‘Master’, sometimes within the same scene. Fortunately, there was a list of characters at the front of the book, which I constantly referred to. I also needed to keep track of all the challenges, which involved various rooms, keys and secret symbols on doors, as well as try to figure out what was going on with the murders and disappearances. The plot twists are clever and surprising and usually make complete sense in hindsight, although if you’re the sort of reader who likes to figure out the answer to the mystery in advance, I should warn you that it is impossible to work this one out — we simply aren’t given enough relevant information and this world doesn’t follow our own rules. I did guess which characters were a bit dodgy, but my guesses as to what they were really doing were completely wrong.

This all makes the book sound very serious, but it’s actually extremely funny and imaginative and entertaining. This is because we see everything through the eyes of Gideon, an irreverent, impatient teenager who is quick to counteract any portentousness with rude jokes. In fact, her slangy, snarky voice, full of references to our own popular culture, is nothing like that of any of the other characters or even consistent with anything in their world. She has been brought up by ancient nuns on a distant planet, she doesn’t recognise the function of a bathtub or swimming pool, has never seen green vegetables or fish or the ocean, yet she describes something on her pillow as “like a chocolate in a fancy hotel”. How does she know about fancy hotels? Why does she make jokes using Tumblr memes? How did she even get access to pornographic magazines or aviator sunglasses on her planet? At first I thought Gideon must have dropped through some time-travelling portal from our world, but no, the author just does all this because she thinks it’s funny. It occasionally threw me out of the story, but mostly I shrugged and got on with enjoying the narrative twists and turns. Your tolerance for this sort of authorial self-indulgence may differ from mine.

Gideon’s anachronistic voice certainly seems to be the main reason this book has such mixed reactions to it, although there are some other flaws of pacing and world-building. It’s the author’s first novel and there were times when I thought the editing could have been more thorough. Still, it’s a hugely ambitious, entertaining, genre-mashing book that I think will appeal to readers who don’t usually read science fiction or horror – for example, Rivers of London fans. I’m looking forward to reading the sequel, Harrow the Ninth, although I have been warned it’s even weirder and more challenging than this one.

My Favourite Books of 2019

This year, I was in a reading slump and a writing slump (and a general dealing-with-life slump), so I finished reading only 31 new books. I did a lot of comfort reading of old favourites and I spent many hours online reading newspapers and journal articles and blog posts, trying to make some sense of the chaotic world we live in. I also got sucked into the toxic garbage fire that is Twitter. There are some good things about Twitter, but I’m not finding it very educational, entertaining or conducive to good mental health at the moment, especially since the recent ‘improvements’ that cause strangers’ tweets to keep appearing randomly in my Twitter feed. I might delete my Twitter account or I might work out a more constructive way of using it in 2020. But here are my favourite books from this year:

Adult Fiction

'Normal People' by Sally Rooney This year, I failed to finish reading a number of novels that had received a great deal of hype. It is possible there’s something wrong with my literary tastes, but I feel life is just too short to waste a lot of time ploughing through pretentious waffle about uninteresting characters and situations. I did enjoy the latest Rivers of London novel from Ben Aaronovitch, Lies Sleeping, but I was underwhelmed by his new novella, The October Man. One book that did live up to the hype was Sally Rooney’s Normal People, although I do understand the criticisms of it and I think I am now done with novels about writers. Writers do not tend to live fascinating lives. Please, novelists, from now on, write about characters who do something else for a living.

Non-Fiction

I read a lot of 1960s non-fiction as research for the book I am currently trying (and failing) to write, but I can’t count any of them as 2019 favourites because they were re-reads. I did enjoy A Good School: Life at a Girls’ Grammar School in the 1950s by Mary Evans, which included some amusing commentary on the ridiculousness of school regulations and the ingenuity of school girls in getting around these rules. I am not sure I can truly call Growing Up Queer in Australia, edited by Benjamin Law, a favourite book, but I found it to be far more interesting and wide-ranging than I expected. I have issues with the term ‘queer’ and I was bothered by the apparent misogyny and ignorance of a few of the contributors, but I finished the book feeling that I had a much greater understanding of and empathy with younger Australians who identify themselves as living under the LGBTQ+ umbrella. And surely that’s why we read non-fiction – to walk in someone else’s shoes for a while.

Graphic Novels

'Skim' by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki I really liked Skim, a graphic novel set in Canada in 1993, written by Mariko Tamaki and illustrated by Jillian Tamaki. I presume it’s at least a bit autobiographical, because it feels so authentic. Teenage Kim is having a fairly bad year. She breaks her arm after tripping over her own home-made Wiccan altar; she falls disastrously in love with a female teacher with boundary issues; she sneers at her racist Mean Girl classmates; she observes her parents’ unhappy relationship with dismay; she grows apart from her best friend and makes a new unexpected friend. Despite the depressing themes, it’s often very funny and the art works very well with the story.

Children’s Books

'El Deafo' by Cece Bell I read some great books aimed at middle graders. El Deafo by Cece Bell was an entertaining, endearing graphic memoir about a girl with acquired hearing loss growing up in 1970s America. Cece has problems that most children will relate to (finding and keeping friends, dealing with mean teachers and bullying classmates, having a crush on a boy in her neighbourhood) but she’s also the only child in her school who uses a Phonic Ear — which turns out to give her super powers. The author includes a helpful note at the end, explaining the different forms of communication used by people who have hearing impairments or are Deaf and explaining that she now views her deafness not as a disability but “an occasional nuisance, and oddly enough, as a gift: I can turn off the sound of the world any time I want.”

I also enjoyed The Terrible Two Get Worse by Mac Barnett, Jory John and Kevin Cornell, sequel to The Terrible Two. This time, the pranksters plot to oust their terrible school principal, but find his replacement is even worse. There are plenty of jokes, an inventive plot and fabulous illustrations, alongside some surprisingly sophisticated references (to Occam’s razor and Chekhov’s gun, among others).

Catch a Falling Star by Meg McKinlay was a warm-hearted, gentle exploration of grief, set in rural Western Australia in 1979. Twelve-year-old Frankie is busy looking after her eccentric little brother Newt while her widowed mother works overtime as a nurse. Frankie’s father died in a plane crash several years before, just as Skylab was launched into the atmosphere. Now Skylab is about to plummet back to Earth and Newt is acting very strangely — and Frankie is the only one able to figure out what’s going on. The child characters are realistic and endearing and the historical research is thoughtfully incorporated into the story. And yes, books set in 1979 are now regarded as historical fiction. I feel so old.

'Wed Wabbit' by Lissa Evans Finally, I absolutely loved Wed Wabbit by Lissa Evans. Ten-year-old Fidge finds herself stuck in a surreal world that bears a twisted resemblance to her little sister’s favourite book, ‘The Land of the Wimbley Woos’. With the dubious assistance of a plastic carrot on wheels that dispenses psychological advice, a giant purple elephant with a passion for community theatre, and her awful cousin Graham, Fidge must solve a series of clues to rescue the Wimbley Woos from an evil dictator and return to the real world. There’s plenty of fast-paced adventure, hilarious jokes and a great deal of heart, with an emotionally satisfying conclusion. As with Alice in Wonderland and the Wizard of Oz books, some of the satire may be more amusing to adults than to child readers; on the other hand, there’s a recurring joke involving the word ‘fart’ that made me laugh like a drain every time, so I’m probably not the best person to discuss levels of sophistication in text-based humour. My only issue was that the map in the front of the book didn’t seem to bear much resemblance to Fidge’s travels in Wimbley Land so was rather confusing, although that could be part of the joke.

I am hoping next year will be a more successful year for me in terms of reading and writing books. Here is the pile of books I brought home from the library for holiday reading:

Holiday Reading 2019

I’ve also noted that Girls Gone By are publishing another of Antonia Forest’s Marlow books early next year, although they’ve decided to skip Book Seven, The Ready-Made Family and go straight to Book Eight, The Cricket Term. WHAT IS THIS NONSENSE, GIRLS GONE BY? I’M TRYING TO READ THEM IN THE CORRECT SEQUENCE. Although of course, I’ve ordered The Cricket Term.

Thank you to everyone who visited Memoranda this year. Happy Christmas to everyone celebrating it and happy end-of-December to everyone else!

‘Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead’ by Paula Byrne

I really enjoyed Mad World by Paula Byrne, which is an engrossing account of the people who inspired Evelyn Waugh’s novels – specifically, the troubled Lygon family of Madresfield Court, so similar to the Flyte family in Brideshead Revisited.

'Mad World' by Paula Byrne The true story of the Lygons turns out to be even more dramatic and tragic than that of their fictional counterparts. Lord Beauchamp, a very grand earl, didn’t merely choose to live away from England with his lover because he disliked his pious wife – he was forced into permanent exile in 1931 to evade arrest for “committing acts of gross homosexual indecency” with his servants. While aristocratic men of the time often got away with flouting this law, Lord Beauchamp had been flagrant in his disregard for social and legal conventions. This became a problem when it appeared one of his daughters, Lady Mary, might marry Prince George. The King took action and recruited Beauchamp’s brother-in-law, Bendor, the Duke of Westminster, who’d long resented Beauchamp:

“It seemed grotesquely unfair that his brother-in-law should have three sons, a loyal wife, a string of homosexual lovers, a glittering career and great standing in politics, while he himself had got through three wives without producing a single male heir … Bendor set about his task with great relish and ruthless dispatch.”

The Lygon family was torn apart, with most of the children taking their father’s side and refusing to forgive their mother for divorcing him. The girls, previously the most eligible debutantes of their time, were unable to make ‘good’ marriages, due to the scandal. Lady Mary, the most beautiful, eventually married a philandering Russian aristocrat, who left her penniless and battling mental illness, alcoholism and loneliness. The heir, Lord Elmley, married a much older woman and had no children; Hugh, the model for Sebastian Flyte, quickly lost his good looks and his money and spent the remainder of his short life in a drunken stupor, trying to block out the guilt and shame of his own homosexuality; only Lady Dorothy, portrayed as Cordelia Flyte, seemed to live a relatively happy and productive life, although she had her own brief and disastrous marriage.

The author says that she wrote this book because she believed “that Evelyn Waugh had been persistently misrepresented as a snob and a curmudgeonly misanthropist.” However, I finished this book disliking Waugh, as a person, even more than I already did, which I didn’t think was possible. He was a snob. He spent his life attaching himself to a series of rich, aristocratic families, happy to be their court jester if he got to stay in grand country houses for extended periods at their expense, especially if it also provided him with good writing fodder. From his earliest years, he was spiteful and nasty, bullying anyone he regarded as his inferior in either social status or intelligence. He may have possessed wit and humour, but it always had a sharp edge. There is a lot of description of his idiotic drunken escapades with friends, which we are meant to admire:

“…to an outsider, the banter and play that characterised Mad World [that is, life at Madresfield Court with the Lygon siblings] appear frivolous and jejune, but in reality the comedy was a means of survival and a manifestation of love.”

'Brideshead Revisited' by Evelyn Waugh Hmm. Waugh at least had some self-awareness and admitted, when proposing to the woman who would become his second wife, “I am restless and moody and misanthropic and lazy and have no money…” (It reminded me of Mr Mybug in Cold Comfort Farm trying to appear more interesting to Flora by hinting at his dark depths.) Perhaps the poor woman thought he was joking, but she agreed to marry him and then spent years living in the country, perpetually pregnant, looking after their huge brood of children while he caroused around London. Despite his fervent Roman Catholicism, he had no moral qualms about buying the services of prostitutes, including “little Arab girls of fifteen and sixteen, for ten francs each” in Morocco. Even his brief military service during the war was marked by impropriety, when he falsified the official record of his battalion’s withdrawal from Crete in 1941. He told his friend Nancy Mitford that his behaviour would have been even worse if he hadn’t been under the moral influence of the Church. The mind boggles.

Paula Byrne provides an interesting analysis of most of Waugh’s books, including Vile Bodies, A Handful of Dust and the Sword of Honour trilogy, but I found her detailed chapter on Brideshead Revisited the most fascinating. She examines his descriptions of Oxford, homosexuality, Roman Catholicism and aristocratic life, linking the major characters in the novel to their real-life counterparts. I think readers who love Waugh’s writing will find this book rewarding – but don’t expect to feel very fond of Waugh by the end of it.