Jacob's Room Is Full of Books: A Year of Reading Read online

  The buffet at King’s Lynn is over a hundred years old and still has its original façade and doors. Inside isn’t very modern either. They do a great bacon butty, hot and freshly cooked, for the early commuters. I wish the Queen would pop in there some time to say hello, even if she passes on the butty. Apparently they always know in there when she is coming, because the sniffer dogs come in beforehand. (Possibly also for the bacon butties.) Whereas most station buffets are stocked with mass-produced plastic food, ours has homemade sandwiches and hot toast. It is always busy in the run-up to the hourly London train, especially in the early morning, but it goes quiet in between, so it might still be fit for a Brief Encounter at the table in the corner.

  JUST OCCASIONALLY THE BARE-FACED cheek of some people does stop me in my tracks. Letter from a woman saying she has a ‘truly fantastic’ idea for a ghost story but, having tried several times to write it herself, she realises it needs ‘a more expert hand’. So if she tells it to me, and I write it, she reckons we have a bestseller. She would give me a percentage. And if this one succeeds, she has more ideas where this one came from.

  There is really no possible answer. So I haven’t.

  IN CORNWALL, THE SWALLOWS had arrived by 2 April and were already busily nesting in their cliff holes. They were seen on a Devon telegraph wire on 8 April and by me on a Norfolk wire on the tenth. And so they move up country.

  In Cornwall I saw a white throat. None here yet, but they are quite elusive.

  On a walk round the lakes at Pensthorpe nature reserve yesterday we saw the first ducklings, eight little bumble bees clustered round their mother. As soon as we neared, she gathered them all very close and ushered them towards the water but didn’t actually plop in. Meanwhile, the drake lifted his wings in a hostile gesture, warning us away – traditional role assignment, though plenty of male birds and animals share in the nest-sitting and child-feeding.

  POPPING INTO A LIVELY TWITTER exchange between a group of writers, I found the traditional favourite subjects under discussion. That genius American teller and illustrator of strange tales, Edward Gorey, wrote a book called The Unstrung Harp, which features an aspiring writer called Mr Earbrass. When Mr Earbrass goes to a literary party he finds that ‘The talk deals with disappointing sales, inadequate publicity, more than inadequate royalties, idiotic or criminal reviews, others’ declining talent, and the unspeakable horror of the literary life’.

  I would add the talk about what utter agony and ceaseless toil writing is, but otherwise nothing changes.

  ACCORDING TO A. E. HOUSMAN, ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now …’ And so it is. I have not missed many things from our twenty-five years in the Cotswold farmhouse, but each April I miss, with a hollow in my heart, the four and a half acres of cherry trees I planted on the rising meadow there. Once, when I wandered down through their rows under a full moon, the barn owl came gliding down beside me on silent wings. Magic always touches us when unbidden and least expected. In spite of what the fairy tales and Harry Potter tell us, we cannot conjure it up for ourselves. But it is not entirely true that magical worlds can only be entered when we are children, and that adults worlds are grey and full of facts and plain speaking. Any tree in full creamy blossom, any moonlit night, can open the door of memory for me, on to the cherry orchard.

  I have heard Housman called sentimental and worse. But what does that mean? It means he has the power to awaken a response in us, the power to move us.

  Now, of my threescore years and ten,

  Twenty will not come again,

  And take from seventy springs a score,

  It only leaves me fifty more.

  And since to look at things in bloom

  Fifty springs are little room,

  About the woodlands I will go

  To see the cherry hung with snow.

  Is a poet’s power to move us to do with use of language only? What else, other than choice of subject, that awakens an answering response in the reader even before a line has been read? ‘Ode on the Death of a Child’ has a head start by comparison with one, say, ‘On Military Might’.

  W. H. Auden’s poems are sometimes witty, often thought-provoking and can also be moving, but do they make tears prick behind the eyes? ‘Stop all the clocks …’ may, but probably because of context.

  Eliot? Clever, thought-provoking, complex, knotty – but moving? I have not been emotionally disturbed by a T. S. Eliot poem. Yet some of them get right under the skin. Four Quartets has great solemnity and some phrases provoke an intense personal sense of nostalgia.

  Perhaps it is a mite too easy to be upset by Housman. The rhyming helps him. Rhyme always does. The subject matter – the deaths of young men in war, their beautiful English home county and countryside, Englishness in general, youth lost, old age approaching too soon. Easy to cry at any of these. Does that make him a glib poet? Slick? Sentimental? I am not sure. He himself famously said that he judged true poetry by whether or not the hairs on your chin bristle if one repeats it while shaving. That has been sneered at a lot over the years. But it has something to do with that … On the other hand, that probably never happens to anyone reading Milton, Pope or Dryden – mighty poets all.

  But Alexander McCall Smith has made me take a long, close look at W. H. Auden again, the poet I learned so much of for A Level, whose poems I have never forgotten. McCall Smith’s small book What W. H. Auden Can Do for You illuminates the poetry in a highly individual way and clarifies it, too, so that we read him with new eyes. And that, surely, is the best achievement of any literary critic. His final paragraph is one any author would be humbled to read about himself – and which justifies the existence any work of literature, poetry or prose, as well as the existence of its maker.

  I have learned so much from this poet. I have been transported by his words. My life has been enriched by his language. I have stopped and thought, and thought, over so many of his lines. He can be with us in every part of our lives, showing us how rich life can be, and how precious.

  Indeed, say that of any poet, or novelist, who has been so essential to you, has helped form the person you are.

  Who is my W. H. Auden?

  I have a few art books. Not a random assortment about Monet/Manet/Van Gogh/Rubens/Michelangelo, which I would probably never look at, just a selection about painters who appeal to me in a way different from simple admiration or awe, though I am in articulate about art so usually I cannot explain why.

  I have loved David Hockney’s work ever since I first saw a limited edition print of his for sale in 1965 and wanted it more than almost anything I have ever wanted, other than my first bike. It was a drawing of tulips in a vase and now I know his work much better I would see that it could have been by no one else but DH. At the time, I just gazed and longed and longed and gazed. It was £60, and I had no money, let alone £60 to buy a work of art. I yearned and coveted that picture. I dreamed about it. The next time I walked past the small local gallery, it had gone.

  I have regretted ever since that I didn’t beg, borrow or steal to buy it, but in the sober light of day I know I could not have had it and even if I had I would probably have had to sell it five years down the line when I was even poorer.

  Still, there are the David Hockney books on the special shelf in the sitting room, for just one row of very tall books.

  I often go in there, not necessarily to sit, just to look for something mislaid maybe, and then I take one of them down and look closely at a few pages of pictures for ten minutes or so. Always rewarding. It is also a plus that Hockney came from Bridlington – not Scarborough, but the next best thing and only a few miles down the coast. There was always a rivalry: ‘Are you from/which do you like best, Scarborough or Brid?’ A lot can ride on the answer.

  The other half of the shelf is taken up by books by and about John Piper, whom I knew, together with and inseparable from his wife Myfanwy, and who were such a significant part of my life for nearly thirty years.

  It was in Scarb
orough that I first saw a painting by John, when I was a child and we went to the house called Woodend – in those days part museum, part art gallery, part tea room, with one room devoted to the Sitwell family, whose home this had once been. John Piper had painted the other Sitwell family seat, Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire, and the pictures hung in that room, as did others by him, several of which were of Windsor Castle. They were commissioned by King George VI and painted in dark colours. When the King first saw them, he said, ‘You seem to have very bad luck with your weather, Mr Piper.’

  I can hear John’s voice repeating the story now. I hear his voice often – distinctive, slightly posh – as so many of his generation’s voices were then. (He was born in Epsom, Surrey, and was not posh at all, just safely middle class, but the fact remained.) He punctuated his talk with lovely words like ‘jolly’, as in ‘jolly nice of you to come/say so/bring it’.

  Overnight stays in the Pipers’ farmhouse at Fawley Bottom in south Oxfordshire were very special. The house was special. The garden was special. The studio was special. The place had a magic I have never known anywhere else, because of its setting, what it contained, its atmosphere, but most of all its creators.

  I lived in Leamington Spa, so I would drive down the old road (the M40 was not yet finished) in my battered Mini, feeling excitement with each signpost bringing me nearer. The dual carriageway towards Henley-on-Thames. A left turn and a winding road through the hills above it, above the river, dipping a bit, rising some more, and then a sharp left into the gateway and there it was. An Oxfordshire stone farmhouse, with a big barn to the right, converted as John’s studio for his larger paintings. Pull up in front of the kitchen door which was the one used for all entrances and exits, and John would emerge, tall, thin and with a slightly stiff walk, like a crane. He was one of the most welcoming, hospitable and polite of men, always took my bag and told me it was jolly nice to see me, jolly nice of me to come, asked about the drive, and so on into the kitchen, where Myfanwy would almost always be, apparently cooking, in that pieces of meat or fish seemed to be slipped casually into the Aga, to emerge a few hours later as a perfectly cooked dish.

  Myfanwy was a natural and instinctive cook and, long before it became fashionable, always used local produce, real meat, veg from the garden, other things from farmers or cheesemakers around. And it was far less easy to find those things then.

  I never understood what people meant by a Celtic face until I saw Myfanwy. She was Welsh, though had no accent. Her face is impossible to describe and did not always photograph well. It was startling, remarkable, interesting, intelligent, bony, but not hawk-like, as John’s was. Her hair hung short and straight, she did not wear make-up, but she wore nice frocks and very high heels which showed off good legs, and unusual necklaces. I was a little frightened of her as I never was of John. She could be scathing, her wit and scorn could occasionally be caustic, but she was kind. They were friends who offered friendship as it is most valued – sympathetic, understanding, sometimes bracing, occasionally disapproving. But strong. Reliable. If you were in a mess, trouble, in the midst of sadness or strife, you could go to them and feel stronger, and warmed by affection and good humour.

  I always slept in the Book Room, which was literally that, dark, comfortable, ever-interesting. You only had to look round, reach out a hand to a shelf, to find treasures, and often signed treasures by old friends. The 1920s and 1930s and 1940s, poetry, fiction, topography, France, Venice, art, John’s own books, complete Shell Guides to Britain which he produced with John Betjeman, runs of magazines – Horizon, the London Magazine, catalogues from galleries, often of John’s own exhibitions. I could have spent days in there, looking and reading.

  Dinner. John changed into a different jacket … maybe a velvet one, and one of his amazing shirts with broad stripes in vivid colours, and a Missoni tie or a French cravat. Myfanwy changed, too, into a rather sexy dress, usually in a softer or even sombre colour. She always looked good but John was the dandy. If it was winter, he would have lit the fire, having already fetched in logs and laid it earlier, and picked the vegetables, too. Their vegetable garden was like no other and they grew almost everything from seed. Then he would fetch up the right bottle of wine for the food, from the cellar, and open it, and light the candles. I have never seen candlesticks like theirs. They were white china, absolutely straight and plain and square. I have seen many a white candlestick since but always with some curlicue or roundness or decoration or twist of the stem. I wish I had thought to ask where they came from, but I suspect it would have been from France, to which they travelled often. I have postcards of his from various French towns, usually of churches, and from Italy, usually Venice. When he drove Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears all the way there, Myfanwy and Ben in the back talking about her libretto for his opera of Death in Venice, John sent me a card from somewhere en route. ‘Car and passengers behaving very well so far.’

  After the meat, the salad, the fruit and the cheese – Myf did not do puddings, though sometimes there might be a fruit tart, brought home from a French patisserie in London after a day trip. And then there would be another glass of wine and the smell of the wood smoke and the candles and John would play the piano. Jazz. Old music hall tunes. Twenties numbers. A bit of Chopin, just occasionally. In summer, the door was open on to the garden.

  The small studio was a late addition to the house, converted out of a barn at the end. It had deeply comfortable black leather sofas, with pots of brushes and china paint dishes around, portfolios of John’s prints, new pictures on easels, and jugs, bowls and dishes from his very successful foray into pottery. A French ‘Tortoise’ stove. Smells of oil paint and turps and more wood smoke. And talk, while classical music played. Talk about people and places and ideas and politics and families and the Church and churches – John was a passionate Church of England churches man and on the Oxford diocesan board for their preservation and upkeep for many years. He painted just about every one in the county, as well as elsewhere, in Wales, all over France. He is buried in the churchyard of one of the most modestly typical English churches, at Fawley, where he was a churchwarden and took the collection every Sunday.

  They had known so many of the painters and poets of their day. There was always a good story about someone or other. Someone had gone to lunch bearing a bottle of champagne, which neither of them liked. Myfanwy gave it a look. ‘Graham Greene always liked fizzy drinks.’

  I lost close touch with them for some time, not after my marriage and my first daughter, but a year or so later when I was focused on having a second child and kept failing and could think of nothing else. During that time, John and Myfanwy’s granddaughter Lucy, who lived near to them, was killed in a road accident, beside which horror even the premature birth and subsequent death of my own infant seemed a small grief. But they read about it, from the announcement in the paper, and wrote and offered love and a place to stay which was safe and familiar if ever we needed it. A healing place.

  It strikes me now that Fawley Bottom, and the Pipers’ life there, was exactly that. After a stressful day and a drive down, perhaps in the dark and teeming rain, an evening there, dinner, music, talk and a night in the Book Room, breakfast with Myfanwy’s homemade bread, one felt renewed and healed either from trivial difficulties or major ones.

  John suffered the cruellest of last years in the grip of Alzheimer’s. His funeral was as perfect and right as one can ever be, with John’s favourite flowers, giant sunflowers, on his coffin and a bent, distraught but brave Myfanwy, supported on either sides by her son and grandson, as she dropped one of them into the grave. She had lost one son, Edward, their eldest, lost a beloved grand-daughter, and now she was saying farewell to her beloved John.

  She lived on at Fawley Bottom into her nineties, still working on librettos, still seeing family, and so many friends, though the evenings at the Aga in her stilettos, evenings cooking and drinking wine and laughing and talking, were long gone and she was lovingly looked a
fter rather than being the one in charge.

  I went to visit her the year before she died. She made tea, there was a homemade cake. We wandered down the garden, which was still a garden, still with vegetables and flowers, but less tended, a shadow of its old self.

  Myf was old and frail but still interested in everything, still lively, still with shrewd eyes and that short laugh full of meaning.

  I drove away knowing I would not see her again. I said goodbye to her, to the house, the garden, John’s studio, still as he had last used and left it, laying down the brush he no longer recognised, the paints he did not understand. I said goodbye to years of friendship, merriment, succour, music, good food, good wine, affection, in that healing place. And to those white candlesticks.

  MAY

  THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT. They are straightforward. I tell them, in a firm but friendly way, that I am happy to answer questions but I won’t do their homework and can’t do their exams for them. I can be straight with them, and they take it. But with the aspiring writers I have to tread carefully, for fear of bruising feelings, causing a set-back, breaking frail egos. I have to remember how generous and encouraging people were to me. It matters.

  But. But, but, but. I wonder what they expect. What do they want? It isn’t always riches. Facts have penetrated from all the statistics put out by the Royal Society of Literature and the Bookseller and the books page commentators.

  What did I want? To ‘be’ a writer. To be published. To see my book(s) in hardback on shelves. To have readers. To be understood by readers. To be praised. To be allowed to go on writing and writing and having to do nothing else.

  Is it the same now? Yes, I guess so. It has just got so much harder. Yet in some ways perhaps easier, too. Every new book jostles for attention and review space and shelf space and reader space with hundreds of others each month. Each week. Maybe when I began it was only dozens.