Apricots at Midnight by Adèle Geras

My housemate Melissa (not to be confused with a different housemate Melissa, who has also written the odd book review for SIAB) wanted to borrow a book, and ended up with one I was given but have yet to read - Apricots at Midnight (1977) by Adèle Geras. As always, I encourage my friends to write reviews for SIAB. This is seldom taken up, but thankfully Melissa said yes, and wrote this fab review! Do (as always) make my guests feel welcome in the comments section... and enjoy the review:

Small pleasures. I picked this book off Simon’s shelf at his first words of description, without waiting for the rest: ‘That one is a children’s book.’ I love books written for children; the unpredictable-but-safe plotlines, the freshness of the detail, the firing of the imagination; and this one did not disappoint.

Actually, this is the sort of book that as a child I didn’t really appreciate. It’s one of those books which describes someone’s childhood memories, and why, I would wonder, should I read about another person’s everyday life when my own was so interesting and there were plenty of books about daredevil escapades, fantastic worlds, or true-to-life explorations? It’s only through growing up (a little bit) that I’ve come to appreciate the beauty of the everyday and of simple, happy memories.

This book is built around a quilt; a quilt sewn together, patch by patch, by the narrator’s elderly relative Aunt Pinny, from fabrics picked up throughout her life. Each patch is tied to a story, the cue to a memory of long ago. The apricots of the title relate to the first ball Pinny attended, a little girl sneaking down to join her working mother for a midnight snack.

A child’s perspective is so different: everything is fascinating, but nothing is truly surprising. For Pinny, the line between make-believe and reality is not particularly important; there’s no disappointment when the adventurer Major Variana admits his limp was gained by dropping a crate of oranges on his foot rather than being bitten by a crocodile, and no questioning of his reassurance ‘That was the only made-up story, I promise you’. In her old age, Pinny retains this childlike ability to take her experiences at face value, so that the tone of the book hinges slightly on the fantastic.

The individual salient events, people and places slowly build a picture of the beauty of Pinny’s daily life. The emergent character in the backdrop is her mother: thrown from prosperity at the death of her husband, and fighting to build a life for herself and her daughter on the strength of her dressmaking skills. She is the constant in Pinny’s life, tying the book together, providing stability and a structure. It is she who first suggests the quilt and teaches a tiny Pinny to hold a needle and make her first stitches. Like a fairy godmother, she can always produce something from whatever nothing is to hand: a garden for a convalescent Pinny from scraps of flowered fabric; an extra sixpence when Pinny’s allowance isn’t quite enough for the music box she wants to buy; an overnight job at Mrs Triptree’s ball so that Pinny can see the ladies in their beautiful costumes.

There is a chance for Pinny to be involved in everything she does – sitting in on meetings with unusual and exotic guests, contributing a not-so-successful stuffed zebra to the soft toy stall at the church fair, cutting out the jam tarts for a picnic. Her tears and remorse on the day she is delayed picking Pinny up from school, and gratitude to the teachers who took the child home for tea and entertained her, is a moment of revelation for Pinny:

It occurred to me then that I had not once, even in the worst depths of my misery, thought what it must have been like for her, knowing she would not be at the school gates, knowing that she was making me more and more unhappy every minute she was not there.

Her selfless love and care for Pinny comes out at every turn. On one occasion, she covers for her daughter, losing a rich client in the process, when the little girl recovers a roll of cloth that she believes belongs to the future king and queen of Borneo but was actually the client’s curtains. I fell in love with her at the point when she stretches a tiny budget to provide Pinny with bulbs for her garden:

I do not remember that we had trouble finding the money. I was too excited at the prospect of my own garden. But now I can see that my mother must have gone without something she needed or wanted, in order to save what was necessary.

Her generosity is not reserved for her daughter alone: when Pinny asks a visiting gentleman at a loose end to stay, she hesitantly but not unwillingly opens her home to him until he is able to find his feet again.

To my delight, one of the stories turns out to take place in Oxford. This is Pinny’s first taste of what she calls ‘the country’. ‘”It’s not the proper country, Pinny,” my mother warned me. “Oxford is a large town, and quite near.”’ Unperturbed, Pinny’s imagination runs wild: ‘Milkmaids in mob caps and farmers in knee-breeches, small houses with roses growing round the doors, stiles, carthorses, shepherds coming down from the hills at sunset, wooden bridges curving over brooks.’

The reality is quite different, of course, but turns out to be no less exciting. Not least, St Giles’ Fair, ‘the most splendid, exciting, glorious fair in the whole world’, as Pinny’s Oxfordian friends, Miles and Kate, delightedly inform her. The description is priceless, a snapshot of the fair a century before I experienced it. Some things are quite different – the long-banned prizes of live goldfish, the penny charge for each game, the steam powering the organs. The exhilaration of the fair, however, is unchanged over generations, and the bright colours of the rides which draw the children’s attention, the reckless spending on hopeless attempts at skewering a prize, the loud music and bustle of the crowd, sound tantalisingly familiar.

Ten patches, ten stories; yet a quilt is so much bigger than that. I’m left wondering what else is in there; the stories that Pinny would not tell till her listener was older, the ones she perhaps would never tell at all? 

Hovel in the Hills - Elizabeth West

Last year I read, and very much enjoyed, The Egg & I by Betty Macdonald (and discovered that there is a thriving Betty Macdonald community out there).  Although the very thought of going to run a farm with a recalcitrant stove and marauding animals fills me with horror (and I am very much a country boy - albeit one with a fondness for electricity), I very much enjoyed reading her witty, self-deprecating take on her adventures.  It is non-fiction disguised as fiction.  And I was hoping to find its equal in Elizabeth West's Hovel in the Hills (1977).  Well, er... it didn't work out quite like that.

Elizabeth West and her husband certainly have many of the same difficulties.  They decided to move from the ratrace to the bleak middle of nowhere in Wales.  At high altitudes, with wind, rain, and cold being bitterly present throughout much of the year - with very little money to boot - this could easily have been an Egg & I Mark 2.  The obstacles - from wallpaper which grew mouldy with alarming alacrity, to the difficulties of crossing vast distances without a car - are funds for much wry laughter and rolled eyes.

But, although the cover assures me that the contents will be 'warm, funny, [and] moving', Elizabeth West seems to have (had?) almost no sense of humour.  Obstacle after obstacle is raised, with the smug solution given.  Almost every page drips with self-satisfaction.  They clearly feel an immense sense of superiority to all the fools in the world who wouldn't know how to run a stove, or make a salad out of weeds, or have the curious weakness of preferring a flush toilet to a hole in a shed.

Perhaps it is just a weakness in me, but I found it hard to warm to a writer who had all the answers.  Her husband was worse - the sort of irritating person who fixes everything with little more than a spanner and a stern glance.  Self-deprecation is one of the qualities I find most endearing in fact and fiction (I am British, after all) and the Wests don't have a drop of it.

I was on happier ground when she turned her attention away from their achievements and towards nature.  Particularly when she wrote about the birdlife of the area -  that was endearing and almost witty.  True, she wrote about how good they were with animals and birds, but that couldn't get in the way of how fun it was to read about the wildlife and the personalities they displayed.  I was strongly reminded of Gavin Maxwell's Ring of Bright Water during these sections.  Here is a bit about the great tits which visited them:

We fed them on fat and peanuts as well as oatmeal and it soon became obvious which was the male and which was the female - from their behaviour as well as the slightly larger size and broad bely stripe of the male.  Pinny was always completely trusting, and quite at ease when feeding from our hands.  She flew to them without hesitation, ate daintily, and landed and took off with very gentle feet.  Podger, her mate, had an entirely different personality.  He only plucked up courage to come to our hands because he had seen Pinny do so.  But he made a great fuss about it.  Dashing in with great bluster, he would land with a clunk of clawed feet, grabbing what he could and making off with it straight away.  We went to the door with peanuts as soon as we saw the birds at our window in the morning.  If Podger arrived first he would sit on a nearby bush churring and chinking fussily until Pinny arrived to feed.  He was probably kidding her that he was being a gentleman, but we know that he needed the reassurance of seeing her feed first.

Besides the chapters on birds, I did also enjoy her descriptions of the wrangles they had experienced with the local council when they bought a caravan for holiday lets.  Everyone enjoys a tale of the small-mindedness of little people wielding power - so long as the tale is happening to someone else, of course - and West does give the whole saga amusingly.  Her sense of superiority feels justified here, at least - and there is an excellent coda to the whole rigmarole, which I shan't spoil in case you decide to read the book.

But, as you'll have gathered, I found that the irritating outweighed the enjoyable in Hovel in the Hills.  I'm probably just too cynical to enjoy the story of someone being better than everyone else.  Give me Betty Macdonald accidentally setting fire to things any day.

Injury Time - Beryl Bainbridge

It's Beryl Bainbridge Reading Week with Annabel/Gaskella... hope you're joining in!

Can you imagine what would happen if the casts of Abigail's Party and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? were held hostage in a siege?  Well, if you can't, then read Injury Time and it'll give you a pretty good idea.  The sexual bewilderment of George and Martha is combined with the 1970s would-you-like-an-olive stylings of Beverley et al in Bainbridge's 1977 novel, somewhere in the middle of her writing career.

Edward is a somewhat hapless chap, working in dull job and in a marriage with Helen which, if not loveless, is hardly passionate.  And he has a mistress - albeit one with three unruly children at home, and no intention of staying submissively in the shadows.  His mistress rejoices in the absurd name Binny.

Binny was a wonderful mother, but she didn't seem to realise he was a very busy man and his time was limited. They could never do anything until her ten-year-old had settled down for the night.  They could usually start doing something at about five to eleven, and then they had to do it very quickly because Edward had to leave at quarter past eleven.  He was always whispering frantically into Binny's ear what he might do if only they had a whole evening together, and she grew quite pale and breathless and hugged him fearfully tightly in the hall, mostly when seeing him out.

Binny is tired of fitting in around Helen's schedule (although Helen supposedly does not know of Binny) and demands that Edward ceases to treat her as a dirty little secret.  In order to pacify Binny, Edward agrees to invite his colleague Simpson, and Simpson's wife Muriel, to a dinner party at Binny's house.  What could possibly go wrong?

Bainbridge is great at showing the awkwardness of this dinner party and all its shades of morality: Simpson has overstated his wife's approval of the night, for example, and Binny's attempts to maintain a presentable dinner party in bizarre circumstances are drawn wonderfully.  My favourite character, though, is Binny's neighbour Alma, who turns up mid-way through the party, rather the worse for wear.  I don't know what I find so amusing about characters who incongruously pepper their conversation with 'darling' and 'dear', but it always makes me chuckle.  Indeed, the whole novel is very funny - mostly a humour which comes from dialogue, clashes of characters, and surreal turns of events.

"Drunken driving is a crime," said Simpson stiffly.  "It should carry the harshest penalties."

"What are you worried about, darling?  I lost my licence, didn't I?"  All at once Alma's face crumpled.  Tears spilled out of her ludicrous eyes.

"You can talk, George," Muriel said coldly.  "You're only wearing one shoe."

The most bizarre twist, as I mentioned at the beginning and as the cover suggests, is that these characters find their evening's festivities interrupted when two men and a woman come running through the front door (complete with a pram holding a doll) and hold them all hostage.  The house is chosen more or less at random, and they are simply a bargaining tool against the police.

What makes Injury Time so hilarious is that Beryl Bainbridge chooses not to change the tone when the hostage situation takes place.  The characters - especially irrepressible Alma - don't alter the way they talk, and the dynamics between man, mistress, colleague, and wife all remain fraught, uncomfortable and very funny.  It helps that Ginger and Harry, the main two hostage-takers, are not your normal criminals.  Some fairly disturbing events occur in Injury Time, but they are described with such lightness, and focus upon social awkwardness rather than anything more traumatic, that this remains decidedly a comic novel.  As my first foray into the world of Bainbridge, I'm off to a fantastic start, and I look forward to seeing what else the week brings.