Hints and Wrinkles – and More

…then when my mother-in-law died, we’d only been married a year, I found a cookbook and I kept that. And my daughter rang and she said, have you still got that recipe for Granny’s … I’ve forgotten the name. Well, I had to hunt for it but I found the nearest one I could. I went through loads of cookbooks. And she said, oh, yes, I managed, ‘cos Granny Gomer’s was half an egg, ‘cos it was a wartime one you see. (Margaret G, b. 1924)

Mother, really, she did more crocheting but she loved to write. She loved recipes. I’ve got some of her books that she wrote recipes and poems in, didn’t she? She was always doing something like that, but Father loved reading. (Jean Mercer, b. 1925)

I wasn’t planning to return to books about running a home, like the Hints and Wrinkles volume given away by the Daily Herald in 1939. But since the original post, I’ve come across more domestic volumes on Sheffield’s bookshelves. Some have been bought new or second-hand, for interest, while others were given as presents to young people leaving home, and others still have been passed down in families, as the memories from our readers show. Firmly rooted in their own time, these domestic books show better than many how everyday life changes. Attitudes, habits and aspirations are all visible through them.

Here are a few, drawn at random, from the collection of one friend.

Starting with the more recent, we find cookery books by Jamie (Penguin/Michael Joseph, 2014) and Delia (BBC, 1995), Jane Grigson (Penguin, 1974) and Rose Elliott (Fontana, 1983). Delia and Jamie are celebrity cooks who can set the fashion. Rose Elliot, who published her first book in 1967, is perhaps the first popular vegetarian cookery writer, well remembered by me at least from student days. And Jane Grigson was not only a highly respected cook but also a prose stylist:

The artichoke above all is the vegetable expression of civilised living, of the long view, of increasing delight by anticipation and crescendo. No wonder it was once regarded as an aphrodisiac. It had no place in the troll’s world of instant gratification. It makes no appeal to the meat-and-two-veg mentality.

Food and related businesses have long sponsored domestic advice as part of their marketing. Sainsbury published a handsome, apron-pocket-sized cookery series in the 1980s. This one, from in 1985, was written by Anne Willan, the English founder of the French La Varenne cookery school.

And there’s the Radiation New World Cookery Book, published by the manufacturers to teach people how to use their gas stoves. It first appeared in 1927, but had staying power. This updated edition is from 1963.

Here is New World’s recipe for Savoy Pudding. (Does anyone still eat this?)

Regulo Mark 5

Time: Pudding – 30 minutes, Meringue – 20 minutes

Short crust pastry, using 6oz flour. 2 oz butter or margarine. 2oz caster sugar. Whites of 2 eggs. Yolks of 2 eggs. 3 oz sponge cake crumbs. 1/3 pint milk. 2 oz chopped candied peel. Ratafia essence. 1 tablespoonful caster sugar.

Method: Line a greased pie-dish with the pastry and decorate the edges according to taste. Cream the fat and sugar together, beat in the egg yolks and cake crumbs and add the milk gradually with the chopped peel and ratafia essence. Put this into the prepared dish and bake for 30 minutes with the Regulo set at Mark 5. Whisk the egg whites until stiff, fold in 1 tablespoonful caster sugar and pile it onto the pudding. Put on the bottom of the oven for 20 minutes to set and brown the meringue.

This is the recipe for the same pudding from Cassell’s Shilling Cookery Book (1903 edition). (Puddings were clearly important at the turn of the 20th century. Cassell provides 74 pages of them.)

Rub six ounces of stale savoy cake to crumbs, and pour upon these a quarter of a pint of boiling milk. Let them soak for half an hour, then beat the mixture with a fork until smooth, and add four ounces of fresh butter, four ounces of finely-shred candied peel, the well-beaten yolks of four eggs, two tablespoonfuls of sugar, and two tablespoonfuls of brandy. Beat the mixture for some minutes, put it into a cool place for an hour, and beat it up again. Put it into a buttered dish and bake in a brisk oven. Whisk the whites of the eggs till firm, sweeten them and flavour them pleasantly. Put them on the pudding, and place this in the oven a few minutes longer, but do not let it get brown. When the eggs are set the pudding is ready for serving. Time to bake the pudding, half an hour. Sufficient for four or five persons.

The results must be similar, but the 1903 pudding looks much richer, and the instructions are less precise. Just how hot is a ‘brisk oven’ and how do you flavour something ‘pleasantly’?[1]

The Shilling Cookery Book was first published in 1888, compiled by Arthur Gay Payne who, unusually, combined cookery writing and sports journalism. It was one of a modestly-priced series, aimed perhaps at the lower middle or skilled working classes. Loath to miss any opportunities, Cassell used its pages to advertise:

  • their other publications such as their Home Handbooks (which, interestingly for 1903, includes Vegetarian Cookery) and the ‘Famous Sixpenny Novels’, with once popular, now largely forgotten authors like E W Hornung, Anthony Hope, Warwick Deeping and Marie Connor Leighton
  • food and related products. My favourites are Bongola tea, which ‘has no equal’, and Lemco, ‘pure beef – the primest beef the world produces’.

Our next books, The Constance Spry Cookery Book (Dent & Sons, 1956) and Mrs Beeton’s Cookery and Household Management (Ward, Lock & Co, 1960 edition) are by the great authorities of their day.

Constance Spry (1886-1960), who has rather faded from notice today, was renowned for her flower arrangements (she ‘did’ the Coronation and the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor). She also ran a very successful domestic science school at Winkfield Place, Berkshire. Her cookery book is comprehensive, but am I alone in finding the illustration above too garish?

Mrs Beeton (1836-1865) died young but is still remembered. ‘I must frankly own, that if I had known, beforehand, that this book would have cost me the labour which it has, I should never have been courageous enough to commence it,’ she writes in the first edition (1861). A hundred years later, her book has been updated and includes modern colour schemes and a fish dish to make you blench.

Here, in case anyone is still wearing them, is Mrs Beeton’s advice on caring for corsets and girdles:

These should be washed as often as other ‘next the skin’ garments. Washing should be done quickly in cool suds, rubbing any very dirty parts with a soft nail brush. Several rinses should be given, and the garments should then be squeezed gently between the folds of a towel to remove surplus moisture. They should be dried in a cool airy place away from any direct heat.

Finally, there is Elizabeth Craig’s Needlecraft (Collins, 1941). Craig (1883-1980) was a Scottish home economist and journalist. Her main interest was cookery and she produced many recipe books in a career lasting over 60 years. She also wrote about housekeeping, gardening and needlework. From 1937, Collins published the various volumes of her Household Library: Cookery, Housekeeping, Gardening, 1,000 Household Hints and Needlecraft. These books were promoted as ‘An Extra Pair of hands, always ready’: and are a forerunner of the Daily Herald’s Home Library. Needlework is full of useful projects like covering a wicker storage basket for a nursery and making your own lingerie.

Nine books written and updated over about 150 years. Between them, they reflect the changing priorities and expectations of our society, particularly of course as they affect the lives of women.

 

[1] The owner of the books thinks a brisk oven is about 200° and suggests orange or lemon rind to taste for ‘pleasant’ flavouring. She also wonders if the pastry in the New World recipe is baked blind.

The Five Find-Outers by Enid Blyton

By Sue Roe

I remember as a child, on my visits to Park Library on Duke Street, Sheffield, being captivated by child detectives – Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys and the Famous Five and Secret Seven of Enid Blyton (1897-1968). Yet I have yet to meet anyone who remembers the other group of child detectives: the Five Find-Outers and a Dog. They were led initially by Larry but from the third book by ‘Fatty’: Frederick Algernon Trotteville, an only child with very relaxed parents and lots of pocket money for cakes and other treats which he shares with the others in the group. These are: Larry, his sister Daisy, Pip and his younger sister Bets, and Buster, Fatty’s Scottie dog, who eats biscuits with potted meat and nips the ankles of the local plodding policeman, Mr Goon.

All except Bets attend boarding school so the adventures happen in the school holidays. The children hunt for clues (or ‘glues’ as Bets calls them) and talk to witnesses. Fatty specialises in disguises: he has wigs, grease paints, false teeth, cheek pads which he uses to gain information and to outwit Mr Goon. The books very much reflect a particular mid-twentieth century village society with cooks, maids and valets, tramps, gypsies and fairground folk. There is an undercurrent of class difference: Fatty’s mother plays golf and bridge; Mr Goon’s nephew, Ern, who becomes an unofficial member of the group, eats with the cook, not with the other children.

The stories were set in the fictitious village of Peterswood, based on Bourne End, near Marlow in Buckinghamshire. At the start of the series Larry was 13; Fatty, Daisy and  Pip were 12, and Bets was eight. There were 15 adventures in total, published between 1943 and 1961, with titles like The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage (1943), The Mystery of the Disappearing Cat (1944) and The Mystery of the Vanished Prince (1951).

I remember being fascinated by their adventures and especially by Fatty’s exploits – the  disguises and deductions, his ability to ‘throw his voice’ at crucial points in the plot! He makes the series special and, for me, more interesting than Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, whose adventures had the advantage of more exciting venues like Kirrin Island and Smuggler’s Top.

I would be very interested to know if anyone else is familiar with them. Please leave a comment if you remember Fatty and his friends.

 

You can read more of Sue’s reading journey here.

Biggles – but for girls!

“We have come here to make a landing ground for British aeroplanes,” replied Worrals. …

Louis stared. He clicked his tongue. “Nom de Dieu. This is a mission dangereux. Why do the English send women on such work?”[i]

In the middle of the 20th century, there were schools for boys and schools for girls and, where schools were mixed, there were often boys’ entrances and girls’ entrances. There were toys for boys (guns, Meccano sets, model railways) and toys for girls (dolls and all their impedimenta). There were games for boys (Cowboys and Indians) and games for girls (‘let’s play house’). And there were books for boys and books for girls and even sometimes, to avoid confusion, separate shelving in libraries, with girls and boys admitted on alternate days.  .

A small survey of children’s reading, carried out by the public library in Sheffield in 1937-38, reported that girls read more than boys. They liked school, fairy and ‘domestic’ tales, while boys chose air travel, adventure, school and the sea. In non-fiction, boys read about machinery and engineering, science and ‘things to do’, while girls were ‘naturally less interested’ in these and enjoyed poetry and plays.[ii]

But there were exceptions to the gendered norms of the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, just as now, when books are less obviously for boys or girls, but there is an awful lot of girly pink everywhere.

Worrals knew it would be a hazardous business to try to get out of the cave without a guide. (Picture by Stead)

One such exception in the world of books was Worrals, Flight Officer Joan Worralson or Worrals of the WAAF. Worrals was the creation of Captain W E Johns (1893-1968), author of the popular books about air ace and adventurer James Bigglesworth, aka Biggles. Johns was a pilot in World War One and was shot down and imprisoned in 1918. By the 1930s, he was an aviation correspondent for newspapers and writing books too, including the first Biggles story in 1932[iii]. It is hard now, when air travel is routine, to appreciate just how aviation held public attention then, with technological advances, international air races and pioneers like Charles Lindbergh. The Sheffield Library survey cited above reports that books about flying were easily the most popular with boys.

Peter:  Oh, I could read those again.  I could enjoy them again because in it a person can sort of lose himself and you can become Biggles for say half an hour and it’s great to read these stories.  But at the same time I used to like to read about the air aces of the First World War, the real ones, and I was always sorry when I came to when they were killed because invariably they were, but I used to think they’ve had a damn good life, they’ve enjoyed it, what they were doing, and that’s it and I do find that’s, shall we say? an example to the rest of us and, y’know, I don’t know, I suppose reading is my way of escape.

What about girls then?

‘…I remember I read all the Biggles books,’ said Erica.

In the early days of World War Two, to aid recruitment, the Air Ministry asked Captain Johns to write about women in the services (even if service life would never be as exciting as he would make it seem). Worrals duly appeared in 1940, wearing a flying suit and aged about 18, in a serial in the Girl’s Own Paper. As the Daily Mail said, there was ”Worrals” – a woman of wit, courage and resource – a worthy ‘sister’ to “Biggles”.

The first fifty yards was so bad that in her heart Worrals became convinced that it would take hours to get to the bottom. (Picture by Stead)

Worrals appeared in 11 books and three short stories between 1941 and 1950. In wartime, she effortlessly shot down enemy aircraft, routed and unmasked German spies, outwitted the Gestapo, escaped from countless traps and near-death incidents, carried out daring missions in France, Syria, Australia and various Pacific islands and rescued French Resistance fighters and British soldiers. After the war, her adventures continued. She rescued people from certain death, thwarted opal thieves in Australia and tracked down war criminals and gun runners.

‘… the older ones loved Biggles and Worrals …’ said Margaret, who worked in Sheffield’s school library service.

Like Biggles, Worrals had allies. There was her friend, Frecks, who was brave but not quite as resourceful as Worrals; Spitfire pilot Bill Ashton, who was sweet on Worrals but was firmly rejected as there was after all a war to be won;[iv] and superiors like Squadron Leader McNavish, who deplored her actions but respected her abilities. But there was never any doubt who was in charge. In Worrals of the WAAF it was her decision to chase and shoot down an enemy fighter.[v] Worrals on the War-Path showed her typically taking the initiative – she had the idea for a secret landing-strip in France and she argued successfully for the opportunity to establish it. In Worrals Goes Afoot (1949) she set up a fake drug deal to make contact with gun-runners.

How unusual was Worrals? From the mid-19th century onwards, unconventional girls like Jo March started to appear in fiction, although they were outnumbered by their obedient sisters. Later there were all those plucky schoolgirls rescuing each other, foiling jewel thieves and so on in books and comics. Books like the Sue Barton series, which started in 1936, described girls training for careers, albeit ones associated with women, like nursing and teaching. When they grew up, of course, many of these unconventional girls settled for matrimony and motherhood. Worrals, who never did settle, was not unique but she was extraordinary.

‘Mademoiselle is aware that the bulls are dangerous – ?’ (Picture by Stead)

This was a time when women’s lives were changing rapidly. They had taken on men’s roles in war (and been encouraged to return home in peacetime). Movements like the Guides gave girls new opportunities, although not the same ones afforded to Scouts. More women were going to university. More were getting the right to vote. All these developments might have had some unconscious influence on Captain Johns.

More important in the writing of Worrals were two pioneering women fliers. Amy Johnson (1903-41), the first female pilot to fly alone from Britain to Australia, was an icon in 1930s Britain. Pauline Gower (1910-47) established the women’s branch of the Air Transport Auxiliary, where Johnson was serving when she crashed to her death in 1941. Johns knew both of them. Worrals’ adventures are more ripping yarn than realistic but her skill, courage and determination were grounded in reality.

Amy Johnson (public domain)

Pauline Gower (Women’s Engineering Society Archives. Creative Commons licence)

The greatest influence, however, was fictional: Biggles. Worrals was Biggles. Both were daring pilots, good shots, natural leaders. Both were uninterested in romance or family. Both were patriotic, clear-headed, decisive, even ruthless. Both were responsible for deaths, but felt little remorse. Captain Johns seemed to see no reason for changing his winning formula just because he was now dealing with the female sex (although it is interesting that he kept writing about Biggles until his death but gave up on Worrals 20 years before).

‘… I’ve not said Biggles, and Arthur Ransome and John Buchan, because I was reading those books as well. Those ‘Captain Johns’ and you know, the others, I would’ve sought out them in the central library,’ said Shirley.

Captain Johns’ prose can be purple (‘Deep night lay across the fair land of France, night as black as the soul of its Nazi conqueror.’[vi]), his plots formulaic and his characterisation superficial. There is little subtlety or depth in his writing. To the 21st century reader (both Biggles and Worrals are still in print), his attitudes can seem dated and occasionally offensive. Sheffield reader James Green reflects now:

… Well, Biggles, I think. … It was written for boys. But there’s an underlying propaganda that I didn’t get at the time, that was there. … ‘Course a lot of stuff we read in those days, I mean I was still at school when the map on the wall was half pink at that time. And there were loads of books with heroes that went out to quell the natives and hook all their values of Great Britain you know, and all the rest of it. … through reading newspapers you’d get writers and critics that would dissect a certain book or books or a genre, and make you see things that you hadn’t seen before. And you think, well that’s not right, you know. But at thirteen you … propaganda. And very Gung Ho. And I did think we were the greatest nation on this earth anyway. ‘God is an Englishman.’

But Johns was successful because of his thrilling plots, vivid characters and ability to spin a yarn. Boys and girls in wartime, seeking excitement or reassurance or distraction, were caught up by the adventures of Biggles and Worrals. For boys, this was the norm but it must have been a relatively new experience for the girls. ‘The boys had the best of it with their air ace “Biggles” until “Worrals of the WAAF” came along,’ says the slogan on Worrals Flies Again (1942).

[i] Worrals on the Warpath (1943).

[ii] A J Jenkinson’s survey, What Do Boys and Girls Read? (Methuen, 1940), involving almost 3,000 children, reported similar results.

[iii] The first Biggles novel is The Camels are Coming. There are about 100 books in total.

[iv] In a 2007 graphic novel, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill, it is implied that Worrals and Frecks are more than friends.

[v] There were no women fighter pilots in the British or American armed forces until the 1990s. Russian women flew fighter planes in World War Two.

[vi] Worrals on the War-Path (1943).

Without libraries what have we?*

Writing up our own reading journeys has long been the plan for the Reading Sheffield team (here is our web designer Lizz’s reading journey). The threat to libraries across the country brought the task into sharp focus for me.  Libraries have been, and are, my regular staging posts along the road.  It saddens me that so many of them are closing and so many of us will thus find the way harder.

Even before libraries, there were my parents.  My father paused his reading about Newcastle Utd in the Evening Chronicle (well, the news was often bad) to help me spell out letters, then words, from the headlines.  ‘Goal’ was probably one of my first words.  My mother, keen to give me the education she missed, taught me the alphabet – in upper case, which later irritated my teachers.  She helped me grasp narrative early on by telling me stories.  One was about how much she enjoyed ‘reading time’ at school, with Anne of Green Gables and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm her favourite books.

There was a scheme allowing very young children – I was about two years old – to borrow picture books from the local library.  For us this was the Redheugh Branch in Gateshead, an Art Deco building with pale yellow doors, now a recording studio.  We went there as often as I could persuade my mother.  I remember a low table-cum-box, divided into four compartments for the picture books and known apparently as a ‘kinderbox’, with three-legged stools around it.  Table and stools were painted yellow and red.

Redheugh Library

Redheugh Library

Inside Redheugh Library

Inside Redheugh Library

A kinderbox

When I was four, we moved.  It was around then that I started school, and found shelves of books in most classrooms.  The Council was keen on school libraries.  There were Ladybird books, Janet and John and two books which, perhaps because they were the first ‘proper’ stories I ever read, stay with me.  First was Neighbours in the Park, about a girl who lived with her parents in a double-decker bus and made friends with a park-keeper’s daughter.  The park, bus and girls were shown on the green, black and white cover.  Then came The Bittern, which had a pale green or brown cover with, I think, a drawing of a rather mournful, long-haired girl.  I have no idea what The Bittern was about, or who wrote either book, but between them they caught me, and I was never free again.  (If anyone knows these books, I would love to hear of them.)

The nearest library was now Gateshead Central, a Carnegie library.  I had no fear of it, or sense that time reading was time wasted.  It was the first place I was allowed to go to by myself.  In holidays I would go at least every other day and, in term time, on Saturdays and a couple of weekday evenings.  Often my father was persuaded to give me a lift.  ‘You won’t be long now, will you?’

Gateshead Central Library

Gateshead Central Library

To join, I had to read a passage aloud to the children’s librarian, stern in brown tweed suit and knitted jumper.  Her hair was corrugated cardboard.  But, frightening as she was, she had the power to make me free of the books on her shelves, so it was a worthwhile ordeal.  The library was a large room, with high shelves and big, oak reading tables and chairs.  It was perhaps not very child-friendly, though this never struck me then.  It was just the library, where the books were, and I wanted to be.

anne_of_green_gables_-_cover

Here I found Anne of Green Gables and loved it as much as my mother had.  How I adored Gilbert Blythe, in common with Anne and many other readers.  Anne herself was important because we both loved stories and hated geometry, and we shared red hair and the name Anne, although mine lacked the important final ‘e’.  There were also Jo, Meg, Amy, Beth (how I cried!), Katy Carr, Rebecca and Pollyanna, who was too glad to be endured for long.  And I found adventurous children like Nancy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins, the Dana Girls and the Hardy Boys.  My Reading Sheffield colleague Mary Grover points out that these are all from across the Atlantic, and wonders if the library had any American connection.  Not that I know of.

School and ballet stories were important too.  My favourites, which were plentiful in the library, were Elinor M Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School series – I can still name all of Joey Maynard’s eleven children – and Lorna Hill’s Sadler’s Wells books.  I begged for ballet lessons, to no avail, and was reduced to copying the ballet-trained glide of a luckier classmate.  I didn’t read about horses, the other staple for young girls.  A teacher had read Black Beauty aloud, and I was haunted by the cruelty.

What other books stay in my mind?

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, with its brilliant opening, where Lucy meets Mr Tumnus under the lamp-post in the snow.  But I found Aslan disturbing and never managed the other Narnia books.

Any book by E Nesbit.  ‘You’re so funny!’ said the psammead. ‘Have your parents tried boiling you?’

The Changeling of Monte Lucio and other old-fashioned, Ruritanian novels by Violet Needham.  Quests, rebellions, secret societies, castles, mountains – what more could anyone want?

A non-fiction series called The Young …, about the early lives of the famous.  My favourite was The Young Mary Queen of Scots, by Jean Plaidy.  Mary, with Marys Beaton, Seton, Fleming and Livingston, escaped from Scotland to France, where she married the Dauphin.  The book ended with her returning to Scotland, aged about 16 and wearing white mourning for her young husband.

‘Career novels’ like Margaret Becomes a Doctor, in which girls trained for a career but always met a nice young man and gave up their hard-won jobs.  Linked with these for me were two series – American, again – about nurses Cherry Ames and Sue Barton, who had both adventures and principles.  Cherry was unique in never settling for domesticity.

Five Children and It

The Psammead: Five Children and It by E Nesbit

violet-needham

When I was around 13, I’d outgrown the children’s library but was too young for the adult.  Ingeniously, I bullied my parents into joining and then used their tickets, always ready if challenged to say I was just collecting their books.  But no-one ever asked.

Today I belong to Sheffield Library, and Newcastle and Leeds have also known me over the years.  Libraries and I have been together for over 50 years, and we see no reason to split up now.

* The answer?  ‘We have no past and no future.’  So said Ray Bradbury.

In Miss Foyle’s Opinion

How did Reading Sheffield readers choose books?  Was it largely by chance? (City Librarian J P Lamb once said that people generally just wanted ‘a book, preferably an attractive one’.)  Or by favourite author?  The next book in a series?  Influenced by a film? (Gone with the Wind was often mentioned.)  Or a recommendation by someone in the book trade?  We have no definitive answer.  Our readers were probably swayed, at different times, by all of the above.

Christina Foyle, by Bassano, whole-plate glass negative, 7 December 1936 (NPG)

Christina Foyle, by Bassano, whole-plate glass negative, 7 December 1936 (NPG)

But here, for what they are worth, are the views of a literary insider – Christina Foyle of Foyle’s Bookshop.  She was speaking, with characteristic firmness, in Belfast in 1950, right in the middle of the Reading Sheffield period, and her remarks were reported in a local paper.

Publishers’ rejects that became best-sellers (Northern Whig – Friday 21 April 1950)

What makes publisher after publisher reject a book which later becomes a best-seller?

This was one of the questions posed yesterday by Miss Christina Foyle when she addressed the Belfast Alpha Club on “Writers of To-day and Yesterday.”

Some of the people whose books were turned down by publishers were Bernard Shaw, Jeffrey Farnol, Richard Llewellyn – Foyle’s were among the publishers who rejected his “How Green Was My Valley” because they did not think that readers liked dialect – Baroness Orczy  – every publisher in London turned down “The Scarlet Pimpernel,” though it has now been translated into every language – and Edgar Wallace.  Edgar Wallace had at first to publish his own books and find his own travellers to sell them.

Another book which was very nearly not published was “Little Women.”  The publisher kept the manuscript in his home; he thought very little of it and intended returning it.  Then one day he found his small niece sitting up reading the manuscript; he told her it was late and she must go to bed, but the child pleaded with him saying she simply must finish the story.  So the publisher had second thoughts!

Books which had surprised the book trade by their popularity were Louis Golding’s “Magnolia Sweet”, “Fanny by Gaslight” and “The Egg and I”.

Although Miss Foyle is a young woman, she does not think present-day writers are as good as their forbears.  Some who had been most promising and had written brilliantly, had turned to religion or politics, and thought that might have been a good thing for religion or politics it was not good for literature.

“Dorothy Sayers used to bring out wonderful detective stories, but is now more interested in religion; A. P. Herbert has turned from novel writing to politics; and Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley and Ethel Mannin have got themselves involved in mysticism,” she stated, and added:

“There is no writer today who can compare in wit to Philip Guedella or Humbert Wolfe.  Peter Cheyney is the most popular thriller writer, but I don’t think he can compare to Edgar Wallace or Conan Doyle.”

Modern poets, Miss Foyle thinks, have committed suicide.  They are difficult to read, and if the public reads poetry at all, it is the poetry of Wordsworth or Tennyson.

“The most popular cookery book is still Mrs Beeton,” she said.

Miss Foyle considers that income tax has had a terrible effect on writers.  An author might take four years to write a book but is taxed as though he spent only one year on it.  The sales of Trevelyan’s “Social History” amounted to £15,000 but he received only £3,000.

Yet Miss Foyle feels that the present is a good time for writers , and she told the meeting that there is a great demand for books in every field and: “If you can write yourself or you know anyone who can write you should tell them of the opportunities.”

By any reckoning, Christina Foyle was a Personality.  Born in 1911, she started in the family bookshop on Charing Cross Road when she was 17, and took it over in the 1960s.  The way she operated was notoriously odd (shelving books, for example, by publisher) but Miss Foyle did know everyone who mattered.  The literary lunches she started in 1930 alone ensured that.

For the record, many of the writers mentioned by Christina Foyle were quoted by Reading Sheffield readers.  So how much influence did someone like her have on readers?

Lady Chatterley (and her Lover) in Sheffield

Today, Saturday 1 October, sees the end of Banned Books Week, the annual American campaign for the freedom to read.  (These are the top titles challenged in the USA this year, and here are some classics which have been attacked.)  So here are Reading Sheffield readers’ memories about Lady Chatterley’s Lover, perhaps one of the most famous banned books of all.  (Coincidentally, a dramatisation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is on at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre until 15 October 2016.)

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D H Lawrence’s novel was first published in Italy in 1928, and in an abridged version in the UK in 1932.  The full version was published in the UK in 1960 by Penguin Books.  Penguin was prosecuted for obscenity and won the case.  The trial made headlines, and Penguin’s victory liberalised UK publishing.

As it happens, the Reading Sheffield readers were not all impressed with Lady Chatterley’s Lover.  But what is important is that, thanks to the 1960 challenge by Penguin Books, they had the chance to read it and make up their own minds.

Licenced by Twospoonfuls under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International licence

Licenced by Twospoonfuls under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International licence

For Mary Robertson, Lady Chatterley’s Lover was ‘the most boring book I’ve ever read!’  Her memories are vivid:

Oh yes! It was banned and then it went to court. Before that we would get it and we would pass it round and it was one you would read under the bedclothes. … The part that was thumbed was the part with the gardener. That’s the only part. I mean now it would be nothing, would it? Oh we laugh about that. … It was [sharp intake of breath] ‘I shouldn’t be reading this’, yes. I didn’t get the D H Lawrence books. They were too gritty, they were too real. I quite like some of his plays [sic] but not the books.

Eva G was also unimpressed. ‘I didn’t think it was shocking! I did think what all the fuss was about!

Anne B was younger – 14 or 15 – when she read it.  She was shocked: ‘Oh yeah because I was totally innocent in those days.’ She got hold of the novel by chance:

I found my dad reading surreptitiously, which was totally…I mean it was when it was all in the papers about the …[laughing] I remember he pushed it under the pile of newspapers in the cupboard and I found it one day and I started doing the same thing and reading it surreptitiously. There was always a half hour part of the day, when I got in from school before they came back from work,  that I’d got to myself and I used to read it. I worked my way through it. That was the only time and I knew I shouldn’t be doing it so I never let on. I don’t think my mother knows today that I ever read it.

Discretion was not unusual. Nurse Betty R said:

Yes, sister on the ward was reading it and she said “Would you like to read this Betty?” And she said “Keep the brown cover on it.”

Peter Mason illustrates what often happens with challenged books:

… we weren’t meant to read his [Lawrence’s] books so we read it and, looking at it now, I don’t know what all the fuss was about, because you see more about it on the TV and the news these days.

He thinks that Lady Chatterley’s Lover only ‘became famous because they banned it, I don’t think it would have…’

Alan B studied Lawrence for his Open University course and concluded that he preferred the poetry to the novels:

… he is one of these people who makes some very insightful…observations on life but you have got to read through a lot of stuff to get to them [chuckles] whereas his poems are more punchy.

Peter B read Lady Chatterley ‘even before copies were generally available’.  He thinks it is now ‘a bit dated’.  But Lawrence:

advanced literature in the sense that it was the first time that sort of thought had been attributed to the working class. You had to be either a business man or a lawyer or something to be written about.

Mavis was, she says, too young when she found D H Lawrence and so she ‘could not understand why it was banned’:

… I had no idea what I was reading.  The sex scenes went right over my head.  In fact somebody lent me a forbidden copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.  I could only have been about fourteen.  Somebody got it from her sister who was much older and I didn’t notice why it should be banned, I couldn’t understand! (Laughs)  And I look back now and think how could I possibly not have noticed what that was all about.

But Mavis does think that Lawrence changed things for her:

It both led me on to a different level of adult fiction even if I didn’t always pick up on the nuances but as I did pick up the nuances I think it made me see how people adapt, grow up, fall in and out of love – I think it went along with my development at the right age.

Betty MacDonald: A Rare Talent

Frances: … You told me about reading aloud in the house.  Was it my father or your father?

Mary: Oh yes, it was your father.  When I was expecting Jonathan I think, we still lived here, after I was married… after my father died we lived here, he used to read to us in the evening, I remember it was The Egg and I, I don’t know whether you know that book.  I can’t remember who wrote it…

Frances: Betty MacDonald… Betty MacDonald.

Mary: Oh yes, that’s right… we were busy knitting and he was reading to us.  I don’t know whether men still do that…

Mary is the only one of our readers to mention The Egg and I, written by the mid-20th century American humorist Betty MacDonald.  The image of her husband reading aloud from the book has stayed in her memory for around 60 years.  This pleases us because we are among Betty’s fans.  (Her fame has faded, but there are still many of us around.)

The Egg and I, a fictionalised account of Betty’s years on a chicken farm, was a sensation on publication in the USA in 1945 and was adapted into a popular film,  It made its author rich and famous.  ‘A good laugh is to be welcomed always: never more so than at the present, when much gloom and ill-humour stalk abroad’, said the Illustrated London News. Even if Betty’s name is less familiar, the book is still known.  It has apparently never been out of print in America, and the title and the names of two characters, Ma and Pa Kettle, have entered the language.

Cover illustration: The Plague and I

Cover illustration: The Plague and I

In the Reading Sheffield team, we like Egg but we prefer Betty’s second book, The Plague and I (1948).  It doesn’t sound very promising: her year spent recovering from tuberculosis in a strict sanatorium, with few family visits allowed and the threat of death hanging over her.  In fact, Plague is vintage Betty MacDonald, displaying her considerable gifts for observation and characterisation and her wonderfully sharp wit.  Here is the Charge Nurse dealing with a rebellious new patient

She noticed a bare shoulder.  Then turning back the covers, as though she were looking for maggots in a sack of flour, she revealed the rest of the bare and satin-clad Miss Kelly,  Her nostrils swelled almost to bursting point. She said to Granite Eyes [another nurse], ‘Miss Murdock … get a pair of outing flannel pyjamas.’ She turned to Miss Kelly … ‘why have you come here wearing silk (she breathed out heavily as she said this loathsome word so that it came out ‘suh-hilk’) pyjamas and nail polish?’

But (and this is important) Betty does not gloss over the treatments (or lack of them – streptomycin had not then been developed), the apparent harshness of the regime or the deaths of fellow patients.

Kate … explained that she had empyema, an infection of the pleural cavity, and added casually that she was dying.

Betty’s short and sometimes difficult life does not immediately suggest much opportunity for humour (although she might have said she had it no worse than anyone else).  She was born in 1907 or 1908 and died of cancer at the early age of 50.  Her father died when she was a child, and she and her siblings were brought up in Seattle by a loving but unconventional mother.  When she was 20, she married an ex-marine, Bob Heskett, and they started a chicken farm in a remote and poor part of the country (hence The Egg and I).  The work was physically exhausting and there was little intellectual stimulation.  After a few years, the marriage failed and Betty returned, with two small daughters but no means of support, to her mother’s home.  The family struggled financially in the Great Depression and Betty had various poorly-paid and unsatisfactory jobs.  The late 1930s brought tuberculosis and the sanatorium.  In 1942, she married her second husband, Donald MacDonald, and lived with him until her death.

Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray starring in The Egg and I

Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray starring in The Egg and I

Betty wrote all her books* during this second, happier marriage.  The Egg and I appeared first in 1945 and sold a million copies in a year.  The Hollywood film, starring Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray, was a hit in 1947, with the hillbilly characters, Ma and Pa Kettle, proving particularly popular.  (The film led to Betty’s being sued for libel by former neighbours who claimed they had been ridiculed.)  Egg was followed by: The Plague and I in 1948; Anybody Can Do Anything (1950) chronicling family life in the Depression; and Onions in the Stew (1955) about life with her second husband and family.

Betty MacDonald is under-rated as humorists often are.  She seems to have operated on the basis of writing about what she knew and remembering that everything is copy. Why is she a good writer?  Without flinching, she grounds the humour she finds in unlikely or unpleasant situations in the reality of those situations.  And her use of language is very precise, yet she pulls off the trick of sounding like someone chatting to you on the bus.  (This is perhaps why our interviewee Mary’s husband could successfully read her aloud.)  Taken together, her books are a chronicle of her times, but also a re-imagining of those times, where the humour is used to deflect the pain and stress she knew.

We wish Betty MacDonald were better known today.

 

(There is brief footage of Betty MacDonald on YouTube and information about her here.  And for all we said above about Betty not being well-known now, two books about her are appearing in 2016: Betty, The Story of Betty MacDonald, Author of The Egg and I, by Anne Wellman; and Looking for Betty MacDonald, by Paula Becker-Brown.)

* In addition to the list above, Betty MacDonald also wrote children’s books, including the Mrs Piggle-Wiggle series.

Arnold Bennett? Really? Most popular novelist?

Yes, that’s right.  Arnold Bennett was the most popular ‘classical novelist’ with Sheffield Libraries borrowers in 1931.  His competition included the likes of Thomas Hardy, John Galsworthy and Charles Dickens.

Most popular author - Arnold Bennett (Project_Gutenberg_etext_13635.jpg)

Arnold Bennett – Project_ Gutenberg_etext_13635.jpg

Librarians have long been numbered among those who worry about fiction. Are novels worthwhile or a frivolous waste of time?  Do they have anything to teach us or are they doing us harm?

One of the justifications for the free public library movement of the 19th century was self-improvement (of the working class in particular).  Irritatingly, however, many borrowers persisted in preferring books of the imagination over books of information, leading librarians to denounce them.

From the hysterical:

…undoubtedly novels are the most dangerous literature of the age: they dissipate the attention; they appeal to the lazy feelings; sensation and novelty are all that are required from them … better would it be that these lending libraries should cease to exist than that they should disseminate evil influences. (J Taylor Kay, the librarian of Owen’s College Manchester, now the University of Manchester, in 1879).

To the patronising:

It may be that the library authorities of the future will maintain that the business of the library is to supply what the public wants to read irrespective of quality in much the same way that cinema proprietors supply films. (William Berwick Sayers, chief librarian, Croydon, in 1931).

But there were always public libraries which welcomed fiction.  They took the view that good novels spoke to the human condition, and that popular fiction could refresh people.  Sheffield was one of them.  In 1931, the following article appeared in Sheffield’s Books and Readers bulletin:

 

Who is the most popular classical novelist?

Public Libraries are often criticised on the score of the amount of fiction issued by them. It is too readily assumed by these critics that fiction is all of one standard, and that a poor one, and to these Jeremiahs we point out the result of a recent test made of the popularity of twelve English novelists whose works may be definitely classed as literature. The Librarians at each of the Lending Libraries in the City were asked to report the number of books by certain authors available for loan and actually on loan to borrowers, with the following results:-

Author Stock On Loan %
Barrie 127 69 54
Bennett 352 314 89
Conrad 261 176 67
Dickens 395 218 55
Galsworthy 288 203 71
Hardy 270 183 68
Kipling 266 132 50
Meredith 146 45 31
Scott 362 105 29
Stevenson 152 89 58
Tennyson* 135 34 25
Wells 532 337 63

An examination of these details reveals that there is no reason to feel ashamed of the quality of the fiction read in Sheffield.  The high percentage for Bennett is perhaps too flattering.  It may be partially explained by the fact that the test was made soon after his death, but allowing for this factor, his popularity is remarkable.

It is fascinating to review this list 85 years on.

  • They are all men. They are all white men.  They are all British (yes, I’m counting Conrad, born in Poland, but naturalised in 1884).  Eight out of the twelve were dead by 1931, and the four still alive were all well over 60 in 1931.
  • Literary reputations change over time. Not all of the twelve authors be considered ‘classical’ today.  Only half of them appear in Robert McCrum’s 2015 list of the best 100 novels written in English (a list which generated criticism, as all such lists do – this one not least because male authors heavily outnumbered female).
  • The very fact of the test and the language used (‘no need to feel ashamed’) perhaps indicate the scale of the debate about fiction.
  • We don’t know much about the context. Which titles were borrowed? Out of the 532 books by H G Wells, say, were some more popular than others?  The article speculates that Arnold Bennett’s popularity was due to his recent death.  There may have been other contributory factors such as the author’s work appearing on the radio.  Wells, for example, took part in three radio talks between 1929 and 1931.  Then there are the borrowers themselves.  Were there more men than women, older than younger people?  Finally, who were the popular novelists (we can speculate that they included the likes of Edgar Wallace and Ethel M Dell) and how would they compare if included?  We can’t answer any of these questions, although we do know that a survey about five years later showed 40 per cent of the fiction borrowed to be ‘classic and standard’ and the rest ‘semi-standard and popular’.

‘Prose fiction today’, wrote Sheffield’s City Librarian in the 1930s, ‘provides one of the most common means by which social, political, religious and other ideas are given to the people’, while action stories had a ‘definite, if limited, place… They give mental refreshment to highly intelligent and well-read library borrowers, they are “introductory readers” to [new borrowers] and … “escape” literature to [the] mentally and physically jaded.’

Clansmen (1936) – ‘A long new novel by Ethel Boileau’

By Mary Grover

ethel-boileau-text

You will struggle to find out anything much about the author, Ethel Boileau, although the indefatigable Furrowed Middlebrow offers some information about her books.  However, you can now find a signed copy of Boileau’s 1936 tome, Clansmen – the story of a Scottish family struggling to maintain their ancestral estate, from just after the Jacobite rising of 1745 to 1936 – on the shelves of Sheffield Hallam University’s special collection of popular fiction 1900-1950.

wings

This copy was donated by Norman Adsetts, after whom the Learning Centre at Hallam is named. As Reading Sheffield’s interview with Norman Adsetts revealed, Boileau was an extremely popular novelist in the 1930s.  Norman should know; he grew up in between the shelves of his father’s tuppenny library where his mother would have found her favourite author, whose foreign name the little boy struggled to pronounce.

The cover and contents of Clansmen belie Boileau’s reputation as simply a writer of romance. For a start, it is unusual to find a novel explicitly promoted for its length.  The first words on the cover of Clansmen are ‘Ethel Boileau’s long new novel’. Length must have been a quality her fans sought. The length owes a great deal to the time-span: 1747-1936.

Family sagas were popular in the 1930s (as they still are).  John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga, published in the 1920s, was succeeded by Hugh Walpole’s Rogue Herries (1930-1932); Ethel Mannin’s Children of the Earth (1930 and 1937); and Mazo de la Roche’s Jalna series (1927-1958).  But the form was sneered at by modernists (as it is by today’s literary fiction proponents) who set value on the intense, the transitory and the subjective. The narrators of popular sagas of this period tend to assume an unfashionable omniscience.

However, in many ways Clansmen itself is about the value of the subjective, the transitory and intense and is very clear-sighted about the economic realities threatening the enjoyment of any emotional attachments. The only nineteenth century members of the Stewart clan who remain solvent are bankers. However their money is misspent by their relatives, either dissolute or dim. The focus of the main and later part of the book is Alan Stewart. His father having died in the Boer War, just before his birth, he is cared for by his uncle whose crazed and fraudulent stock market dealings wipe out what remains of the money. The generosity of a Jewish financier, Sir Isidore, and the utter loyalty of a retainer, Hector (who alone knows that he is Alan’s illegitimate half-brother), enable Alan to survive, first as an ungifted financier himself and then as a more committed laird. However, at the end of the book the success of this ancient calling is seen to be compromised by Alan’s new wife,  a beauty with ‘a past’ and hopelessly bored by the Highlands.  Though the dissolute cousin who attempts to seduce this desperate metropolitan beauty is pushed off a cliff by the loyal Hector, the novel ends on a decidedly equivocal note: Hector ‘with his silent stalker’s walk’ turning his back on the image of Alan’s wife in a way that reveals his own desire for her.

Perhaps it is the date when Clansmen came out, 1936, that accounts for its emphasis on the unforeseen and individual helplessness in the context of global war and pervasive economic collapse. The romance is really that of Hector, who loves both master and mistress with no hope of emotional fulfilment himself. The dedication of the novel ‘To All Scots in Exile’ and the prominence of the Stewart heraldic emblem on the cover suggest that this might be a nostalgic novel in which Scottish clans will represent threatened values of loyalty and land. In fact, it is the members of the clan with least connection with the land who make possible the precarious hold the Stewarts have on their shrinking areas of the Highlands. The benefactors of the romantic but rather obtuse Alan are the Jewish financier and a long-dead ancestor who redeemed the family fortunes by running a bank in India. The vast scope of the novel – the Highlands, Edinburgh, Calcutta, the trenches of the First World War, the battlefields of the Boer War, the fleshpots of New York and, very up-to-date, Nazi Germany – conspires to make the Scottish bogs where the action ends up very much on the edge of things, and certainly holding out no hope of stability or sanctuary.

phillip-gibbs

Returning to the reader who first brought Ethel Boileau’s popularity to our attention, Norman Adsetts’ own favourite was a book by Sir Phillip Gibbs, Cities of Refuge (1937). This novel is about the often harsh and tragic fate of White Russians fleeing the revolution.  This is a strange book for a six year old to read – yet what an appropriate preparation for the wartime apocalypse through which he was to grow up. The tuppenny library served the young Noman well.  Not only did it fire his imagination with romance, comedy and jungle adventures.   It also introduced him to the realities of the world into which he had to learn to be an adult through blockbusters (however much these might be derided by 1930s self-styled ‘realists’ or the heirs of Bloomsbury).  Clansmen together with Cities of Refuge would have given the seven year Norman more knowledge of the history of twentieth century Europe than a modern boy with greater access to fiction now regarded as more appropriate to his age.

‘Children Keep Author Writing’ (Sheffield Telegraph, 10 April 1951)

Kathleen Fidler (image by courtesy of her niece)

The children invited must have felt special.  I imagine them wearing their Sunday best and being carefully checked by their mothers before they left home, probably with family escort.  They would have taken with them the invitation – formal, white pasteboard with the city coat of arms and a rather nice font.

request-

Here are the words of the invitation (which is filed today in the local history section of the library) in case you cannot read it clearly from the image.

The Chairman and Members of the Libraries, Art Galleries and Museums Committee request the pleasure of the company of …………. at a meeting of members of the Hillsborough Junior Library which is to be addressed by Miss Kathleen Fidler, the well-known author and broadcaster of “Brydon” and “Mr Simster” stories, on Monday, 9th April, 1951, at 6.30pm.

The Lady Mayoress of Sheffield (Mrs Keeble Hawson) will preside.

Oh yes, the children would have been on their best behaviour in front of a famous author, the Lady Mayoress, the chairman of the Libraries Committee, the City Librarian and the local press.

The Sheffield Telegraph reported the visit the day after.  There were apparently 80 boys and girls present (a number that suggests very few refused the invitation).  Girls outnumbered boys three to one, and they were all ‘hand-picked for their receptivity’ by the librarians, the Telegraph remarked rather repressively.  Flowers were of course presented to the Lady Mayoress and Kathleen Fidler, by 13 year-old Anne Beresford and nine year-old Paula Mercer respectively.  Miss Fidler read for about 40 minutes from the ‘domestic adventures of the famous Brydon family and a charming fairy story’.  These were evidently much appreciated as, afterwards, most of the children besieged Miss Fidler with requests for autographs (this was the day of autograph books), and she ‘painstakingly signed every one.  It took 20 minutes’, said the Telegraph, hence the title above.

The Brydons Stick at Nothing by Kathleen Fidler

The Telegraph explained that the visit to Sheffield had a ‘pronounced family flavour’.  Kathleen Fidler brought along to Sheffield her husband, James Goldie, and her 79 year-old father, Francis Fidler, who lived in Sheffield as a boy.  They were met by her sister, who was married to Frank Pinion, the headmaster of local Woodhouse Grammar School, and a cousin who lived in Woodseats.

All in all, this visit seems to have been treated rather singularly.  Sheffield Libraries ran events often – exhibitions, story-tellings, lectures, discussion groups etc – and Miss Fidler was not by any means the only author to feature.  But why did the Lady Mayoress and various Council dignitaries attend?  Perhaps it was to promote the Council’s library services, or was it the Fidler family connection, or just someone who knew someone?  (It was by the way a busy time for the Lady Mayoress.  The next Monday she and her husband played host at the Town Hall to Winston and Clementine Churchill.  Winston was Leader of the Opposition, but became Prime Minister a few months later, in October 1951.  That visit made the front page of the Telegraph.)  At all events Kathleen Fidler’s visit to Sheffield is perhaps not that different from today’s book-selling strategies: although they may travel faster and do more literary festivals, authors still do readings and sign things.

Kathleen Fidler was a popular children’s author of the period.  Sixty years afterwards, she was remembered by one of the Reading Sheffield interviewees, Sheila Edwards:

…I joined two libraries because I enjoyed reading so much, I had a subscription to Boots library and I went to the Central Library in town … and I just read masses of books; I can’t remember what they all were now but, there were one or two I remember: Noel Streatfeild- I think she wrote books about ballet, Kathleen Fidler, another one called Malcolm but I can’t just remember what his surname was now…those were the main ones I remember…

Kathleen Fidler was born in England in 1899, trained as a teacher and rose to be a headmistress.  After marrying in 1930, she moved to Scotland and eventually settled in Lasswade, a village near Edinburgh, where, just like Sheffield, she often read to children in the local library.  Like many others, she started her writing career with stories for her own children.  In all she produced about 80 books (more than one a year), including series about two families, the Brydons and the Deans, historical novels like The Desperate Journey (1964) and animal stories such as Haki the Shetland Pony (1968).   Books from Scotland notes: ‘Her work has been praised for the depth and detail of research into the background of her stories.’

Some stories were broadcast on BBC Radio Children’s Hour.  For example, in 1946 there was  ‘The Mysterious Mr. Simister: a school mystery play in three parts by Kathleen Fidler’.  (The cast list includes Gordon Jackson, then in his early 20s but later to become famous as Mr Hudson in Upstairs, Downstairs.)  Kathleen Fidler contributed to the much-loved BBC children’s programme, Jackanory, and wrote many schools programmes for the BBC and was ‘one of the pioneers of BBC Schools Broadcasting’.

After her death in 1980, the Kathleen Fidler Award was instituted for children’s literature, for previously unpublished authors of novels for children aged 8 to 12, alongside the prestigious Carnegie and Kate Greenaway prizes.  I haven’t been able to discover more than a couple of the winners: in 1984 Janet Collins for her novel, Barty; and Cathy MacPhail for Run, Zan, Run in 1994.  The award closed in 2002.

Kathleen Fidler is clearly less well-known today than back in 1951, although some of her books are still available, as reprints, second-hand copies or e-books.  Why this fading?  A novel like The Desperate Journey, about twins, Kirsty and David, who lose their home through the notorious 18th century Highland Clearances, remains enjoyable. If there is not much subtlety, the characters are nevertheless vivid and there is a very strong sense of place and an exciting storyline.  But of course, while historical and animal stories are always popular, she wrote no space saga or fantasy novels about attractive vampires.

the Brydons go canoeing by Kathleen Fidler

Her contemporary novels about the Deans and the Brydons may just be too dated, the Brydons for example being about a family evacuated to the countryside during WWII. There are at least nineteen stories about them.  The Brydons Stick at Nothing, a pacey story about a series of local burglaries, is presumably fairly typical.  The Brydons’ world – the Lancashire countryside – is conventional, comfortable and secure (and it is heartening that the children firmly reject the suggestion of adults that local working-class children may be responsible for the burglaries).  The children are, in the classic way, ‘nice’, middle-class and largely free from adult supervision.  The Brydon girls appear confident but tend to do what their protective brothers tell them.  To today’s children the lives of the Brydons and their friends must seem as far from their own lives as the lives of Victorian children.

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Kathleen Fidler was clearly a great success on the day of her visit to Hillsborough Library.  I wonder whether she had a lasting influence on the children who met her.  A book read in childhood can seize the imagination and change everything afterwards forever.

Have you read Kathleen Fidler’s books?  Do you remember her visit to Sheffield, or any similar events in local libraries? Please let us know.

By Val Hewson

Access Sheila Edwards’ transcript and audio here.