A New Miss Read for Christmas!

Christmas at Thrush Green by Miss Read

Or, more accurately, by Miss Read (Dora Saint) and her long-time editor, Jenny Dereham.  But it is a Thrush Green story, with all of our favourite characters and the daily village dramas that Miss Read fans love.

If you’ve never read a Miss Read book before, this is a good one to start with. The first few chapters interweave introductions of  all of the characters into the narrative; you feel you know them right away.

There are carollers, church-goers and anti church-goes, Dottie Harmer and her animals,  Dimity and her vicar-husband, Ella, Winnie, Nellie Piggott and her Fuchsia Bush cafe,  and, of course, the Misses Lovelock. The small boys Jeremy and Paul are now teenagers, the Curdles’ children are growing, and age is creeping up on the people we’ve read about for all these years.

Ella’s is the central crisis in this story: she is going blind from macular degeneration. But other crises arise in other families, social gaffes are noted and overcome and a firm sense that Thrush Green will always be Thrush Green rests lightly over the whole book. A lovely Christmas time read.

Miss Read’s other Christmas books look very well-worn on my book shelves. I re-read them almost every year. These include Village Christmas, No Holly for Miss Quinn, The Christmas Mouse and Winter in Thrush Green. I also like to read The White Robin around Christmas or New Year. It’s such a hopeful, sweet story.

The Wedding, the Ex-Wife and the Kids

Lately I’ve found myself– sometimes standing in the living room, sometimes during a walk, sometimes while reading, sometimes lying in bed late at night– I’ve found myself reflecting on the happiness of my life, the contentment I feel, and the fact that every single day I feel a deeper connection to and love for my husband. Does this come with age? With experience? With a spiritual (as opposed to romantic) understanding of love? With unconditional love?

A second chance. It can and does happen. We had it, and we took it. And we’ve never regretted it. There have been times of deep and grinding pain caused by my husband’s former wife and his children. There have been deaths in the families. There has been a serious illness that threatened to cripple. So we have known sadness and frustration and challenge. But we feel more connected, move loving and more supportive after each of these times than ever before.

I was in my fifties when we met; he was in his forties. A life well lived always leaves marks; not all baggage is heavy. But second love is more realistic, deeper, more aware of its rarity. It requires patience, forgiveness and tolerance. And acceptance of what cannot be changed.

Curiosity, I supposed, and nostalgia, no doubt, led me to read some of the e-mails between my friends and me when my husband and I first got together.  Here is one of them, from me to a friend of over 30 years.

Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2003
From: R K Silipo
To: “DuRand, Le Clanche”
Subject: From the wilds of suburban Surbiton

Dear Che,

Been ill the past few days with a mystery illness that required sleeping
all day,  moaning at intervals, the sleeping again. Feeling marginally better today,  going to hear Jill Purce, a healer who uses sound, speak tonight at the Siddha Ashram.

We’ve been going to satsang at the ashram on Saturday evenings. It’s very interesting how they have structured the satsang like a Protestant church service, presumably to make uptight English people more comfortable. It begins with chanting, has a little reading and talk, then more chanting, and finishes with food being passed around. One time it was home-made Turkish delight, another  chocolate brownies. Just small bites, but more body than the traditional Host. It’s a nice way to spend two hours, and the young (he looks like 15 to me, but is probably something between 30 and 40) leader of worship is very open and friendly, and a transparently sincere and earnest seeker.

On their altar, covered with beautiful silks, are pictures of their teachers, going back several generations, various Indian deities, Jesus, something vaguely Muslim (no graven images), ditto something Jewish– very ecumenical. In their garden there is a lovely BVM statue, not sentimental or prissy like so many of them are. I quite like her. Other holy people’s statues in the garden, as well.

Don’t know if I told you anything yet about the wedding. We kept it very small, so it was just I’s  father and step-mother (his mother died about 6 years ago) and sister, and my friends Rachel , Julian and his long-time woman friend. We wanted the children there, and they were looking forward to coming, but their mother had other ideas.

The ceremony was very sweet and very brief, about 10 minutes. The
registrar had a great sense of humour, so we were chuckling a lot. But
the actual words we said with such depth and in such a reality as I
have never known before.  We were in the registry office, but I definitely felt the movement of the Spirit shoot through me as we said our vows. It was pretty amazing.

Afterward we went for tea at a place called the Original Maids of Honour tea room, in Kew Road, directly across the road from one of the main entrances to Kew Gardens. The place has been there, in one form or another, since Henry VIII’s time, and ‘maids of honour’ are a pastry created  especially for the old libertine himself.  The current owner of the place inherited it from his father, who inherited from his father, and so on, since 1868.

The weather  was uncharacteristically sunny and warm for the afternoon. The goddesses and gods were smiling on us, I’m certain of it.

Things go well here. Got my passport stamped a few days after the
wedding, so I can work here;  so have been poring over ads and sending
out resumes. The only fly  in the ointment is, of course, I’s former
wife, who uses her children like clubs to try to manipulate him. The
only comfort I take is that someday they will be very angry with her
because she kept them from the wedding and is currently keeping them
from seeing him on any regular basis. She allows an hour here or there
on a Saturday .

The courts here are at least 25 years behind California courts, where they automatically would be granted joint custody, barring any verifiable reason that one parent should be in control. I see a court battle in the future, but not very soon. We must settle into a house big enough to have the children with us first.
–
Neither charm nor patience nor endurance has ever wrested power from those who hold it. — Frederick Douglass

As She Wanted It (after Death)

©2009, Ramona K Silipo. All rights reserved.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s a group of friends and acquaintances gathered annually on Christmas Eve. We decorated a tree, ate a fabulous feast, caught up –some of us saw each other only at this gathering– and told stories. Late in the evening, when the house was uncomfortably warm from all the bodies in activity, we stopped. We quietened. We gathered around a round table with a candle in the middle. Each of us lit a candle from the one on the table. Each of us remembered a friend who was not with us that night. Some of us spoke several names, others only one. But each person there had seen someone die that year.  The last year I attended, our group had shrunk from 14 or 15 to eight.

In that time, when AIDS was still a pandemic killer, I knew dozens of people –young and old and middle aged– who died of it. I saw so many die, said good-bye to so many, that I came to terms with death because I had to in order to survive in some sort emotionally capable state. I learned the power of mourning through the various stages of grief, and of allowing grief to consume me for a brief time, to emerge from it able to move forward. None of these are easy lessons, and I think many of us never allow ourselves to let go and wallow in grief when we need to do it. But with literally dozens of people I knew dying around me, I had to learn to deal with death.

So this year, when we had to deal with three family deaths in rapid succession, I was able to cope with the aftershock.

I have always, even with the deaths of my parents, found repugnant and a bit stomach-turning the common rituals after the event, with the expense and ostentation and superficiality of the typical church funeral.  So as a rule I do not go to funerals. A memorial gathering in a theatre, with shared memories and readings from plays or a few songs was about as far as I  go. My husband knows that I want no fuss and no expense when I go, just cremation and scattering the ashes around the rose bushes or wherever. I’ve said he might go as far as a Memorial Meeting for Worship, if he thinks people need it, but I’ll get back to him on that closer to the event.

Even so I hold in compassion and patience people who do believe in that sort of thing. There’s no denying that the pomp and religiosity of a typical funeral allows many people to grieve in a way they would not permit themselves to do under any other circumstances.

My husband’s sister died early in May. She had cancer for five years, and had gone through all the various treatments to extend her life. She had planned a full production number of a funeral, complete with matched black horses drawing a Victorian carriage with her polished casket inside it, songs she selected (including, I thought slightly perversely, Leaving on a Jet Plane), a huge limousine for the family, an official mourner in Victorian costume and a reception afterward with good eats. She took care of every detail. And as her brother’s wife, I attended the performance. Everything went off without a hitch; Sister would have been very pleased with the way her plans went off like clockwork.

I did not know Sister well. I’d been married to her brother for only six years, and I saw her perhaps four to six times a year, for lunch with the family. We were acquaintances who had been at family gatherings and shared pleasant conversations, enjoyed laughing together and exchanged gifts neither of us really wanted. We liked each other, but never had a meaningful conversation that lasted longer than three minutes. We were so very different we would probably never have met had I not been married to her brother.

But I watched her journey with more than a little admiration, as she pushed through the powerlessness, anger, frustration, struggle and fear, to acceptance. She ran a huge emotional and psychological gamut, with her good days and her bad days. But she lived well right up to the end, and she left people with fond memories and loving good-byes.

The only bone I would pick with her is over my husband’s children. There was a history there, in that my husband’s first wife had a habit of sending vile letters to people; and Sister did not want the children to know of her illness because she did not want to deal with any nastiness from her former sister-in-law. I understood this completely, having read some of the calumnies and attacks by Ex-wife in other contexts. But I felt strongly that the children had a right to know that their aunt was ill, and that they had a right to say good-bye to her.

My husband talked to his sister about the children’s visiting her many times during her illness and treatment, but she did not want to make herself vulnerable to unpleasant letters from the children’s mother. So my husband felt that he had to honour Sister’s wishes. Finally, when she knew that she had little time left, Sister wanted to see the children. My husband tried to arrange it, but Sister died before he could arrange it.

My husband’s dad, his only surviving parent, was gratified to see so many people in the church. So was my husband. The place was packed with people, hundreds of them, who knew Sister and needed to say good-bye to her. Her step-children and her husband were devastated, of course, and allowed themselves deep, wrenching weeping which would not be acceptable in any other context.  I think that’s the most you can expect from a funeral.

Oddly enough, the reception afterward gave me a chance to meet family members I hadn’t met before, and to talk with some whom I’d met only a year ago at Sister’s 50th birthday party. The reception had a lightness about it that Sister would have enjoyed, and virtually everyone commented that everything had been as she wanted it.

Driving home, I thought again how sad it was that the children did not get to say good-bye to their aunt, but I didn’t say anything about it. It had, in fact, been a pretty good day, all thing considered.

My objective is to write fiction that feels completely real –snapshots of life, fleeting moments of insight, unexpected realizations– that sort of thing. I hope you enjoy reading these brief stories.

Christmas Thoughts

The Women’s Insitutute (WI) published a small book in 2007, Practical Know-how at Christmas. Along with the hints, they included some timeless quotations about the holiday. Here are some of them:

Oh, for the good old days when people would stop Christmas shopping when they ran out of money.  (Anonymous)

Life is much like Christmas — you are more apt to get what you expect than what you want.  (Anonymous)

The Devil makes his Christmas pie of lawyers’ tongues. (English Proverb)

Q: Why is Christmas just like a day at the office?  A: You do all the work and the fat guy with the suit gets all the credit. (Anonymous)

To perceive Christmas through its wrapping becomes more difficult every year. (E. B. White)

Heap on the wood — the wind is chill; but let it whistle as it will. We’ll keep our Christmas merry still.  (Sir Walter Scott)

A Quaker Retreat Weekend

©2008, Ramona K. Silipo. All rights reserved.

One of the qualities of Friends that attracted me was spontaneity.  Another was the all-encompassing participatory nature of Quaker activities. It took me much of this weekend to realize that this was the reason I was so uncomfortable at the retreat; but I finally recognized that I was peculiarly disoriented because everything was completely staged. Speakers were appointed in advance and there was virtually no time for communal worship or quiet reflection at the beginning or end of the sessions. Everything seemed regulated and orchestrated to me.

I’ve been a Quaker in name for only eighteen years. That’s longer than many others I’ve met, but nothing compared to a lifetime of Quaker experience. I’ve been a member of only one unprogrammed meeting, and visited others. So I write with limited experience, but I’m fully aware that each meeting does things in its own way.

But isn’t it just the human condition that we are generally comfortable with what we know; that we have expectations based on previous experiences; and that we feel uneasy or irritated when our expectations are disappointed?

I was eagerly looking forward to this retreat, especially since my husband had never been to a Quaker retreat and I wanted to share the experience with him. So there I was at my first meeting retreat in England, trying to get into the swing of things. But I couldn’t. My expectations had been disappointed.

The meeting retreats I’ve known have been very different, almost completely spontaneous, with minimal necessary structure. The Retreat Committee made the actual practical arrangements of place, dates, etc., and developed the query for the retreat. They worked out the schedule, listed topics and assigned convenors for the sessions and small group discussions (the only pre-appointed people), from a list of volunteers who had signed up. Then they let everything flow from there.

These retreats were based on silent worship at the beginning of each session (usually about half an hour), followed by Quaker dialogue, when everyone in the circle had  the opportunity to speak (or pass). The numbers were not huge, varying over the years between about 35 and 70 participants (not including children, who had their own activities or child care).  Each person had ample opportunity to participate.

Small group sessions were set in separate rooms, so we could hear ourselves think and hear what others were saying, the groups discussing a “sub query” for an hour. For instance, one year the retreat query was, “How do we experience God in our day-to-day lives?” The sub-queries included one on whether we felt a personal relationship with Jesus and one for those who wanted to get outside and experience God in the natural world. At the end of the small group discussions, the groups came together again and the convenor (or a group member) gave a brief summary of their discussion.

Although this structure sounds similar to the retreat just ended, the key element was spontaneity. Nothing was planned other than the queries; everything else flowed  from the Spirit’s movement among us. I left that sort of retreat energized, invigorated, excited about Quaker life and Quaker process.

At Charney Manor, things seemed contrived; more intellectual activity and thought process than Spirit inspiration or leading. I left this retreat exhausted and left early because I simply couldn’t find it in myself to stick it any longer. Perhapsy this is all my own skewed perception and will change in time.

And I do not mean to say that the retreat didn’t go well. It went quite well, I think. Everything seemed to go pretty much as planned, with the few minor bumps that any gathering of this size and nature have. The planners obviously had everything well-organized. For me, the high point was the Saturday night sharing– music, poems, stories, things that were personal and important to those who were allowed to share. There were moments of Spirit that evening, and it made the retreat very worthwhile.

The Village in Summer

©2008, RKSilipo. All rights reserved.

Today I stepped out of the village shop and post office and was face to face with a horse. Three horses in fact. Here the kids ride horses, not bicycles, during summer vacation. The horses were smallish, not gorgeous quarter horses but sturdy farm horses. The girls mounted and rode off toward the village green with their snacks.

It’s hot here today; has been for several days. And humid. Yesterday was so bad I longed for Washington, D.C.’s national galleries and museums — air conditioned and free to get into. Anyone who doubts global warning has but to look at the weather here, in these islands, to see it in action. The winters used to be very cold, with snow, even in London and the West Country. The summers had a few hot days, but always punctuated liberally with overcast and rainy days. Not so any more. Last winter, we had one snow, of less than an inch. It disappeared within an hour. And we haven’t had any rain for over a week. This is not the weather of England that I knew thirty year ago when I first started visiting on a regular basis.

Wildflowers are blooming everywhere. Poppies, bright red-orange; Queen Anne’s lace, with its two-inch wide heads of hundreds of tiny white blossoms; purple thistles, many of which are already drying in the sun; deep pink wild geraniums; tiny yellow cowslips and sky blue bluets; and, of course, the hot yellow of ragweed. Wild roses line a lot of the roads here, with huge arching branches of single pink or white blossoms. And blackberries, the rose’s fruiting cousin, are starting to ripen.

In our garden, the snapdragons from last year threw seeds, so we have patches of yellow blooms in odd places. I put in about a hundred sweet pea seeds in April, and they just started to bloom about ten days ago. Roses, left by the previous owner, are blooming even though we didn’t bother to prune last winter. I’m of two minds about them. I hate to get rid of any plants, but these are so pathetic I often consider pulling them up and starting over with good bare root stock. We’ll see.

Lately we’ve had a nocturnal visitor. We leave the sliding glass door open at night for Joey to go in and out, and to let in cool air. The other night I heard the distinct tinkle of a bell and listened to it for several minutes. The next morning, my frying pan, left on the stove, had been licked clean of chicken gravy. This morning the salmon skin I left out had been eaten, along with all the vegetables on the plate. I’ve never seen a cat eat vegetables before. We can’t have a cat because I’m so allergic, but if this is a hungry, homeless cat, I don’t mind feeding it. When it starts to get cold, we’ll have to think of a place to put a warm sleeping box for it, but that’s several months off now.

Heart of England: Stratford-upon-Avon and Coventry

©2008, RKSilipo. All rights reserved.

At the end of May, my husband and I took a weekend trip to “Shakespeare country” It’s only about an hour and half’s drive, but we meandered a bit, took our time and enjoyed country roads with gorgeous vistas in every direction. The weather was hot, so we decided not to try to cram the weekend with activity.

We stopped at Coventry Cathedral on the way to Stratford-on-Avon. My husband had seen it when he was twelve years old and never forgot it, and he wanted to show it to me. I knew why the moment I saw it. This is the first modern cathedral I’ve ever seen that is what I think a cathedral should be. It is exquisite. The exterior is gorgeous red-tan sandstone. The way it’s designed the new cathedral is connected visually and literally to the old one that was bombed out during WWII, with a connecting bridge over a courtyard between the two building. The shell of the old cathedral is visible and you can go inside. It’s an eerie feeling; all that’s left is 3 walls. See: www.coventrycathedral.org

In the new cathedral, everything is bathed in light. Instead of the few usual big, darkly stained glass windows, there are hundreds of small windows in floor-to-ceiling fenestration all along both sides of the building. Light floods into it from all directions. The large, main stained glass work is glorious. It’s hundreds of small windows arranged in a patchwork of colours. You can’t see what it is until you get across the church from it, and then you see a sun in skies of all shades of blue from dark purple to the palest baby blue. Breathtaking!

The baptismal font is a sculpture carved into a giant boulder from Jerusalem. The sculptures in the cathedral are, of course, all modern. There’s a head of Christ by an artist in Oklahoma that is made entirely from the metal in crashed cars from a junkyard. I didn’t like the Christ face, far too white-Midwesterner-looking, but the concept of resurrection, of new from old, runs throughout all the sculptures. A lot of them are made from recycled or reused materials. The most amazing one is the main cross in the sanctuary. It’s a sculpture showing what the altar cross in the old cathedral looked like after the bombing, all twisted from the heat, but not broken. In the center of it, very small, is a cross made from 3 medieval nails, original to the old cathedral. it gave me chills. What a symbol of resurrection!

Coventry Cathedral is also a world center for reconciliation. After the war the then bishop went to Germany and offered forgiveness. Can you imagine? He went to Dresden, which was literally levelled by Allied bombs and the subsequent fires, a striking parallel to Coventry’s situation. He started a movement of reconciliation, and an organization called The Community of the Cross of Nails. They have an international center at the cathedral where conferences and courses are given for both clergy and lay people about fostering forgiveness and reconciliation. Now there are connected centers all over the world that practice reconciliation and charity. The cross made of the old nails is the logo for the organization. See: www.coventry-cathedral.org/international

There’s also a side chapel that is an interfaith meeting place. It’s round. The exterior is rich teal green slate and there are vertical windows, floor to ceiling, every few feet. The stained glass is in very light pastels to let in lots of light. The seats are in a circle, and there’s no altar. The brochure says it’s a place where all Christian denominations are welcome to worship together. They have a service once a week. I loved the chapel, but I wished it was for ALL religions, not just all Christian religions.

We went on to Stratford-upon-Avon and got to our bed and breakfast (B&B) at about 4:00. Driving in, I wouldn’t have recognized the place. I hadn’t been there since 1985. So much development is going on, there are hundreds of new buildings. We had a little rest and watched some news. Then we went out for a while.

We walked from the B&B first to dinner in a pub that was so old, the walls were leaning in. It’s structurally reinforced, so perfectly safe, and eating there, sitting in a room where Shakespeare could have sat, was fun. The food was heavy English food: cottage pie for my husband, and I had traditional Lancashire hot pot– a stew with beef, carrots, onions (in chunks, not sliced), parsnips and potatoes. They served it with greens and bread. It was much over salted for my taste, but I never salt anything at home, so it was probably fine for most people. Then I had a Southern Comfort for dessert. )

We walked off dinner by walking down (about a mile down and back) to the River Avon, window shopping and looking at restaurant menus on the way there; investigating the Royal Shakespeare Company site when we got to the river. We walked along the riverbank briefly, but it was just getting dark and those annoying midges were out and drove us crazy in about 30 seconds. Millions of those little things anywhere near water at dusk.

We took a slightly different route home. The center of Stratford is completely protected as a historical district, so the houses are tiny, with doors along the street that even I, at five-foot-four, would have to duck to get into. Many of the buildings have side entrances that are modern, but the facades are perfect Tudor half timbers. A lot of them lean in or out, or even side to side, but the effect is magical. It’s like stepping into a fairy story.

Of course the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (the RSC’s main house) is closed because they’re building the new theatre on top of, or rather inside, the old one, and it’s a huge construction site. But they’ve done a really smart thing. On the construction barrier walls around the site, they have put up the plans for the new theatre, pictures of how it will look, and regular updates on the process. There’s a whole history of the project posted on these walls. It’s fabulous. (See: www.rsc.org.uk)

Only the small, temporary theatre is open, called the Courtyard Theatre. It’s on the site where the Other Place used to be. They were doing A Midsummer Night’s Dream on the night we could go, and we weren’t in the mood.

On Saturday we slept in, then walked to Trinity Church, where the graves are. Will and Ann are under gravestones in the sanctuary, just in front of the original altar. (Their son, Hamnet, died in childhood. Their daughter lived to adulthood and married a very well-to-do doctor, so she’s buried next to him out in the churchyard. Their house is restored so you can tour it. )

The church was busier than I’ve ever seen it. When I’ve been before, there have been maybe half a dozen people there, but it was crawling on Saturday. So we didn’t linger very long. We did find a nice quiet side chapel where we sat and mediated for a few minutes. The graves are now cordoned off so you can’t get close enough to read the inscriptions. When I was last there, I stood right over them and read the famous “Curst be he who moves my bones..”

We stopped for tea on the way back to our B&B and had delicious pastries (my one extravagance for the day) with really good tea. Then Ewan went straight back to the B&B and I went to the shops to buy little things for dinner. We didn’t want to go out again that night. So I got steak and mushroom pies (actually rectangles of pastry with meat and mushrooms inside in a thick gravy) and Cornish pasties (shaped like giant pot stickers with meat and potatoes inside), apples and plums, and drinks. So we had a picnic on our bed, watched Dr. Who and some other TV and went to sleep early. It was good just to loll around.

Sunday, we got up early, packed up and left by ten , to go to Compton Verney, a fantastic gallery in a gorgeous family estate. It was bought a few years ago by Sir Peter Moores, a very rich businessmen, heir to a fortune and rich in his own right. The permanent collection is quite eccentric because he has eccentric taste in art, but the museum itself is absolutely best practice. They took a page out of the Met’s book and are really the most modern-thinking art museum I’ve seen here in England. See: www.comptonverney.org.uk

They have LOTS of beautifully, professionally produced educational materials, catalogues, a history of the estate and other supporting material. And they have activities every day to engage both children and adults in doing art as well as looking at it.

The galleries are well laid out with good light and temperature control, and the collections are arranged and displayed completely professionally. It was a pleasure to be there. The cafe has fantastic food and the service is amazingly good. The shop had many items based on the collection, and the general stuff is directly related to the activities and/or the collection– not a lot of junky, unrelated items as in most of the museum shops here. I was very impressed indeed.

The collections are, as I said, a bit odd. There’s a lot of medieval art from Europe, especially Italy, and very little English art, in the permanent collection. I’m not fond of medieval stuff, all the angels and saints and endless variations on the theme. But they have some wonderful, very suggestive still lifes, and a couple of saints that really glow.

The temporary exhibition was Giocometti, whom I detest, so we didn’t even go into that gallery.

There was also a performance art piece in progress the whole time we were there, but it was completely booked up so we didn’t get a chance to see the whole piece. It looked really wonderful, young dancer types in dark leggings, skirts or pants, with bright turquoise tops, standing and moving in various places throughout the museum and grounds; and mobiles of photos and miniature objects were part of it, and a video camera set up. As I say, it looked like fun, but it was booked up all day.

The stuff I enjoyed most was the folk art, which is on the top floor. It comprised everything from wonderfully bad paintings to pub signs to everyday tools and gadgets to quilts. There was one quilt that just knocked my socks off. It had patchwork, embroidery, crewel work and applique, all done by hand. It was a patriotic piece, commemorating some battle in 1898. It was a bit worn around the edges but otherwise in very good condition. The colours were much brighter than you’d expect in fabrics over a hundred years old.

The other patchwork was a set of pillows and a full length cushion on an old settee. The patchwork was definitely 19th century, but the settee was at least 17th if not even earlier. The cushions were an obvious effort to make the old bench more comfortable. The colours were natural undyed cotton with a pale orange that could have been from onion skins or possibly calendula petals to make the dye. The stitching was all by hand of course, as the stitches were UNIFORM. What skill the quilter had!

There were also some wonderful toys in the collection, whirly-gigs, a doll bed and a child-sized wheelbarrow, all hand carved. The paints were old and faded and badly chipped, but you could see that they were skillfully and fancifully done in very bright colours. Some of the kitchen gadgets defied even the curators as to what they were used for. A lot of the labels said, “believed to. . .” or “possibly for. . .” Great fun!

There were very few English paintings, but they are having a visiting exhibition of English art later this year, which we may go back and see. In June-September they’re having a special exhibition called The Fabric of Myth, all textiles, which I’m dying to see, so we’re planning to do that. It’s a little more than an hour’s drive, so it’s a doable day out.

Village Life: Miss Read’s People and Places

©RKSilipo. All rights reserved.

Summer is less than a month away, so I go to my book shelves and check that Miss Read is where I think she is, ready for my annual visits to Fairacre and Thrush Green. I re-visit Caxley as well, but not quite as often.

I love these books and cannot recommend them highly enough. They have grace, wit and insight into what makes village people tick.

I had enjoyed those five years — the children, the little school, the pleasure of running my own school-house and of taking a part in village life. . .

. . . at last, I believed, I was accepted, if not as a proper native, at least as ‘Miss Read up at the School’, and not as ‘that new woman pushing herself forward’!

That’s how, on the first page of her first book, Miss Read, whose real name is Dora Saint, sets the scene for Village School and all of the delicious novels of Fairacre that followed it.

In far too many places in England today, the agreeable habit of taking afternoon tea has vanished.

Much too fattening . . . Quite unneccesary . . .

Taking tea is a highly civilized pastime, and fortunately is still in favour at Thrush Green, where it has been brought to a fine art. It is common practice in that pleasant village to invite friends to tea rather than lunch or dinner. . .

. . . said Ella, who is fond of her food, ‘when else can you eat home-made gingerbread, all squishy with black treacle?’

Thus begins Gossip from Thrush Green, one of my favourites from Miss Read’s other village series.

These are novels of character and place. There are plots, simple, homely plots– well-meaning villagers match making (disastrously) for the single woman happy to be single; the disappearing lead from the church roof and similarly disappearing supplies from a building site; fires and blizzards and other natural and unnatural catastrophes and the ramifications thereof; a bit of adultery here, obfuscation there– all the stuff of village life in the England of the mid 20th century.

It’s the characters, however, that keep me re-reading the books every summer: Dotty’s Collywobbles, a health condition known only in Thrush Green, always makes me smile. Ella and Dimity, two dissimilar friends who bump along compatibly together until, well into middle age, Dimity falls in love with the local rector and starts a new life. Winnie Bailey, the sensible doctor’s widow. Ben Curdle, grandson of the late Mrs. Curdle, owner and iron-fist manager of the travelling carnival that visited the town annuallyfor years. Thrush Green is filled with characters that every village knows.

The same is true for Fairacre, where the stories are narrated by the village school teacher. These focus on the children and the children’s families — which is to say, the whole village — and on Miss Read’s contented single life.

The third series is the Caxley Chronicles, three books covering four generations of two families in the market town of Caxley. These stories are just as beautifully told, and the characters as defly defined, but the stories of village life always interested me more.

These books are beautifully written. When I’m reading one, I am driven to read out sentences to my husband, adding, “Isn’t that an amazing sentence? It flows, it…” We’re both writers and know a unique and skillful turn of phrase when we read one.

Some of the Miss Read books are still in print, and those that aren’t can still be found in second-hand book shops all over England. It’s harder to find them in the States, but these days you can use the internet to order books from all over the world. I recommend

www.greenmetroplis.com

http://powellbooks.com

http://pickabook.co.uk

I avoid Amazon because, by selling magazines that promote dog fighting, they advocate cruelty to animals. The Humane Society of the United States is involved in legal proceedings to get them to stop. In fact, Pickabook has prices that are sometimes lower than Amazon’s. And all paperbacks at Green Metropolis are £3.75.