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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.
