These literary quizzes ran (almost) monthly from 2000 to 2008.

Quiz topics: Christmas - Steam engines - Lovers - Gales - Eggs - Cricket - Floods - Parrots - Shops - Knights - Ghosts - Draughts - Angels - Snow - Letters - Insomniacs- Cheese- Horses - Ships -Dancers - Seashores - Swallows - Cars - Foxes - Schools - Dragons - Dust - Marches - Rabbits - Mirrors - Cooks - Dogs - Skylights- Cats - Tunnels - Colds - Stars - Kings - Bells - Queens - Mines & Potholes - Ticking Clocks - Snakes - Striking Clocks - Walls - Buttons - Graves - Stars 2 - Snails and Slugs - Lovers 2 - Gramophones - Nuns - Church Towers and Steeples - Paths & Roads - Drugs - Bridges - Bulls - Witches - Cakes & Biscuits - Stars 3 - Rivers - Moons- Battles - Blood - Demonstrations and Riots - WWII Aeroplanes - Stairs - Picnics - Telephones - Policemen - Owls - New Years - Handkerchiefs - Bicycles - Hairstyles - Doctors - False Teeth - Breakfast- Fire - Monkeys - Eyes in Mirrors - Spiders - Lions

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Underpants - Wind in Poetry - Song - Rain - Bridges - Facial Hair - Drinks - Sleep - Tea - Snow

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Literary Christmases: December 2000

1. The night before Christmas Eve I found my ward transformed into the gay semblance of a sixpenny bazaar, with Union Jacks, paper streamers, crinkled tissue lampshades and Christmas texts and greetings, all carried out in staggering shades of orange and vivid scarlet and brilliant green.

2. Forthwith their shrill little voices uprose on the air, singing one of the old-time carols that their fathers had composed in fields that were fallow and held by frost, or when snowbound in chimney corners, and handed down to be sung in the miry street to lamp-lit windows at Yule-time.

3. Jousted full jollily these gentle knights,
Sythen kayred to the court carols to make.
For there the feast was ilyche full fifteen days,
With all the meat and the mirth that men could devise.

4. A poor, bare, miserable room it was, with broken windows, no fire, ragged bed-clothes, a sick mother, wailing baby, and a group of pale, hungry children cuddled under one old quilt, trying to keep warm. ... ‘Ach, mein Gott! it is good angels come to us!’ said the poor woman, crying for joy.”

5. And well I knew the talk they had, the talk that was of me,
Of the shadow on the household and the son that went to sea;
And O the wicked fool I seemed, in every kind of way,
To be here and hauling frozen ropes on blessed Christmas Day.

Answers: 1. Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain, ch. V, “Camberwell vs Death”, 7 - Christmas in a First World War London hospital ward;
2. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame, ch. V, “Dulce Domum” - this is the field-mice singing to Ratty and Mole;
3. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, section I, stanza 3 (slightly mangled) - this jolly scene is about to be disrupted by the violent entry of the Green Knight;
4. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott, ch. II, “A Merry Christmas” - the girls and their mother have just taken their Christmas breakfast round to a poor immigrant family;
5. “Christmas at Sea”, R. L. Stevenson - the speaker is on a frozen sailing ship that’s being buffeted around in stormy seas below the cliffs of his home village, where he can see Christmas being celebrated in warm cottages, including his parents’.

Literary railway engines: Jan-Feb. 2001

1. Away once more into the day and through the day, with a shrill yell of exultation, roaring, rattling, tearing on, spurning everything with its dark breath, sometimes pausing for a moment where a crowd of faces are, that in a minute more are not, sometimes lapping water greedily, and before the spout at which it drinks has ceased to drip upon the ground, shrieking, roaring, rattling through the purple distance!

2. Edward was panting up behind with every ounce of steam he had. With great effort, he caught up, and crept alongside, slowly gaining till his smokebox was level with James’ buffer-beam.

3. There were two steam engines working near the bridge ... I read the engine numbers: 9387 and 9388. They were solid machines, their lines unflattering, with large tanks flanking and obscuring the curve of the boiler, but they were gorgeous. Each had a tall chimney, shaped like the stove-pipe hat worn by Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

4. The step was high, but she got her knee on to it, and clambered into the cab; she stumbled and fell on hands and knees on the base of the great heap of coals that led up to the square opening in the tender. The engine was not above the weaknesses of its fellows; it was making a great deal more noise than there was the slightest need for.

5. A headlight twinkled on the horizon like a star, grew to an overpowering blaze, and whooped up the humming track to the roaring music of a happy giant’s song. ... (He) had caught one glimpse of the superb six-wheel-coupled racing locomotive, ... laying the miles over his shoulder as a man peels a shaving from a soft board.

Answers: 1. Dombey & Son, Charles Dickens, ch. XX, “Mr Dombey goes upon a Journey”. The train reappears throughout the book, usually representing the dynamic but potentially destructive forces of modernity. It will in fact cause a death later.
2. Edward the Blue Engine: Old Iron, Rev. W. Awdry, orig. Book 9.
3. The Railway Man, chapter 1, Eric Lomax. The author has just discovered the love of his life, on 12th September 1932, in the Portobello Goods Yard, Edinburgh. His enthusiasm for railways leads to torture by the wartime Japanese.
4. The Railway Children, E. Nesbit, ch. IV, “The Engine-Burglar”; Bobbie is climbing into the cab of the engine to ask the driver to mend Peter's toy engine but the train starts off with her still aboard. "'We ain't so much cross,' said the fireman, 'as interested like.'"
5. “.007” from The Day’s Work, Rudyard Kipling. .007 is a new locomotive being terribly impressed by the millionaires' south-bound express, the Purple Emperor. Also featured in the collection of stories are ships, horses and bridge-builders.

[They all ended up being steam engines because I couldn’t find anything interesting about diesel engines. The song Kipling gives the Purple Emperor to roar goes:

“With a michnai - gighnai - shtingal! Yah! Yah! Yah!
Eins - zwei - drei - Mutter! Yah! Yah! Yah!
She climbed upon der shteeple And she frighten all der people,
Singin’ michnai - gighnai - shtingal! Yah! Yah! Yah!”

If anyone can tell me what the words in the first line mean, I'd be grateful! ]

Literary Lovers: Feb.-March 2001

1. (She) ... now forced herself to speak; and immediately, though not very fluently, gave him to understand, that her sentiments had undergone so material a change since the period to which he alluded, as to make her receive, with gratitude and pleasure, his present assurances. The happiness which this reply produced, was such as he had probably never felt before; and he expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do.

2. I rushed out into the water and shouted at the top of my voice: "I’m here!" She came back. She had lost hold of her spar and floated helplessly on her back with her legs in the air. I did not bat an eyelid before the black wall of water. I caught the shipwrecked beauty in my arms, and the next second I was swept off my feet in the boiling surf ... and at last I laid my sweet burden on the beach, safe from the wild and cruel sea! ... Suddenly she sat up and cried: "Save my handbag! Oh, save my handbag!"

3. Well, praised be to the gods for thy foulness! sluttishness may come hereafter. But be it as it may, I will marry thee.

4. He rose upright in the stirrups. He scarce could reach her hand,
But she loosened her hair in the casement. His face burned like a brand
As that black cascade of perfume came tumbling over his breast;
And he kissed its waves in the moonlight,
(O, sweet black waves in the moonlight!)
Then he tugged at his rein in the moonlight, and galloped away to the west.

5. When will you marry me Ethel he uttered you must be my wife it has come to that I love you so intensly that if you say no I shall perforce dash my body to the brink of yon muddy river he panted wildly. Oh dont do that implored Ethel breathing rarther hard. Then say you love me he cried. Oh Bernard she sighed fervently I certinly love you madly you are to me like a Heathen god she cried looking at his manly form and handsome flashing face I will indeed marry you.

Answers: 1. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen, ch. 58: Elizabeth Bennett and Mr Darcy;
2. The Exploits of Moominpappa, Tove Jansen, ch. VIII: Moominpappa meets Moominmamma: (she’s actually still holding her handbag);
3. As You Like It, William Shakespeare, Act III, sc. 3: Touchstone to Audrey (Derek Jacobi and Anthony Hopkins, respectively, played these parts in the 1967 all-male production at the National Theatre);
4. “The Highwayman”*, Alfred Noyes, Part I, v.6: the Highwayman and Bess the landlord’s daughter.
5. The Young Visiters**, Daisy Ashford, ch. 9, “A Proposale”: Bernard Clark and Ethel Monticue.

*“The Highwayman,” the dramatic story of how Bess bravely and resourcefully warns her highwayman lover about a military ambush at the cost of her own life, was written by Alfred Noyes at the age of 24, and published in Forty Singing Seamen and Other Poems in 1907. It’s been described as “the best narrative poem in existence for oral delivery”. I can see Tim Burton doing something with it, with Johnny Depp as the Highwayman and Christopher Walken as Tim the Ostler. Obvious nominee for Bess, the landlord’s black-eyed daughter, is Catherine Zeta Jones. You can hear Alfred Noyes reading the whole poem himself in 1929 on the British Library CD "The Spoken Word - Poets", available from The Book Case at £9.95 plus postage.

Alternatively, if you wanted a rich source of the effective use of simile, metaphor, repetition, partial repetition, onomatopoeic rhythm and more, look no further! It is, of course, in The Nation’s Favourite Poems.

**The Young Visiters was written in an exercise book in 1890 by Daisy Ashford at the age of nine and published with an introduction by J M Barrie in 1919. The story begins with Mr Salteena, “an elderly man of 42” and Ethel Monticue “quite a young girl ... of 17” being invited to stay with the excitingly rich Bernard Clark. Throughout the book Mr Salteena tries to raise himself in the social scale while Ethel and Bernard work up to the passage quoted.

It was televised with Tracey Ullmann, and the most recent edition (Chatto) was illustrated by Posy Simmonds. The book is the source of the words “I am not quite a gentleman but you would hardly notice but it cant be helped anyhow” and “people who have got something funny in their family and who want to be less mere”. It's just become available again.

Literary gales: March-April 2001

1. The shutters were bulging as if tired elephants were leaning against them, and Father was trying to tie the fastening with that handkerchief. But to push against this wind was like pushing against rock. The handkerchief, shutters, everything burst: the rain poured in like the sea into a sinking ship, the wind occupied the room, snatching pictures from the wall, sweeping the table bare. ... The creepers ... now streamed up into the sky like new-combed hair. Bushes were lying flat, laid back on the ground as close as a rabbit lays back his ears. Branches were leaping about loose in the sky. The negro huts were clean gone.

2. ... it seemed hours before he got them the shelter of the Hundred Acre Wood and they stood up straight again, to listen, a little nervously, to the roaring of the gale among the tree-tops.

3. It unveiled for a sinister, fluttering moment a ragged mass of clouds hanging low, the lurch of the long outlines of the ship, the black figures of men caught on the bridge, heads forward, as if petrified in the act of butting ... and then the real thing came at last. It was something formidable and swift, like the sudden smashing of a vial of wrath. It seemed to explode all round the ship with an overpowering concussion and a rush of great waters. ... In an instant the men lost touch of each other.

4. Cautiously he opened the door, felt it leap as the wind smote it. And wrestled it closed. A fan of snow across his kitchen floor, his naked footprint in it. Every window in the house rattled, and outside a cacophony of rolling buckets, slapping rope, snapping tarpaulins against the roar. The wires between his house and the utilities keened discordancies that made his scalp crawl.

5. ... it came on to blow, harder and harder ... until our horses could scarcely face the wind ...; we were often in serious apprehension that the coach would be blown over. ... We came to Ipswich - very late, having had to fight every inch of ground ... and found a cluster of people in the market-place, who had risen from their beds in the night, fearful of falling chimneys.

Answers: West Indies, Sussex, East China Sea, Newfoundland, East Anglia:

1. A High Wind in Jamaica, Richard Hughes, ch.1.iv. The roof soon goes too and the English Thornton family scramble through the broken floor to safety in the cellar with their black servants and the goats. The children are not much perturbed (except about a missing cat) but their parents decide they've been traumatised and send them to England; however, they are accidentally captured by pirates on the way ...

2. The House at Pooh Corner, A.A. Milne, ch. viii, “In which Piglet does a very grand thing”. Owl's tree is about to be blown down, and Piglet is hauled up with string to squeeze through the letterbox and get help.

3. Typhoon, Joseph Conrad, ch.III. Captain MacWhirr has decided against all conventional wisdom to drive the Nan-shan with its cargo of returning Chinese labourers straight through the typhoon.

4. The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx, ch. 38, “The sled-dog driver’s dream”. This is Billy Pretty who's just lost his electricity. Meanwhile the cables are going on Quoyle's house.

5. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens, ch. LV, “Tempest”: David is hurrying to Yarmouth with a farewell letter from Emily to Ham. He's about to see both Ham and Steerforth drown following the offshore shipwreck.

Surprisingly, people had most trouble with the Annie Proulx quotation. One contestant guessed the Conrad without having read the book because she recognised the way the quotation annoyed her!

Literary eggs: April - May 2001

1. “Mrs. Bates, let me propose your venturing on one of these eggs. An egg boiled very soft is not unwholesome. Serle understands boiling an egg better than anybody. I would not recommend an egg boiled by anybody else; but you need not be afraid - they are very small, you see - one of our small eggs will not hurt you.”

2. For the egg was now red-hot, and inside it something was moving. Next moment there was a soft cracking sound; the egg burst in two, and out of it came a flame-coloured bird. It rested a moment among the flames, and as it rested there the four children could see it growing bigger and bigger under their eyes. ... The bird rose in its nest of fire, stretched its wings, and flew out into the room. It flew round and round, and round again, and where it passed the air was warm. Then it perched on the fender.

3. ... looking about him confusedly, (he) saw the image of himself, which had come nearer.The next moment he saw it dolorously bespattered with eggs. ... “Buffoonery, tricks, ridicule the test of truth - all that is very well.” Here an unpleasant egg broke on (his) shoulder ...; then came a hail of eggs, chiefly aimed at the image, but occasionally hitting the original, as if by chance.

4. (He) was sitting with his legs crossed, like a Turk, on the top of a high wall ... and, as his eyes were steadily fixed in the opposite direction, and he didn’t take the least notice of her, she thought he must be a stuffed figure after all. “And how exactly like an egg he is!” she said aloud, standing with her hands ready to catch him, for she was every moment expecting him to fall. “It’s very provoking,” (he) said after a long silence, looking away from (her) as he spoke, “to be called an egg - very!”

5. (He) lowered the egg beneath the foamy surface, and opened it ... and this time, it did not wail. A gurgling song was coming out of it, a song whose words he couldn’t distinguish through the water.

Answers: 1. Emma, Jane Austen, Mr. Woodhouse in ch. 3. Emma’s father, anxious at anyone’s eating more than thin gruel, is addressing Miss Bates’s ancient mother;

2. The Phoenix and the Carpet, E. Nesbit, ch. 1, “The Egg”. The children have recently and accidentally set fire to their carpet, which is replaced by a second-hand one, which happens to have a golden egg rolled up in it - which egg Robert has just knocked into the fire while attempting to do magic with chanting and a tea-cloth. The bird is of course the Phoenix. This book, by the incomparable E. Nesbit, follows Five Children and It;

3. Middlemarch, George Eliot, Book V, chapter LI. Dorothea’s uncle Mr. Brooke is standing for Parliament but he is neither articulate nor popular. The actor Robert Hardy was actually bombarded with eggs while shooting this scene for the excellent television series;

4. Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll, ch. VI, “Humpty-Dumpty”. Which is of course who this is, a highly original thinker on the meanings of words and the arrangement of faces though abrupt in his manners.

5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J. K. Rowling, ch. 25, “The Egg and the Eye”. Harry’s running late on solving the second task and is in the Prefects’ enormous and sumptuous bath being helped by Moaning Myrtle, the glum ghost from the girls’ toilets.

Literary cricket matches: May - June 2001

1. The first ball of the over Jack steps out and meets, swiping with all his force. If he had only allowed for the twist! But he hasn’t and so the ball goes spinning straight up in the air as if it would never come down again. Away runs Jack, shouting and trusting to the chapter of accidents; but the bowler runs steadily under it, judging every spin, and calling out, ‘I have it,’ catches it, and playfully pitches it onto the back of the stalwart Jack.

2. 'That was a six, scorer!' he yelled, just as Ellis next to him was catching the return from deep mid-wicket. The blast in his ear made him drop the ball. Adrian picked it up for him. ‘Try and get them to bounce on the ground first,’ he said helpfully. ‘That way it’s harder for the batsman to hit quite so far.’

3. Ten to make and the match to win -
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.

4. With five minutes to go, (he) watched the first ball of the over come skimming down towards him. It was a beauty. It was jam. He smote it as Saul smote the Philistines. It soared away in a splendid parabola, struck the pavilion roof with a noise like the crack of doom, rattled down the galvanised iron roofing, bounced into the enclosure where the scorers were sitting, and broke a bottle of lemonade. The match was won.

5. The next ball was very slow and crafty, endowed as it was with every iota of fingerspin and brain-power which a long-term rate-collector could muster. In addition, it was delivered at the extreme end of the crease so as to secure a background of dark laurels, instead of a dazzling white screen, and it swung a little in the air; a few minutes later, the urchins, by this time delirious with ecstasy, were fishing it out of the squire’s trout stream with a bamboo pole and an old bucket.

Answers: Two public schools and one ex-, one prep school and an all-comers' village match. Cricket was once an English metaphor for correct behaviour in life (1. & 3.) and British writers are particularly good at using behaviour on the pitch as an illustration of character.

1. Tom Brown’s School-Days, Thomas Hughes, part II, ch. viii, “Tom Brown’s Last Match”. Rugby are playing a prestigious match against a superior team from Marylebone. Husky, popular Jack Raggles gets his come-uppance while the captain of the team, Tom Brown, now 19 and a strapping six-footer "with ruddy, tanned face and whiskers, curly brown hair, and a laughing, dancing eye", discusses with "a master" (Hughes) the noble British institution of cricket ("he doesn't play that he may win, but that his side may") and the merits of an education at Rugby under Arnold. The team lose gloriously, another great British tradition.

2. The Liar, Stephen Fry, ch. 9, iii; the main character Adrian, currently teaching at a prep school, is psyching out the opposing side's young star leg-spinner, Ellis - who is too well-mannered for his own good.

3. “Vitai Lampada”, Sir Henry Newbolt. Published in his 1908 collection Clifton Chapel, and described by my Cambridge Guide to English Literature as "repellent", this poem is famous for its refrain of "Play up! play up! and play the game!" and was extremely popular in its day. It demonstrates how a correct attitude to cricket can in later life be the saving of a half-massacred regiment engaged in desert warfare.

4. Murder Must Advertise, Dorothy Sayers, ch. xviii, “Unexpected Conclusion of a Cricket Match”. Gentleman-detective Lord Peter Wimsey, working incognito at an advertising agency, nearly blows his cover by going into "Wimsey of Balliol" batting mode. The whole match is very entertaining even if incomprehensible to the likes of me: "The next he clouted to leg for three, nearly braining square-leg and so flummoxing deep-field that he flung it back wildly to the wrong end, giving the Pymmites a fourth for an overthrow."

5. England their England, A. G. MacDonell, ch. 7. One of the most well-remembered English village cricket-matches was written by a Scottish journalist, whose satirical account of his hosts was published to great acclaim in 1933. Especially memorable is the terrifying blacksmith who savagely hits the last ball so high that it takes over three pages to come down.

Literary floods: June-July 2001

1. And without a moment’s shudder of fear, she plunged through the water, which was rising fast to her knees, and by the glimmering light of the candle she had left on the stairs, she mounted onto the window-sill and crept into the boat, which was left with the prow lodging and protruding through the window.

2. It rained and it rained and it rained. ... And he imagined himself with X, saying "Did you ever see such rain, X?" and X saying, "Isn’t it awful ...?" It would have been jolly to talk like this, and really, it wasn’t much good having anything exciting like floods, if you couldn’t share them with somebody.

3. In the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.

4. The man at the gate said the river was rising fast, and he feared it would be a bad night. Many of the meadows were under water, and in one low part of the road the water was halfway up to my knees; the bottom was good, and master drove gently, so it was no matter.

5. And over all, the bells tumbled and wrangled, shouting their alarm across the country ... awake! make haste! save yourselves! The deep waters have gone over us! They call with the noise of the cataracts!

Answers:

1. Mill on the Floss, George Eliot, Book 7, ch. 5 “The last conflict”. Maggie Tulliver's despair is interrupted by the sudden crashing of a boat through the window which the flooding river has now reached. The boat is soon swept away with Maggie in it and she rows with difficulty to the ruined mill to rescue her estranged brother Tom ... It's not a cheerful book.

2. Winnie the Pooh, A. A. Milne, ch. 19 “In which Piglet is entirely surrounded by water”. "X" is Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet is beginning to feel lonely.

3. Genesis, ch. 7, v. 11-12. King James version of Noah's Flood.

4. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell, ch. XII “A stormy day”. By the time Squire Gordon and John Manly start their return journey in the dog-cart, the wooden bridge has broken beneath the flood and it is only the horse's sixth sense that saves the party.

5. The Nine Tailors, Dorothy Sayers, last section, first part, “The waters are called home". This flood is the stirring conclusion of the 1934 campanological Wimsey novel, recently released on BBC audiocassette, and it allows the (sympathetic) murderer to escape the gallows. The bells are called Gaude, Sabaoth, John, Jericho, Jubilee, Dimity, Batty Thomas and Tailor Paul, and the reader knows them well by the end of the book. In Women's Writing in English, Britain 1900-1945, Anthea Trodd points out that Dorothy Sayers's flood is reminiscent of the one in Constance Holme's The Lonely Plough, 1914.

Literary parrots: July-August 2001

1. But one day he began to do acrobatic tricks on the beams in the kitchen and fell into a pot of stew with a sailor’s shout of everyone for himself, and with such good luck that the cook managed to scoop him out with a ladle, scalded and deplumed but still alive.

2. Oxen and wain-ropes would not draw me back to that accursed island; and the worst dreams I ever have are when I hear the surf booming about its coasts, or start upright in bed, with the sharp voice of Captain Flint still ringing in my ears: “Pieces of eight! pieces of eight!”

3. When she exhaled her last breath, she thought she saw in the half-opened heavens a gigantic parrot hovering above her head.

4. The green parrot, perched on the edge of the cabin table, was trying to bite off the head of a little jade image of Buddha that Captain Flint had bought in Hong Kong. “Go ahead, Polly,’”said Captain Flint, “smash it up.” “Pretty Polly,” said the parrot, and holding the idol in one claw, twisted at it with its strong curved beak.

5. Our parrot was called Coco, a green parrot. He didn’t talk very well, he could say Qui est la? Qui est la? and answer himself Che Coco, Che Coco. After Mr Mason clipped his wings he grew very bad-tempered, and though he would sit quietly on my mother’s shoulder, he darted out at everyone who came near him and pecked their feet.

Answers:

1. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, first section. The parrot causes the death of Fermina's husband Doctor Urbino.

2. Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson, final paragraph. Long John Silver's (female) parrot, estimated to be 200 years old, is named Captain Flint after the buccaneer "and if anybody's seen more wickedness, it must be the devil himself."

3. A Simple Soul, Gustav Flaubert, final words. The simple, kindly maidservant Felicite in her loneliness confuses the parrot Loulou with the Holy Ghost and maintains her devotion even after it dies, is stuffed and becomes moth-eaten.

4. Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome, ch. 25, “Captain Flint Gets the Black Spot”. The Amazons' well-travelled Uncle Jim, aka Captain Flint, has just had his houseboat ransacked and burgled and all his exotic mementoes strewn around. The young, male parrot Polly manages to get the head off the jade Buddha. He's later given to Titty, the third of the Swallows, and says "Pieces of Eight", which makes up the third reference to Treasure Island.

5. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys, Part I. More memorable (but too upsetting to use in a quiz) is the passage when the parrot, unable to fly, falls in flames from the burning house, like Bertha Rochester herself.

Literary Shops: August-September 2001

1. Sometimes people would stay long after the shop was closed. ‘They don’t mind a bit at Shalford’s,’ these ladies used to say, and while they loitered, it was forbidden to touch a wrapper or take any measures to conclude the day until the doors closed behind them. Mr Kipps would watch these later customers from the shadow of a stack of goods, and death and disfigurement was the least he wished for them.

2. The last shop was narrow and shabby. Peeling gold letters over the door read Ollivanders: Makers of Fine Wands since 382BC. A single wand lay on a faded purple cushion in the dusty window.

3. We reached Mr Ormerod’s shop and stopped outside the window. the display had been the same for years, a huge cardboard cut-out of a Marmite jar dominated the space, bleached on one side where the sun had caught it, the Player’s Capstan Cigarette display behind it, featuring a saturnine sailor’s face in the centre of a lifebelt. A few days earlier, Anita had told me that this sailor was in fact her father.

4. Mr Grinder kept a shop in the Bethnal Green Road. It was announced in brilliant lettering as an ‘oil, colour and Italian warehouse’ and there ... he sold pots, pans, kettles, brooms, shovels, mops, lamps, nails and treacle. It was a shop too tight for its stock, which burst forth upon at every available opening, and heaped so high upon the paving that the window was half buried in a bank of shining tin.

5. But Miss Phebe, who did not consider it quite maidenly to go and stand close to Mr Preston, and survey the shelves of books in such close proximity to a gentleman, found herself an errand at the other end of the shop, and occupied herself in buying writing-paper.

Answers:

1. Kipps, H. G. Wells, ch. 2/2, “The Emporium”. Kipps is apprenticed at 14 to Mr Shalford of the Folkestone Drapery Bazaar. The shop closes at 7.30pm, he gets his supper around 9pm and the dormitory lights go out at 11pm. You can see he would resent having his evening further eaten into. Part of the book was adapted into the musical Half a Sixpence with Tommy Steele.

2. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone - J. K. Rowling, ch. 5, “Diagon Alley”. Harry's personal wand, holly and phoenix feather, 11", is the twin of the one which in Voldemort's hands gave Harry his scar. This has interesting consequences in Book 4.

3. Anita and Me, Meera Syal, ch. 1. Winner of a 1996 Betty Trask Award. This "confidence" marks the beginning of Meena's enthralment to the dreaded Anita.

4. A Child of the Jago, 1896, Arthur Morrison, ch. 18. Working at this shop is Dicky's one chance to escape from his poverty-stricken and crime-ridden East London upbringing. The author was an East Londoner himself, and worked as a journalist.

5. Wives and Daughters, 1864-6, Elizabeth Gaskell, ch. XLVI, “Hollingford Gossips". This gives Molly a chance to hand over Cynthia's notes to the ungentlemanly Mr Preston - unfortunately under the fascinated gaze of scandal-mongering Mrs Goodenough. There was recently an excellent television series of the book.

Literary Knights: September-October 2001

1. When Peredur signalled with his hand that they should begin the knight charged, but Peredur stood fast and did not move. Then Peredur gave the spurs to his horse and made a ferocious attack, sharp and terrible, proud and eager, and struck a poisonous-sharp, bitter-severe, warrior-like blow under the helmet, lifting his opponent out of the saddle and throwing him a great distance away.

2. All in the blue unclouded weather
Thick-jewell’d shone the saddle-leather,
The helmet and the helmet-feather
Burn’d like one burning flame together,
As he rode down to Camelot.

3. Sir Brian had a pair of boots with great big spurs on,
A fighting pair of which he was particularly fond.
On Tuesday and on Friday, just to make the street look tidy,
He’d collect the passing villagers and kick them in the pond.

4. ... there was a knight in full armour, standing still and silent and unearthly, among the majestic trunks. He was mounted on an enormous white horse that stood as rapt as its master, and he carried in his right hand, with its butt resting on the stirrup, a high, smooth jousting lance, that stood up among the tree stumps, higher and higher, till it was outlined against the velvet. All was moonlight, all silver, too beautiful to describe.

5. “Now one can breathe more easily,” said the Knight, putting back his shaggy hair with both hands, and turning his gentle face and large mild eyes to (her). ... He was dressed in tin armour, which seemed to fit him very badly, and he had a queer-shaped little deal box fastened across his shoulders, upside-down, and with the lid hanging open.

Answers:

1. Peredur in the story “Peredur Son of Evrawg” from The Mabinogion, trans. Jeffrey Gantz (Penguin). It's thought that "Peredur" is an earlier form of "Perceval". Peredur, poor but ambitious, brave and strong, sets out to become a knight for King Arthur, fighting, punishing bad behaviour and rescuing damsels in distress as he goes. The Mabinogion is a composite title for eleven medieval Welsh prose tales which grew from centuries of oral story-telling.

2. Sir Lancelot in “The Lady of Shalott” Part III, Alfred Lord Tennyson. His appearance prompts the Lady of Shalott to abandon her magic weaving and opt for the real world - which of course kills her. The work was voted the Nation's Second Favourite Poem. Apparently the first two lines are recommended as a mantra.

3. “Bad Sir Brian Botany” in When We Were Very Young, A. A. Milne. Finally the exasperated villagers steal his weapons and throw him in the pond.

4. First sight of King Pellinore in The Sword in the Stone, T. H. White, ch. II. The Wart gives him the fright of his life by enquiring the way back to Sir Ector's Castle. He's a Wodehousian character given to saying "What, what?" and pursuing the Questing Beast. The Sword in the Stone bears very little resemblance to the Disney version and is the first of the four books making up the wonderful, inventive and moving Arthurian cycle The Once and Future King.

5. The White Knight in Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll, ch. VIII, “It’s my own invention”. He's an eccentric, incompetent, well-meaning character who has trouble staying on his horse. On his first appearance in the book as a chess piece, Alice notices he balances very badly on the poker. Some say he is a self-portrait of the author.

Literary Ghosts: October-November 2001

1. ... I encountered a little boy with a sheep and two lambs before him; he was crying terribly. ... “What is the matter, my little man?” I asked. “They’s Heathcliff and a woman, yonder, under t’ Nab,” he blubbered, “Un’ Aw dawnut pass ‘em.” I saw nothing; but neither the sheep nor he would go on, so I bid him take the road lower down.

2. He seized his left ear and pulled. His whole head swung off his neck and fell onto his shoulder as if it was on a hinge. Someone had obviously tried to behead him, but not done it properly.

3. "Peace, break thee off. Look where it comes again.”
“In the same figure like the king that’s dead.”
“Thou are a scholar, speak to it, Horatio.”.

4. The bells ... were succeeded by a clanking noise; as if some person were dragging a chain over the casks in the wine-merchant’s cellar. ... The cellar-door flew open with a booming sound, and then he heard the noise much louder, on the floors below; then coming up the stairs; then coming straight towards his door.

5. ... there, advancing from the door of the powdering room, a figure in doublet and hose, a ruff round its neck - and no head! The head, sure enough, was there; but it was under the right arm, held close in the slashed-velvet sleeve of the doublet. The face looking from under the arm wore a pleasant smile. Both boys, I am sorry to say, screamed. The American fired again.

Answers:

1. Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, Vol. II, Ch. XX. Nelly Dean is half-inclined to believe the local people's stories of Heathcliff and Cathy walking, but rational Lockwood closes the novel with his disbelief, wondering "how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth". So dramatic is the change in mood brought about in the Haworth moorland landscape by alterations in weather and light that both beliefs seem equally valid.

2. J K Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Ch. 7 “The Sorting Hat”. Nearly Headless Nick, who prefers to be known as Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington, is introducing himself to the new Gryffindors.

3. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act. I, Sc. 1. The Sentinels have seen the ghost twice before and have now invited Hamlet's friend Horatio along to corroborate their story and find out what it wants. Ghosts cannot speak until spoken to, and they want an educated man to do the speaking for fear of offending it, which could be dangerous.

4. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, Stave 1: Marley’s Ghost. Sceptical Scrooge's ex-partner Jacob Marley is coming to warn him of the error of his ways.

5. E. Nesbit, The Enchanted Castle, Ch.XI. Mabel has magicked up the ghost of Sir Rupert, to convince American millionaire Jefferson D. Conway to rent the castle and solve Lord Yalding's financial problems, but Sir Rupert is too realistic and Mr Conway departs on the early train. I personally was terrified as a child by this ghost, which for some reason I expected to materialise in the girls' toilets at school. The pleasant smile was particularly upsetting. The book, which stands alone, is wonderfully inventive and also includes walking statues of dinosaurs and the nightmarish Ugly-Wuglies, made of old clothes, umbrellas and hockey sticks. Noel Coward was reading it when he died, and J B Priestley was also keen on it.

For an appreciative article on E. Nesbit by Gore Vidal go to http://www.nybooks.com/articles/13132

Literary Draughts: November-December 2001

1. “Charity, dear Miss Prism, charity! None of us are perfect. I myself am peculiarly susceptible to draughts.”

2. And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor.

3. "That young man ... is very thoughtless. Do not tell his father, but that young man is not quite the thing. He has been opening the doors very often this evening and keeping them open very inconsiderately. He does not think of the draught. I do not mean to set you against him, but indeed he is not quite the thing."

4. He was not sure where the air was coming from, but towards the upper end of their space there was something breathable. He periodically changed places with Jack so that they could share it. He imagined some vent or pipe from the surface had been bent over by one of the explosions and was still delivering a small but vital current of air. It was the darkness that worried him most.

5. She looked round the room. The window curtains seemed in motion. It could be nothing but the violence of the wind penetrating through the divisions of the shutters; and she stepped boldly forward, carelessly humming a tune, to assure herself of its being so, peeped courageously behind each curtain, saw nothing on either low window seat to scare her, and on placing a hand against a shutter, felt the strongest conviction of the wind’s force.

Answers

1. The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde, Canon Chasuble in Act 2. Miss Prism has been self-righteous about the sudden death, at the Grand Hotel in Paris, from a severe chill, of Jack's fictitious dissolute younger brother Ernest.

2. John Keats, “The Eve of St. Agnes”, verse XL. Lots of bad weather in this poem; it starts with bitter cold as Madeline prepares for the amorous dreams of St Agnes' Eve, then turns to wind and sleet as she elopes with her lover Porphyro. Airborne rugs must be less common these days of draught-proofing and fitted carpets but our landing carpet used to ripple in the wind on Portland in the late 1950s. Anyone out there got a twenty-first century flying carpet?

3. Emma, Jane Austen, Mr. Woodhouse in ch.11. Frank Churchill has been experimenting with making more space available for dancing.

4. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks, Part Six, “France 1918”. This draught is life-saving for Stephen who has been trapped underground with sapper Jack in a small space behind a massive rockfall that has blocked their return to the trenches.

5. Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen, ch. 21. Young Catherine Morland has arrived at the Tilney's Abbey, expecting terrible Gothic goings-on. The moving curtains prove to be non-supernatural, but she soon manages to scare herself by finding a roll of paper in a cupboard, accidentally extinguishing her candle, and hearing some distant footsteps.

Literary Angels: December 2001-January 2002

1. Him the Almighty Power hurld headlong flaming from th’Ethereal Skie with hideous ruin and combustion down to bottomless perdition ...

2. “ ... when I was a little child ... the children that I used to see early in the morning were very different from any others that I ever saw. ... Such numbers of them too! All in white dresses and with something shining on the borders and on their heads ... They used to come down in long bright slanting rows and say all together, ‘Who is this in pain? Who is this in pain?’ ...they swept about me and took me up and made me light.”

3. And by came an Angel, who had a bright key,
And he open’d the coffins and set them all free;
Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing, they run,
And wash in a river, and shine in the Sun.

4. ... and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

5. They turned. Their great wings beat inwards, slowing them, and their bodies swung downwards until they stood upright in the air, holding their position by the beating of their wings. They surrounded her, five huge forms glowing in the dark air, lit by an invisible sun.

Answers:
The angels that spring most readily to mind at this time of year are those of the Nativity. However the ones below are military in nature (1, 4 and 5) while those in 2 and 3 are trying to console deprived and exploited English children of the 18th and 19th centuries, supernatural help being all they were likely to get. The idea of Guardian Angels has been undergoing a revival over the last few years, from the numbers of books and cards bought on the subject.

1. Paradise Lost (1667-74), John Milton, Book I. This of course is Satan, previously Lucifer, the brightest of all the angels, whose rebellion against God was violently crushed. The story is re-visited in Philip Pullman's trilogy for older children "His Dark Materials" (see 5.).

2. Our Mutual Friend (1864-5), Charles Dickens, Jenny Wren in Book 2, ch. II “Still educational”. Lizzie Hexham is lodging with the poor, stunted and crippled but bossy little Doll's Dressmaker, aka Fanny Cleaver, who also has to put up with an alcoholic father. She's telling Lizzy and Eugene Wrayburn (who is bored) about the imaginary flowers and birds that keep her company, and the angelic visitations of her childhood who made up for the children who mocked her.

3. “The Chimney Sweeper” in Songs of Innocence (1789), William Blake. Little sweep Tom Dacre cries when his head is shaved but is consoled by a divine vision in which all the blackened and imprisoned little sweeping boys are liberated. In Songs of Experience, the sweeping boy comments satirically on how his Christian parents believe that because he is cheerful, they have done him no injury in selling him into service.

4. Genesis, ch. 3, v. 24, King James version, 1611. God expels disobedient Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden in case they eat of the Tree of Life and live forever. The angels here are enforcing God's wishes with the help of a supernatural weapon. The famous 15th century picture by Masaccio can be seen at http://www.kfki.hu/~arthp/html/m/masaccio/brancacc/expulsio/old_expu.html

and Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling version at http://www.christusrex.org/www1/sistine/6r-Fall.jpg

5. The Subtle Knife (1997), Philip Pullman, ch. 6,“Lighted fliers”. The angels, or bene elim, are mustering for another assault on heaven. Witch Queen Ruta Skadi joins a group of these ancient beings on their way to join Lord Asriel.

Literary Snow: January-February 2002

1. For the people who were shovelling away on the house-tops were jovial and full of glee, calling out to one another from the parapet and now and then exchanging a facetious snowball - better-natured missile by far than many a wordy jest - laughing heartily if it went right, and not less heartily if it went wrong.

2. . ... at that moment there was a lull in the wind, the snow fell less thickly and, not a dozen yards away, and a little above them, they both saw the dim grey shape of a small building. They struggled towards it. Each step was now more difficult than the last. The sledge-runners sank deep into the snow, and their own feet went down and down as if there was nothing firm for foot to stand on.

3. As it is, I unsnap my chair harness, plant the chair in the snow, sit on it, set my feet on the rung between the front legs, my arms folded over my knees and my head resting on my arms, and am able in this way to take a sleep of fully ten minutes before the snow piles over me.

4. Deadening, muffling, stifling its murmur failing;
Lazily and incessantly floating down and down,
Silently sifting and veiling road, roof and railing;

5. Then, crouching beside the hole I had just made, trying to regain my breath, I glanced back and was shocked to see clear through the ridge into the yawning abyss below. Blue-white ice gleamed up through the hole from the expanse of the West Face, which I could see looming beneath it. Suddenly it clicked in my brain why I had fallen through so many times. It was all one crevasse.

Answers:

1. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, Stave III, “The second of the three spirits”. In the company of jolly Spirit of Christmas Present, filthy, foggy London is transformed by human cheerfulness, and a cornucopia of evocative fruits, vegetables and nuts on display in the shops follows.

2. Arthur Ransome, Winter Holiday, ch. xxvi, “The North Pole”, 1933. Following a mix-up over signals, inexperienced Dick and Dorothea have been blown north at tremendous speed in a blizzard and failing light on their home-made sailed sledge to the north end of iced-up Lake Windermere, Dick unaware of the danger in his bliss at his contraption's success. The sledge has just crashed and they're struggling the last stretch on foot to the life-saving "North Pole" - a Victorian "view-house". "People oughtn't to be allowed to be brought up in towns," says sensible Susan over their folly but Nancy's envious of their luck.

3. Ted Hughes, “Snow” in Difficulties of a Bridegroom. Written in 1956, this impossible but meticulously detailed story shows a man clinging to survival and sanity in never-ending miserable conditions. The chair is the only thing in his surroundings that has history and character.

4. “London Snow” by Robert Frost (1874-1963). The Frosts lived in England 1912-1915. This snow is clearly the slow, long-drawn-out sort.

5. Joe Simpson, Touching the Void, ch. 5,“Disaster”, 1988. Joe and Simon have been unwittingly walking on a huge overhanging corniche in the Peruvian Andes. Things soon get much worse.

Literary Correspondence: Feb.-March 2002

1. Unhappy fortune! By my brotherhood,
The letter was not nice but full of charge
Of dear import; and the neglecting it
May do much danger. Friar John, go hence;
Get me an iron crow, and bring it straight
Unto my cell.

2. Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from girl and boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or visit relations,
And applications for situations
And timid lovers’ declarations

3. By and by we came to packets of Miss Jenkyns’s letters. These Miss Matty did regret to burn. she said that all the others had been only interesting to those who loved the writers and that it seemed as if it would have hurt her to allow them to fall into the hands of strangers, who had not known her dear mother, and how good she was, although she did not always spell quite in the modern fashion; but Deborah’s letters were so very superior!

4. (She) wrote three words only:- ‘FIRE HELP QUICK.’ She tore off the strip of paper on which she written them and rolled it into a thin strip. Roger, who was on very good terms with Sappho, caught her without difficulty. He croodled to her to keep her calm. Dorothea was telling her to fly straight. ‘Keep out of the smoke and you’ll be all right.’

5. With an alphabet on the hearth at my feet for reference, I contrived in an hour or two to print and smear this epistle: ‘MI DEER JO i OPE YOU R KRWITE WELL i OPE i SHAl SON B HABELL 4 2 TEEDGE U JO AND THEN WE SHORL B SO GLODD AN WEN i M PRENGTD 2 U JO WOT LARX AN BLEVE ME INF XN PIP.’ There was no indispensable necessity for my communicating with Joe by letter, inasmuch as he sat beside me and we were all alone. But, I delivered this communication (slate and all) with my own hand, and Jo received it as a miracle of erudition.

Answers:

1. Romeo & Juliet (1597 or earlier), William Shakespeare, Act V, sc. ii. We've just seen Romeo buy some poison with the intention of killing himself at Juliet's grave. In this short scene which follows, we understand how it is that he has not received the news of the deception; Friar John has been quarantined by the authorities and could not travel with the letter he was supposed to deliver to Romeo. "Nice" here means "trifling." The audience would remember the closing of infected houses, with everyone inside them, for a space of 28 days, during the 1592-3 plague outbreak in London.

2. “Night Mail” - W. H. Auden. This was written for the GPO Film Unit to accompany a documentary on the London-Scotland overnight mail service in 1935. Another contributor was Benjamin Britten. The verse had to fit in with the filmed shots and so parts of it were scrapped; the poem only covers the Scottish part of the journey. Interesting background information can be found at http://www.britmovie.co.uk/genres/documentary/filmography/003.html The 35-minute film was shown on Channel 4 a few years ago.

3. Cranford (1851-53), Elizabeth Gaskell, ch. 5 “Old Letters”. Matty, aka Miss Matilda Jenkyns, is too thrifty to have a candle before teatime and has fallen asleep in the dark and dreamed of her past life. (As her love-letters are sixty or seventy years old, she must be at least in her 70s.) This brings on the urge to destroy old family letters, and she and the author take on the "sad work" together. Deborah is Matty's elder sister; the writer doesn't share Matty's admiration for her. "Oh dear! How I wanted facts instead of reflections, before those letters were concluded!" The book is based on the author's observations of life in the small town of Knutsford, Cheshire, where "all the holders of houses above a certain rent are women".

4. Pigeon Post (1936), Arthur Ransome, ch. XXXI, “Smoke over High Topps”. The children are camping on the high fells, where they're investigating reports of gold, during a prolonged drought; the three younger ones are trapped by a rapidly spreading fire and send the unreliable homing-pigeon Sappho with a message for help. The message is received in time for the fire-fighters to save the Tysons' isolated farm - but it takes another three nerve-wracking chapters. Mrs Tyson has been worrying about the fire risk since we first met her. For a Canadian article on the geology of the book, see www.arthur-ransome.org/ar/literary/pigeonpo.htm and for a list of Ransome's sources, see http://www.arthur-ransome.org/ar/literary/ardocs.htm Nice to see so many Ransome enthusiasts on the web.

5. Great Expectations (1860-1), Charles Dickens, Vol. I, ch. 7. While waiting to be apprenticed, Pip is being "educated" at an evening school by "a ridiculous old woman of limited means and unlimited infirmity"; Angus Calder comments in the Penguin edition that "This is an example of the only kind of education available in most parts of England before the state began to take a hand in the mid-nineteenth century." Pip's friend Biddy is more helpful. Jo himself had no schooling because his violent and drunken father objected. "My father were that good in his hart, don't you see?" says the forgiving Jo.

Literary Insomniacs:March-April 2002

1. O sleep! O gentle sleep!
Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,
That thou will no more weigh mine eyelids down
And steep my senses in forgetfulness?

2. The next morning, she was asked how she had slept. ‘Oh, very badly indeed!’ she replied. ‘I have scarcely closed my eyes the whole night through. I do not know what was in my bed, but I had something hard under me, and am all over black and blue.’

3. In vapid listlessness I leant my head against the window, and continued spelling over Catherine Earnshaw-Heathcliff-Linton, till my eyes closed; but they had not rested five minutes when a glare of white letters started from the dark, as vivid as spectres ... and rousing myself to dispel the intrusive name, I discovered my candle wick reclining on one of the antique volumes, and perfuming the place with the odour of roasted calf-skin. I snuffed it off, and very ill at ease under the influence of cold and lingering nausea, sat up and spread open the injured tome on my knee.

4. They had left him and now they were going to bed. Uncle Alan took a bath, and Tom lay listening to him and hating him. ... Later he heard other movements and conversation from elsewhere in the flat. Finally, the line of light under his door disappeared: that meant that the hall-light of the flat had been switched off for the night. Slow silence and then the grandfather clock struck for twelve. By midnight, his uncle and aunt were always in bed, and asleep too, usually. Only Tom lay still open-eyed and sullen, imprisoned in wakefulness.

5. Whether it was the wind, or the excitement of golf, or of the researches in the preceptory, that kept Parkins awake, he was not sure. Awake he remained, in any case, long enough to fancy .. that he was the victim of all manner of fatal disorders: he would lie counting the beats of his heart, convinced that it was going to stop work at any moment ... He found a little vicarious comfort in the idea that someone else was in the same boat. A near neighbour (in the darkness it was not easy to tell the direction) was tossing and rustling in his bed too.

Answers:

1. William Shakespeare: Henry IV Part II, Act 3 Sc. 1 . (1597?) A riotous scene involving Falstaff, Prince Hal and Doll Tearsheet has just been interrupted by an urgent summons to court as the rebellion led by Northumberland and the Bishop of York spreads. Both of the Henry IV plays are about rebellion, and the ailing King Henry (in his night-gown) is finding it all too much - especially as he has no confidence in his son's ability to succeed him. In this speech, like Henry V, he envies the poor and obscure their ability to sleep, and finishes "Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown."

2. Hans Andersen, “The Real Princess” (or “The Princess and the Pea”). Published in 1835, this is a variation on a traditional tale known in Sweden (but there the girl has to be told about the pea by her dog or cat). In an 11th-century Kashmiri legend, a young Brahmin man suffers pain from a single hair beneath seven mattresses. (Info from the Opies' Classic Fairy Tales.)

3. Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, 1847, Vol. I, ch. III; Lockwood has been benighted at Wuthering Heights and put by Zillah into Cathy's old room, in a strange old-fashioned bed enclosed in an oak case but including an exernal window. He's cold, sick and faint, having just been knocked down by the dogs. When he does finally get to sleep he has a lengthy nightmare about being first bored and then attacked in chapel; following which he has the terrifying experience or dream of Cathy's ghost at the window.

4. Philippa Pearce, Tom’s Midnight Garden, 1958, ch. 2, “The Clock Strikes Thirteen”. In this classic children's book, Tom's being overfed rich food by his doting Aunt Gwen and ordered by his disciplinarian Uncle Alan to "be in bed and if possible asleep for ten hours" every night. The fact that the unruly grandfather clock in the hall strikes thirteen gives him an extra hour to explore the ghost back garden without breaking his promise.

5. M.R. James: “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”, from Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, 1905-11. Professor Parkins, staying in a double room at an inn on the East Coast, has agreed to look at the site of a ruined Templars' preceptory, where he finds an antique whistle. Anyone who has read this cumulatively unnerving story will know that the restless neighbour is in the other bed ... Montague Rhodes James was successively and sometimes simultaneously Provost of Kings, Cambridge, Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge and Provost of Eton College. He catalogued the collections of every Cambridge college and several London libraries.

[I decided against including the following very apposite quotation because I thought most people wouldn't know it and it's too long - good, though, isn't it? It's from “The Terribly Strange Bed” by Wilkie Collins. The speaker has been inefficiently drugged and it's just as well he can't sleep as he is able to notice the top of the four-poster bed coming down to crush him.

I was wide awake, and in a high fever. Every nerve in my body trembled - every one of my senses seemed to be preternaturally sharpened. I tossed and rolled, and tried every kind of position, and perseveringly sought out the cold corners of the bed, and all to no purpose. Now, I thrust my arms over the clothes; now, I poked them under the clothes; now, I violently shot my legs straight out down to the bottom of the bed; now, I convulsively coiled them up as near my chin as they would go; now, I shook out my crumpled pillow, changed it to the cool side, patted it flat, and lay down quietly on my back; now, I fiercely doubled it in two, set it up on end, thrust it against the board of the bed, and tried a sitting posture. Every effort was in vain; I groaned with vexation, as I felt that I was in for a sleepless night. ]

In the late Lorna Sage's excellent autobiography, she tells how a friendly doctor helped her to cope with her childhood insomnia by advising her to pass the night reading.

Literary Cheese: April-May 2002

Mostly Victorian, this cheese. There's one modern one.

1. “Marooned three years agone,” he continued, “and lived on goats since then, and berries, and oysters. ... But, mate, my heart is sore for Christian diet. You mightn’t happen to have a piece of cheese about you, now? No? Well, many’s the long night I’ve dreamed of cheese - toasted, mostly - and woke up again, and here I am.”

2. “I shouldn’t like to think of your father eating cheese; it’s such a strong-smelling coarse kind of thing.”

3. “When you got up this morning did you think before sunset you’d see cheese made?” she said. (He) thought about the question. He had long since decided there was little usefulness in speculating much on what a day will bring. It led a person to the equal errors of being either dreadful or hopeful. Neither, in his experience, served to ease your mind. But he did have to allow that cheese had not factored into this day’s dawn thoughts.

4. And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cooks’ own ladles

5. Cheese, like oil, makes too much of itself. It wants the whole boat to itself. It goes through the hamper and gives a cheesy flavour to everything else there. You can’t tell whether you are eating apple pie, or German sausage, or strawberries and cream. It all seems cheese. There is too much odour about cheese.

Answers:

1. Ben Gunn in Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson, ch. xv “The Man of the Island” (1883). Jim Hawkins comments that marooning "stood for a horrible kind of punishment common enough among the buccaneers, in which the offender is put ashore with a little powder and shot, and left behind on some desolate and distant island." An American Culinary Workstation called "The Repertoire" - http://www.therepertoire.com/cheese/ - points out that Ben Gunn could easily have made his own cheese, with all the goats on the island. Altogether he seems to have been a bit of a loser; even his attempt to spook his ex-colleagues by impersonating the dead Captain Flint doesn't last long. "Why, nobody minds Ben Gunn," cried Merry; "dead or alive, nobody minds him."

2. Wives and Daughters, Elizabeth Gaskell, ch. 4, “Making Friendship”; Molly, devoted to her father's happiness and aware of his tastes, is doing her best to like her new stepmother but has fallen into the trap of being too confiding to this manipulative and snobbish woman. "Oh, but we will cure him of that [eating cheese]. ... I am sure he would be sorry to annoy me," says Mrs Gibson. Daniel Poole in his What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew says that "Cheese was a lower-class favourite, as was bacon."

3. Cold Mountain - Charles Frazier (1997). Inman is weak from hunger on his long journey home towards the end of the American Civil War, and has luckily met an eccentric and solitary but highly capable elderly woman. She ran away from her brutal husband when she was a girl and has been living off her goats and the land ever since. She's also an artist. The book explains exactly how the goats' cheese is made.

4. “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”, Robert Browning, st. 2. According to Alan Bold and Robert Giddings' True Characters, there are variants around the world of this story of the mysterious man who, cheated of his reward for ridding the town of its plague of rats, abducts all its children. There are three German possible historical explanations offered: Nicholas of Cologne's leadership of 20,000 children on the fatal Children's Crusade of 1212; a similar event involving a man called Bunting (= "brightly coloured") in 1284; and the medieval settlement by Germans of Sudetenland in Bohemia (the children's descendants are supposed to live still in Transylvania). The poem was written in 1845.

5. Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome, ch. 4, “... advantages of cheese as a travelling companion”. This comment launches us into a three-and-a-half page anecdote about two smelly cheeses brought from Liverpool ("by a friend of mine") on a train to general public consternation and finally buried on a beach. This wonderful book was first published in 1889 - JKJ worked variously as a railway clerk, an actor, a teacher, a journalist, a playwright and served as an ambulance driver in France during WWI.

Literary Horses: May-June 2002

1. It was Ginger! But how changed!

2. I saw the horses:
Huge in the dense grey - ten together -
Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move,
With draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,
Making no sound.

3. The pony died, and as it died
Kicked him severely in the side.

4. While inside the vaulting of the ribs between his knees the darkly meated heart pumped of who’s will and the blood pulsed and the bowels shifted in their massive blue convolutions of who’s will and the stout thighbones and knee and cannon and the tendons like flaxen hawsers that drew and flexed and drew and flexed at their articulations and of who’s will all sheathed and muffled in the flesh and the hooves that stove wells in the morning groundmist and the head turning side to side and the great slavering keyboard of his teeth and the hot globes of his eyes where the world burned.

5. A little Morgan had one forefoot on the wall,
The other curled at his breast. He dipped his head
And snorted at us. And then he had to bolt.
We heard the miniature thunder where he fled.

Answers:

1. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell, Ch. Xl, “Poor Ginger”. The bit that's had little girls in tears for 125 years - Beauty's old friend Ginger, the spirited chestnut mare, reduced to starved misery as an maltreated cab-horse, soon to die. Anna Sewell, a Quaker, was crippled by a fall in her teens and used a pony and trap to get around for the rest of her life. The book, which set out to expose the suffering endured by horses from their thoughtless owners, with much practical advice given throughout the book, was published in 1877 and endorsed by the RSPCA, and in America, George Angell of the Humane Society, gave free copies to cab drivers. Anna Sewell did not live to see its success. Her house, with a horse weathervane, can still be seen in Great Yarmouth.

2. “The Horses”, from Hawk in the Rain, 1957, by Ted Hughes, the late Poet Laureate, born locally. The speaker is climbing a steep hill to the moors before daybreak, passes the motionless horses, witnesses an apocalyptic dawn, and on his descent, finds the horses still motionless in the rising sun. Simon Armitage, in his introduction to his selection of Hughes' poems, cites this poem among several others as literature that can immediately appeal to the young: "a means by which the surrounding world could suddenly be translated, understood, and experienced." See http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1655550,00.html for an appreciation by Alice Oswald.

3. “Jack and his Pony Tom” in New Cautionary Tales for Children by Hilaire Belloc, 1940. Jack kills his pony by overfeeding him; in the next poem the boy Tom kills his pony Jack by riding him too hard. This temperamental and difficult Anglo-French writer (1870-1953), a man of strong Roman Catholic and anti-socialist beliefs, is now better remembered for his humorous books for children than for his historical, political or religious works.

4. All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy, Part II, 1992, the first of the Border Trilogy and 1992 winner of the US National Book Award and the National Book Critics Award. It was a major US bestseller in hardback, and tells the story of a laconic Texan boy, gifted with horses, who heads south for Mexico with a friend when his ranching family breaks up. Against the spareness of much of the prose, this passage about a prize stallion stands out. There are a number of websites devoted to the author: see especially http://www.cormacmccarthy.com/ and for an interview with the New York Times, go to http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17/specials/mccarthy-venom.html

5. “The Runaway”, Robert Frost, 1918. Couldn't find a great deal about this poem, though it's much listed on the web as a favourite poem and evidently also much set for homework in American schools from the number of pleas for help in analysing it! It's a brief atmospheric description of people coming on a young Morgan horse terrified by the falling snow. The Morgan, says my elderly Observer's Guide to Horses and Ponies, is an American breed of light horse, solid and compact, 14-15 hands, and all Morgans are descended from Justin Morgan, foaled 1793 in Vermont. Robert Frost, "the voice of New England" and half-Scottish, was encouraged to write by Rupert Brooke when he came to Britain 1912-15.

Literary Ships: June-July 2002
Where do the following ships appear, and who are the authors? One children’s book.

1. 'The ship? Great God, where is the ship?' Soon they through dim bewildering mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom ...; only the uppermasts out of the water; while fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan harpooners still maintained their sinking look-outs on the sea.

2. One green light squinting over Kidd’s Creek, which is near the mouth of of the pirate river, marked where the brig, the Jolly Roger, lay, low in the water: a rakish-looking craft foul to the hull, every beam in her detestable like ground strewn with mangled feathers. She was the cannibal of the seas, and scarce needed that watchful eye, for she floated immune in the horror of her name.

3. Till noon we quietly sailed on,
Yet never a breath did breathe,
Slowly and smoothly went the ship,
Moved onward from beneath.

4. Trees, trees, millions of trees, massive, immense, running up high; and at their foot, hugging the bank against the stream, crept the little begrimed steamboat, like a sluggish beetle crawling on the floor of a lofty portico.

5. But what a noisy world this wooden one is! The south-west wind that keeps us at anchor booms and whistles in the rigging and thunders over her ... furled canvas. Flurries of rain beat a retreat of kettledrums over every inch of her.

Answers:

1. Moby Dick, Herman Melville, ch. 135, “The Chase - Third Day”, 1851. This of course is the conclusion of Ahab's obsessive hunt for the great white whale; the Pequod goes down with all hands, dragging all the boats with her; the final victim is a hawk, a "bird of heaven", that has been tormenting Tashtego as he nails a red banner to the masthead at Ahab's command. Ishmael survives by clinging to his friend Queequeeg's floating coffin. The novel has been described as one of the greatest of all time, a magnificent portrait of a world that was coming to an end, with philosophical and allegorical undertones on the nature of evil. Ironically, it lost Melville his popularity with the public who were expecting another straightforward adventure story.

He himself while serving on a whaler had met a seaman whose father, Owen Chase, had been first mate on the Essex, sunk by a whale in 1821. In 1839 the destruction of a ship by a scarred sperm whale called Mocha Dick had been reported.

2. Peter and Wendy, J. M. Barrie, ch. XIV, “The Pirate Ship”. The character of Peter Pan first appeared in a story titled The Little White Bird (1902), followed in 1904 by a play called Peter Pan or the boy who would never grow up. In 1906, camePeter Pan in Kensington Gardens. In 1911, Barrie turned the play into a children's book called Peter and Wendy.

The Pirate Ship, with its rather nasty association of mangled feathers (fox leavings?), is introduced directly after the seizing of the children by the pirates and Captain Hook's complicated reaction to the sleeping Peter. Wendy, awake, herself has fallen for Hook's ironic gallantry. Tinkerbell has self-sacrificingly drunk the poison intended for Peter, and Peter, off to rescue Wendy, is "frightfully happy". Perhaps the mangled feathers are to counterbalance Hook's love of flowers and prowess on the harpsichord.

The University of Western Ontario has published a webpage with a History of Peter Pan criticism http://instruct.uwo.ca/english/133e/pp.html. According to this, Alfred Noyes compared Barrie with R L Stevenson's Treasure Island: "Stevenson wrote about pirates with a kind of romantic regret. . .. He was . . . a man writing for boys and yearning to lose himself in boyhood; while Barrie is a boy, in triumphant possession of his kingdom, writing for men. . . Barrie begins where Stevenson ended."

3. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Part V, 1797. This peaceful passage occurs after the departure of the spirits who arrived to help the Ancient Mariner when he prayed; they inhabited the sailors' corpses in order to do the work of the boat. His only helper now is the Spirit of the South Pole who is moving the ship, but ceases at noon, when the Mariner has one more ordeal to undergo. The poem was Coleridge's major contribution to The Lyrical Ballads of 1798. Wordsworth later recalled its creation on a walk in the Quantocks. The story was based on a dream of Coleridge's friend, Mr Cruikshank, but Wordsworth claimed responsibility for the albatross (he was reading Shelvocke's Voyages which mentions the albatrosses round Cape Horn) and for the dead men's navigation of the ship.

4. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, II, 1902. The book was written in 1898-9, and was based on the author's experiences in Belgium's exploitative "Congo Free State" in 1890, which affected his health for the rest of his life. Marlow is slowly making his way towards Kurtz, a man of brilliant reputation, but who proves to be mad and evil. The powerful passage from which the quotation is taken emphasises the vast darkness of the unknown: "We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember, because we were travelling in the night of first ages." The steamboat has no grace or grandeur, merely an ability to keep ploughing on - and a noisy steam whistle. Famously, the story was adapted by Coppola for the film Apocalypse Now about the Vietnam War.

5. Rites of Passage, William Golding, 1, 1980. Booker Prize winner and first of a trilogy telling the story of self-important young Edmund Talbot's long sea-journey to Australia; the other two are Close Quarters and Fire Down Below, the revised trilogy being republished as To the Ends of the Earth. From early comedy, the story darkens. "Full of the colour and clatter of scenes whose tarry detail the author reports to us like a revenant from one of Nelson's ships" said W. L. Webb in The Guardian, and the novels are excellent on the physicality and boredom of long sea voyages of the period.

Literary Dancers: July-August 2002:
Sources and authors of the following dancers, please. Three works for children.

1. He was grey and he was woolly and his pride was inordinate: he danced on an outcrop in the middle of Australia, and he went to the Little God Nqa.

2. Then she figured in a waltz with Monsieur de Klingenspohr, the Prince of Peterwaradin’s cousin and attache. The delighted Prince, having less retinue than his French diplomatic colleague, insisted on taking a turn with the charming creature, and twirled round the ball-room with her, scattering the diamonds out of his boot-tassels and hussar jacket until His Highness was fairly out of breath. Papoosh Pasha himself would have liked to dance with her if that amusement had been the custom of his country.

3. So stately his form and so lovely her face,
That never a hall such a galliard did grace

4. And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand
They danced by the light of the moon

5. Dance she did and dance she must, over field and meadow, in rain and sunshine, by night and by day. By night! That was most horrible! She danced into the lonely churchyard, but the dead there danced not, they were at rest.

ANSWERS:

1. Rudyard Kipling, “The Sing-Song of Old Man Kangaroo” from The Just So Stories, 1902. Kipling had begun to write this collection of stories for children while in he was in South Africa. His son John was born in 1897 but his older daughter died in 1898. Moving to Bateman's in East Sussex, he wrote his masterpiece Kim in 1901, and these stories, with their compelling rhythmic and repetitive style for reading aloud, were published in 1902 and were popular for decades. He illustrated the stories, with comments, in his own distinctive style. In this story a squatty little animal provokes an Australian god into setting Yellow-Dog-Dingo to chasing him until his back legs lengthen and he becomes a kangaroo. David Davis readThe Just So Stories superlatively on the radio in the days of Children's Hour but, alas, the cassette is no longer available. Johnny Morris subsequently recorded some of the stories, on BBC cassette.

2. W M Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847-48), Ch LI “In which a charade is acted which may or may not puzzle the reader.” The novel is described by my Chambers Biographical Dictionary as "the first novel to give a conspectus of London society with its mingling of rich parvenus and decadent upper class". The sought-after dancer is social climber Becky Sharp, now Mrs Rawdon Crawley; she has just shone in the charade and is about to reach the social heights of being invited to dine with royalty. Rawdon Crawley is rather intimidated by his wife and will shortly be seized by the bailiffs; the gulf between the couple widens further. The novel was successfully adapted for television recently.

3. Sir Walter Scott, “Young Lochinvar”. Scott, so admired by Jane Austen, is little read these days, and this poem which used to be standard school fodder didn't even make it into the top 100 of the Nation's Favourite Poems. Briefly, heiress fair Ellen is about to marry some nameless fop without too much protest, when Lochinvar comes barging in, breaks the crockery, performs a quick galliard with the bride, puts her on the back of his horse and gallops off. The Opies in their Oxford Book of Narrative Verse say it's based on a traditional ballad included in Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 1802, under the title "The Laird of Laminton"; Scott collected further versions, altered it and titled it "Katharine Janfarie" (Lochinvar loses the bride in this). This, famous, version is from his historical romance about Flodden Field, Marmion, Canto v, lines 313-360 (1808). The song is represented as sung by an English lady at the court of James IV of Scotland and the story has been changed to suit the context; Lochinvar is a Scot, Ellen English. The Lochinvars lived in Kenmure Castle in Kirkcudbrightshire and Netherby Hall is in Cumberland. I never much cared for either of the lovers, he's too aggressively macho and she's wet. He'll probably knock her about later. And how can he be "unarmed" when he's got a good broadsword? You can find the full text and some notes at http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/poems/scott1.html

The driving rhythm of the poem (anapestic tetrameter couplets) is shared with Browning's "How they brought the good news from Ghent to Aix" - "I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three"). In his useful and entertaining book Rhyme's Reason, John Hollander comments that these couplets were used widely in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. "Anapestic" means that two short or unstressed syllables are followed by a long one, the reverse of a dactyl where the stressed syllable comes before two unstressed. "Tetrameter" refers to the four beats in the line. The couplets, says Hollander, could be either active:

"There are rhythms like this that you'll frequently meet:
they resound with the pounding of narrative feet,
and their anapests carry a regular load
(The hoofbeats of horses, of course, on the road)."

- or elegiac:

"But they lie by the side of a whispering stream
Flowing slowly as time, gliding by in a dream."

4. Edward Lear, “The Owl and the Pussycat”. This was first published in Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets, 1871. Lear devised the Book of Nonsense, published in 1846, for the children of the Earl of Derby. It went through several dozen editions, and was followed in the 1870s by the above collection, and Nonsense Songs and Stories, More Nonsense Songs, Pictures, &tc., and Laughable Lyrics. "The Owl and the Pussycat" still ranks in the nation's affections at no. 45. The word "runcible" was invented by Lear, and has given its name to a sort of spoon/fork implement. The poem's been set to music many times - see http://edwardlear.tripod.com/learmusic.html

5. Hans Christian Andersen “The Red Shoes” (1845). What a nasty misogynistic vindictive story this is! The Taliban would love it. A pretty little destitute girl loves red shoes, and is cumulatively punished for repeatedly putting vanity before good works and religion. Finally she can only stop dancing by having her feet chopped off, and the dancing feet still block her way to church. It is only when she gives up all thoughts of anything except reading the Bible that she is allowed back into the Christian fold and permitted to die. I'm reminded of C. S. Lewis sending Susan of the Narnia books to Hell for being interested in stockings. The unpleasant but powerful story has been used as a source for many works, including the Powell/Pressburger film of the same name. In Mary Norton's children's book Are All the Giants Dead? (1975), the dancing red shoes appear, minus feet, as helpful if mischievous spirit guides.

Literary Seashores: August-September 2002

1. (He) rose dripping from the water and stood naked, cleaning his glasses with a sock. The only sound that reached them now through the heat of the morning was the long, grinding roar of the breakers on the reef.

2. They went to the sands, to watch the flowing of the tide, which a fine south-easterly breeze was bringing in with all the grandeur which so flat a shore admitted. They praised the morning; gloried in the sea; sympathised in the delight of the fresh-feeling breeze - and were silent; till Henrietta suddenly began again, with, “Oh! yes, I am quite convinced that with very few exceptions, the sea air always does good.”

3. ...the grating roar
Of pebbles, which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow

4. As soon as I came to the Sea Shore, I was surprized to see that I had taken up my Lot on the worst Side of the Island, for here indeed the Shore was cover’d with innumerable Turtles , whereas on the other Side, I had found but three in a Year and half. Here was also an infinite number of Fowls, of many kinds, some which I had seen, and some which I had not seen before, and many of them very good Meat; but such as I knew not the Names of, except those call’d Penguins.

5. Only in the west was it broken by any vestiges of the sea it had risen from. There it was astir with crawling white filaments, knotted confusedly at one spot in the north-west, whence came a sibilant murmur like the hissing of many snakes.

ANSWERS:

1. William Golding, Lord of the Flies (1954), Ch. 1: “The Sound of the Shell.” Fat asthmatic short-sighted sensible Piggy and fit blond Ralph find themselves on an idyllic desert island as survivors, with other boys, from an aircrash. The book is a reworking of Ballantyne’s Coral Island (1858), but unlike the stalwartly upright and competent characters of that book, most of the boys revert to savagery and murder. “The tendency towards evil in man is Golding’s principal theme,” says my Cambridge Guide to English Literature. The book has been filmed twice, successfully by Peter Brook in 1963, and less so, in an American version, in 1990. Hugh Edwards who played Piggy in the Brook version went on to qualify in ergonomics and recently built a Mars factory in Russia.

2. Jane Austen, Persuasion, (1815-16), Part 1, Ch. 12. The heroine Anne Elliott is with her sister-in-law Henrietta Musgrove on an outing to Lyme Regis. Henrietta is disgenuously arguing for a removal to the seaside of the elderly cleric Dr. Shirley, to leave his living free for her betrothed, Charles Hayter. In the same chapter, the duplicitous Mr Elliott arrives and admires Anne, giving Captain Wentworth some second thoughts, and Louisa concusses herself jumping down the steps of the Cobb. Although Jane Austen isn’t big on scenery, her educated characters are aware of the early nineteenth-century importance of admiring Nature (preferably in its grander manifestations) along with Wordsworth and Scott.

3. Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”, 1867. Published in New Poems, the poem argues that in a desolate world on which the tide of morality and religion is going out, individual love is the best refuge. It’s his best-known poem, and no. 17 in The Nation’s Favourite Poems. Arnold was the son of Thomas Arnold of Rugby, the headmaster in Tom Brown’s Schooldays. After the age of 45 he turned from poetry to literary criticism, for which he is equally well-known. The first line quoted is echoed in the Golding extract, but the noise made by surf is quite distinctive so it could be coincidence.

4. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719), (p. 108 in OWC edition). Robinson Crusoe is clearly mainly interested what he can eat, and the character is highly practical and matter-of-fact throughout the book. He’s popularly supposed to have been based on Alexander Selkirk, marooned on a Pacific island for five years. Tim Severin in his recent Seeking Robinson Crusoe suggests other more resourceful originators. Crusoe’s island is near the mouth of the Orinoco off Venezuela, according to the map published in the fourth edition, so is unlikely to have had penguins on it.

5. Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands (1903), Ch. XII, “My Initiation”. Clever, fastidious Carruthers of the Foreign Office has joined his acquaintance, the eccentric gifted monomaniac Davies, on his boat in the Friesian estuaries of the Baltic. The pair have run aground at low tide in “a desert of sand”, and are about to jump off and go exploring in sea-boots amongst the sandbanks and channels. Scarily, they repeat the experience at night in a gale, and Carruthers is “finally cured of funk”. Robert Erskine Childers, son of a British orientalist, served in the Boer and First World Wars, and was executed by the Irish Free State for his support of Sinn Fein in 1922. The book, an early recognition of the threat from growing German seapower, is a gripping read and brilliantly captures the strange atmosphere of the area.

Literary Swallows: Sept.-Oct. 2002

Sources and authors of the following birds, please! One children’s book.

1. Up in the sky swallows swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in and out, round and round, yet always with perfect control as if elastics held them ...

2. “More like swallows than crows, I would have said, sir. From the migratory aspect.” And I followed this with a suitably modest smile to indicate without ambiguity that I had made a witticism, since I did not wish Mr Farraday to restrain any spontaneous mirth he felt out of a misplaced respectfulness.

3. The breezy call of incense-breathing morn
The swallow twittering from the straw-built shed

4. And she seated herself on the bird’s back, her feet resting on the outspread wings, and tied her girdle firmly round one of the strongest feathers, and then the swallow soared high into the air, and flew away over forest and lake, over mountains whose crests are covered with snow all the year round.

5. And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

ANSWERS

Swallows appear in Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red too and there are indeed a lot of them wheeling around above Istanbul. They're to be seen in Britain between April and October but migrate to hot climates for the winter.

1. Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway (p 77) (1925). The beauty of the birds' movement over sunny Regent's Park is noticed by poor shellshocked Septimus just before hallucinations caused by the horror of his wartime experiences break over him yet again. Virginia Woolf apparently drew on her own nervous breakdowns in describing his decline into insanity. The novel takes place during a single summer day in London as a society hostess prepares for a party. The book "show(s) us life and character in motion, forming and re-forming from moment to moment" (Cambridge Guide to English Literature). It was successfully adapted for film by the actress Eileen Atkins in 1998, with Vanessa Redgrave in the title role and Rupert Graves as Septimus.

2. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day, “Prologue: July 1956 - Darlington Hall” (p 17) (1989). Elderly butler Stevens never does get the hang of bantering, but he is still resolving to master the art as the book finishes. Filmed by Merchant-Ivory in 1993 with Anthony Hopkins as Stevens. He's talking about gypsies.

3. Thomas Gray, “Elegy written in a country churchyard” (1751). Nice to see an 18th-century poem so high in the nation's affections (no. 12 in The Nation's Favourite Poems). This phenomenally popular work evokes bygone rural England (Stoke Poges in Buckinghamshire to be exact) and meditates on the obscure and forgotten lives of the villagers, barred from the glories and evils of the famous. The second half is rather boring. The poem is "full of quotations" ("paths of glory", "far from the madding crowd", "some mute inglorious Milton", "full many a flower is born to blush unseen ...") and the third line of the first verse is famous for being rearrangeable in numerous ways and still retaining its sense and scansion.

4. Hans Christian Anderson: “Tommelise” (Thumbelina) (1836). In this story the tiny heroine revives a migrating swallow that has succumbed to the winter cold in Denmark; when warmth returns in spring he departs but returns in the autumn in time to save her from marriage to an old toad who lives underground, and carries her past sunny lands where grapes, oranges and lemons grow to a place with a blue lake, vines and a marble palace - where she meets a prince of suitable size to marry. The Opies point out that unlike Tom Thumb, Tommelise is passive and the victim of circumstances(The Classic Fairy Tales).

5. John Keats, “To Autumn” (1819). Rated no. 6 by the nation, between Wordsworth's "Daffodils" and Yeats' "Lake Isle of Innisfree", and probably recognisable by most people who paid any attention at school (at least in schools where English Literature is still taught), this very atmospheric poem moves from early to late autumn; by the last verse there's a distinct chill in the air. It's pointed out that "with winter near, the sounds of autumn lack the confidence of spring". The departing swallows feature in the last line. Keats died two years later. Two questions: 1. Where did swallows congregate before we had telephone wires? 2. Do gnats really make a noise? ("in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn".)

Literary Cars : October - November 2002

Titles and authors of books where following cars are to be found, please. One children’s book.

1. He increased his pace, and, as the car devoured the street and leapt forth on the high road through the open country, he was only conscious that he was ... the terror, the traffic-queller, the Lord of the lone trail, before whom all must give way or be smitten into nothingness and everlasting night. He chanted as he flew, and the car responded with sonorous drone.

2. I blew a final blast on the horn, and slipped out after her, leaving the engine running. We were not many seconds too soon. A man found the handle on the rear door. He pulled it open and pawed inside. We were all but pushed over by the pressure of others making for the car. There was a shout of anger when someone opened the front door and found the seats there empty, too.

3. As the marchers approached, Ammu put her window up. Estha his. Rahel hers. Effortfully, because the black knob on the handle had fallen off. Suddenly the skyblue Plymouth looked absurdly opulent on the narrow pitted road.

4. “That’s torn it!” (he) said ... The car lay, helpless and ridiculous, her nose deep in the ditch, her back wheels cocked absurdly up on the bank, as though she were doing her best to bolt to earth and were scraping herself a burrow beneath the drifted snow.

5. Beside the tents the old cars stood, and water fouled the ignition wires and water fouled the carburettors. The little grey tents stood in lakes. And at last the people had to move. Then the cars wouldn’t start because the wires were shorted, and if the engines would run, deep mud engulfed the wheels.

ANSWERS

1. Kenneth Grahame, Wind in the Willows, (1908), ch. Vi "Mr Toad." His friends having just locked him up for his own good, Toad has escaped and stolen a car. This early example of joy-riding soon ends in prison. The book began in a series of letters to Grahame's son telling the story of Mole. In his Introduction to Children's Literature, Peter Hunt calls it "a complex, uneasy book, whose place in children's literature is ambiguous and yet definitive" - the confusions including whether it is written for children or adults, the class element which reflects anxieties of the period, the shifting relations of animals and humans, and the mingling of rural idyll with farce and neo-pagan elements. Grahame worked unhappily at the Bank of England. In her 1981 book Wild Wood, Jan Needle retold the story from the point of view of the "invisible" working classes of the Wild Wood.

2. John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, (1951), ch. 5 “A Light in the Night”. The still-sighted hero and his weepy female companion (an upper-crust lady novelist) have helped themselves to "a large, shiny saloon car" which has proved useful in avoiding triffids and the desperate crowds of blinded people. Now immobilised by the crowds they're in danger of violence from the mob and have to make a hasty getaway. This was Wyndham's first novel and an immediate success.

3. Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things, 2. “Pappachi’s Moth”. Set in Kerala and winner of the 1997 Booker Prize. In this passage the troubled middle-class family in their conspicuous car are about to be surrounded by casually hostile Naxalite (Maoist) marchers: Communists, students and untouchables.

4. Dorothy Sayers, The Nine Tailors, (1934), opening words. Yes, I know I've used this book before but it's full of memorable passages. Wimsey has just driven his big posh car into a dyke in the Fens during a snowstorm, conveniently leaving him stranded in a remote village just in time to show his prowess at bell-ringing and solve the murder case which rapidly presents itself. Edmund Wilson called the book "one of the dullest ... I have ever encountered in any field"; others voted it the best Golden Age mystery. (Val McDermid in the Oxford Good Fiction Guide.)

5. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, (1939), ch. 29. Winner of the 1940 Pulitzer Prize and successfully filmed in the same year with Henry Fonda, the novel tells the story of the Joad family fleeing the dustbowl of Oklahoma to the illusory dream of a better life in California. In this extract, towards the end, the family have reached a desolate boxcar camp where no help is to be had and the weaker members of the community are dying of pneumonia.

Literary Foxes: November-December 2002

Two works for children in this one. Titles and authors please.

1. Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now,
And again now, and now, and now
Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees

2. But - seated upon the stump, she was startled to find an elegantly-dressed gentleman reading a newspaper. He had black prick ears and sandy coloured whiskers.

3. Then his brush drooped down till it sometimes dragged
And his fur felt sick and his chest was tagged
With taggles of mud and his pads were lead,
It was well for him he’d an earth ahead.

4. Then the Fox stretched out his tail, the prince seated himself upon it, and away they went over stock and stone until his hair whistled in the wind.

5. Something rustled the dead leaves; not more than ten yards from where we stood, a small russet animal stole out on to the path and stopped for a photographic instant to take a look at us. ... By the time he had slipped out of sight again I had just begun to realise what it was that had looked at me with such human alertness.

ANSWERS

Ted Hughes, “The Thought-Fox”. Probably his best-known poem, from Hawk in the Rain, 1957, and no. 71 in The Nation’s Favourite Poems, it deals with the creative process involving memory, observation and imagination. The Week for 28th September quotes from an article he wrote for The Guardian in July 1997, in which he told how a mid-19th-century foxhunter called Jack Russell persuaded the country people of North Devon to encourage the breeding and survival of foxes, hitherto locally rare, in order to give the newly-started hunt something to chase, with the result that “foxes swarm in almost incredible abundance where formerly there were none.” He put this down to “the spell of the hunt” cancelling out the market economy of country people’s common sense “where the only virtue of a fox is to be dead”. He can be heard reading the poem on a cassette (Thought-fox and Other Poems) published by Faber, and the Ted Hughes website run by Claas Kazzer can be found at www.uni-leipzig.de/~angl/hughes.htm

2. Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Jemima Puddle-duck (1908). The fox (who only wears his smart clothing when the duck is present) tricks the silly duck into laying her eggs in his shed, strangely full of feathers. Unfortunately the foxhound puppies who with the collie prevent him from eating the lot (and presumably kill him), also gobble up the eggs.

3. John Masefield, “Reynard the Fox” (1919). The Opies in The Oxford Book of Narrative Verse say that although Masefield did not hunt himself, he went to Berkshire meets by bicycle several times while writing this long poem. “I am not and never have been a fox-hunter but it is the passion of English country people, and into it they put all the beauty and the fervour which the English put into all things when deeply roused.” The fox gets away.

4. Brothers Grimm, “The Golden Bird” from Household Tales, collected from the people of Hesse and issued in three volumes 1812-22. The story’s full of well-known themes - the three brothers of whom only the third succeeds, the need to be nice to talking creatures you meet in the wood, the magic bird that steals the fruit and the advisability of choosing the humbler of two or three options (which also crops up in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice). I’m sure this last theme has a name and a whole body of analysis, but I couldn’t find it. Anyway the story is Type 550 in the Aarne-Thompson folk story classification (which I also couldn’t find). Foxes are often supernatural in Scandinavian folklore, and in this case, when mercifully killed by the hero, turns out to be the princess’s brother. Given the obduracy of the hero, the fox is remarkably long-suffering. Both Arthur Rackham and Mervyn Peake illustrated the ride on the fox’s tail. I remember the same story being adapted to a pig called Toby Twirl. There are Grimm-related websites at http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm.html and http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimmtales.html

5. Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Part One: “Early Days”, VII (1928). This first volume of his semi-fictitious autobiography won the 1929 Hawthornden Prize; it was followed by Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, dealing with the First World War, and Sherston’s Progress. In this passage, he is still a boy, on his second hunt. His companion, Denis Milden, “a proper little sportsman”, emits “a shrill ‘Huick-holler’” and the young Sherston shows himself up as a mollycoddle by exclaiming “Don’t do that; they’ll catch him!” to his later shame and misery. This fox gets away too.

Literary Schools: Dec.-Jan. 2002-2003

1. St custard’s hav a very interesting history if you are interested in hist which few boys are. It was built by a madman in 1836 and he made a few improvements before he was put in the bin e.g. the observatory to study worms, the fortifications to pot at gamekeepers and that round thing which hav no use at all.

2. The refectory was a great, low-ceiled gloomy room; on two long tables smoked basins of something hot, which, however, to my dismay, sent forth an odour far from inviting. I saw an universal manifestation of discontent when the fumes of the repast met the nostrils of those destined to swallow it: from the van of the procession, the tall girls of the first class, rose the whispered words: - “Disgusting! The porridge is burnt again!”

3. There were a hundred and forty-two staircases ...; wide, sweeping ones; narrow rickety ones; some that led somewhere different on a Friday; some with a vanishing step halfway up that you had to remember to jump.

4. No. 5 was precisely like No. 6, in shape, size and furniture, but Rose had unpacked her trunk, and decorated her room with odds and ends of all sorts. The table was covered with books and boxes; covered lithographs were pinned on the walls; a huge blue rosette ornamented the headboard of the bed; the blinds were tied together with pink ribbon; over the top of the window was a festoon of hemlock boughs, fresh and spicy. The effect was fantastic, but cheery.

5. By degrees ... the place resolved itself into a bare and dirty room with a couple of windows, whereof a tenth part might be of glass, the remainder being stopped up with old copy-books and paper. There were a couple of long old rickety desks, cut and notched, and inked and damaged, in every possible way; two or three forms, a detached desk ... The ceiling was supported like that of a barn, with cross-beams and rafters, and the walls were so stained and discoloured that it was impossible to tell whether they had ever been touched with paint or whitewash.

ANSWERS

1. Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle, Down with Skool! - “St. Custard’s: by the Camera Club” (1953). The opinionated and incompetent speller Molesworth first showed up in an occasional series written for Punch in the 1940s by Geoffrey Willans who was drawing on his own teaching experience. In the 1950s he and Ronald Searle, the creator of St. Trinian's, collaborated on several Molesworth books but Willans sadly died at the age of 47. The BBC Opinions webpage calls the books "the definitive works on the British public school system. Tom Brown's Schooldays has more gritty realism, but Molesworth has far worse spelling, as any fule kno." "The Molesworth books rank alongside Sellar and Yeatman's authoritative history of Britain, 1066 And All That, as required reading for anyone seeking to understand the British psyche." See http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A156962
People who grew up in Britain in the 1950s can often be heard exclaiming "Hullo Clouds, Hullo Sky" if they are creative types.

2. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, Vol. 1, Ch. 5 (1847). This dispiriting place is based on Cowan Bridge school founded by the Rev William Carus Wilson, of whom Brocklebank is partly a portrait. Charlotte Bronte went to this school at the age of 8 in 1824, soon to be joined by Emily.

3. J K Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Ch.8 “The Potions Master” (1997). In this first book of the series, the author is establishing the magical nature of Hogwarts Castle, a neo-Gothic place reminiscent at first sight across the lake of an illustration for "The Twelve Dancing Princesses". This particular passage is portrayed in the film by an Escher-like scene.

4. Susan Coolidge, What Katy Did, Part 2, Ch. iv, “The Nunnery” (1872). Sarah Chauncy Woolsey (1835-1905) wrote a number of stories for girls, of which the Katy books are now the best known. Dr. Carr sends Katy to boarding-school with her sister Clover as he thinks responsibility for the housework is making her old before her time. Unlike their unfortunate British contemporaries, the girls have a splendid time. In his Introduction to Children's Literature, Peter Hunt notes the popular mid-19th US genre of "the domestic tale centring on a strong, often displaced, female hero."

5. Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, Ch. 8 “Of the internal economy of Dotheboys Hall” (1838-9). Dickens declares in his introduction that "Mr Squeers and his school are faint and feeble pictures of an existing reality, purposely subdued and kept down lest they be deemed impossible ... lasting agonies and disfigurements inflicted upon children .. involving ... offensive and foul details of neglect, cruelty and disease ..." Dotheboys Hall was based on an actual school, Bowes Academy, Yorkshire, visited by Dickens and his illustrator Hablot Browne in 1838. The headmaster, William Shaw, had been convicted of negligence in 1823, when some of his pupils went blind from beatings and starvation. 19th-century Yorkshire schools seem to have been places to avoid. In the forthcoming film, Gibson Mill near Hebden Bridge is used to represent Dotheboys Hall, with local boys as the luckless pupils.

Literary Dragons: January-February 2003

1. And there was the Horntail, at the other end of the enclosure, crouched low over her clutch of eggs, her wings half-furled, her evil, yellow eyes upon him, a monstrous, scaly black lizard, thrashing her spiked tail, leaving yard-long gouge marks in the hard ground.

2. Then an old harrower of the dark
happened to find the hoard open,
the burning one who hunts out barrows,
the slick-skinned dragon, threatening the night sky
with streamers of fire.

3. Roaring he swept back over the town. A hail of dark arrows leapt up and snapped and rattled on his scales and jewels, and their shafts fell back kindled by his breath burning and hissing into the lake.

4. And I saw an angel come down from Heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit, and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years.

5 The old dragon Kalessin looked at him from one long, awful, golden eye. There were ages beyond ages in the depths of that eye; the morning of the world was deep in it. Though Arren did not look into it, he knew that it looked upon him with profound and mild hilarity.

THE ANSWERS

1. J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, ch. 20, “The First Task”

2. Beowulf, Seamus Heaney’s translation, ll.2270-2274

3. J R R Tolkien, The Hobbit, ch. 14, “Fire and Water”

4. Revelation of St John the Divine, Ch.20, v.1

5. Ursula Le Guin, The Farthest Shore (Earthsea 3), ch.13. “The Stone of Pain”

Literary Dust: February-March 2003

1. Dust, the smell of dust, the feel of dust on everything: soft pads of dust underfoot, dust piling up in the grooves the door slid along in, dust on the rocks of the floor, which had to be swept out every day into the dust outside. Films of dust settled on the food even while they ate it, and often winds whirled dust and grass up into the air and the sunlight became spotty and dirty-looking.

2. Certain wintry branches of candles on the high chimneypiece faintly lighted the chamber: or, it would be more expressive to say, faintly troubled its darkness. It was spacious, and I dare say had once been handsome, but every discernible thing in it was covered with dust and mould, and dropping to pieces.

3. “Dust? What are you talking about?” “You might not call it that. It’s elementary particles. In my world the scholars call it Rusakov Particles, but normally they call it dust. They don’t show up easily, but they come out of space and fix on people. Not children so much, though. Mostly on grownups.”

4. I will show you fear in a handful of dust

5. “Fluff,” repeated Bessy. “Little bits, as fly off fro’ the cotton, when they’re carding it, and fill the air till it looks all fine white dust. They say it winds round the lungs and tightens them up. Anyhow, there’s many a one as works in a carding-room, that falls into a waste, coughing and spitting blood, because they’re just poisoned by the fluff.”

THE ANSWERS

1. Doris Lessing, Mara and Dann, ch. 1 (1999). The sister and brother of the title live during an Ice Age of the distant future; Europe is under ice, the Mediterranean is a hole in the ground and North Africa is tundra and swamp. The children are gradually making their way north from southern Africa which is now shockingly dry, barren and inhospitable to people, plants and animals. Only insects and reptiles thrive. At this point they are being sheltered by an elderly woman of the same race.

2. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, Ch. 11. (1861). This is the mouldering bridal feast of the eccentric Miss Havisham, to whom the young Pip is sent. She was apparently based on a Martha Joachim who went mad when her suitor shot himself, thenceforth dressing in white and living in seclusion, and also on "the White Woman of Berners Street", seen by Dickens as a child: "She is a conceited old creature, cold and formal in manner ... This is her bridal dress." ("Where We Stopped Growing")

3. Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials 2), ch. 4, “Trepanning” (1997). In a television interview, the author explained that Dust is used as a metaphor for matter becoming conscious of itself as the first step to wisdom. Here scientist Dr Mary Malone of the Dark Matter Research Unit is talking to Lyra, through whom she discovers that the particles are conscious and can communicate. The book was attacked by the Catholic Church for its assault on organised religion.

4. T S Eliot, The Waste Land, I. “The Burial of the Dead” (1922). Most people interpret the dust as death, though it is a popular source of imagery and quotation. For a complicated linked commentary on the poem, go to http://www.bigchalk.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/WOPortal.woa/wa/HWCDA/file?fileid=316033&flt=High_School&pathTitles=/Eliot_T_S_/Criticism_Commentary/Exploring_The_Wasteland_&version=2&tg=Literature

5. Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South, ch. xiii, “Soft breeze in a sultry place” (1855). Southern Minister's daughter Margaret is visiting mill-girl Bessy Higgins who herself is dying of an industrial disease contracted in the mill.

Literary Marches: March-April 2003

Mostly works for adults this time (5 is borderline).

1. Try—try—try—try—to think o’ something different—
Oh—my—God—keep—me from goin’ lunatic!

2. Rajkumar was swept along in the direction of the river. As he ran he became aware of a ripple in the ground beneath him, a kind of drumbeat in the earth, a rhythmic tremor that travelled up his spine through the soles of his feet. ... The first squad of soldiers marched past with their shouldered rifles. There was no rancour on the soldiers’ faces, no emotion at all.

3. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on bloodshod.

4. They had been going for an hour when they heard behind them a rhythmic thudding, like the ticking of a gigantic clock. ... At first sight it seemed that an enormous horizontal door was flying up the road towards them. It was a platoon of Welsh Guards in good order, rifles at the slope, led by a second-lieutenant. They came by at a forced march, their gaze fixed forwards, their arms swinging high.

5. Where the dim bare slopes that they had crossed should lie, he thought he saw groves of trees. But they were moving! Could it be that the trees of Fangorn were awake, and the forest was rising, marching over the hills to war? He rubbed his eyes wondering if sleep and shadow had deceived him; but the great grey shapes moved steadily onward. There was a noise like wind in many branches.

THE ANSWERS:

1. Rudyard Kiping, “Boots” ("Infantry Columns" seems to be an alternative title of this poem.) Many of his poems were sympathetic to the common soldier, usually having a bad time in India, but this one is set in Africa, probably during the Boer War, where a soldier is being driven mad by the unending regular rhythm of the boots. Popular Australian bass-baritone Peter Dawson turned it into a song during a train journey to Margate and recorded it in 1929. Someone called Todd Mauldin has recently set it "to a kinda cool middle-eastern techno thing."

2. Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace, ch. 3 (2000). An orphaned Indian streetboy is witnessing the arrival of the British forces in Mandalay in 1885 prior to the abdication and exile of King Thebaw; the book opens with the sound of their distant cannon upriver. The Burmese are astonished to see that the soldiers following the English in the next squad are Indian, and the book is partly about the uneasy Anglo-Indian relationship. This fascinating novel by the author of In An Antique Land shows us British colonialism from the point of view of the colonised, and takes us through to present-day Myanmar.

3. Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est”, 1917-1918. Probably the most famous anti-war poem, highly graphic in its description of the gassing of an exhausted foot soldier. No. 8 in The Nation's Favourite Poems.

4. Ian McEwan, Atonement, Part 2 (p. 240). A rare "show of discipline and cohesion" during the chaotic and straggling retreat to Dunkirk effectively conveyed in the second half of this excellent novel.

5. J R R Tolkien, The Two Towers, ch. iv, “Treebeard”. The second in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and recently filmed.

Literary Rabbits: April-May 2003

Remarkable lack of live and happy rabbits in adult literature! One work for adults, two for children, and two cross-overs. Rejected were rabbits in snares in Hardy, James Stephens and probably Nancy Mitford, and rabbits having their burrows dug up in John Clare. As a child I had a depressing book called "Fifteen Rabbits" by Felix Salten ("Bambi"). They all died by various unpleasant means - there was a grand massacre by shooters towards the end - with the exception of Hops and Plana, a male and female ready to start all over again. The most upsetting death was that of the cute baby Epi who was taken home by a little girl and left to die of thirst and hunger.

1. The hedge is thick and green with briar,
From their sand the conies creep

2. They were rabbits like himself, but quite furry and brand-new. They must have been very well made, for their seams didn't show at all, and they changed shape in a queer way when they moved; one minute they were long and thin and the next minute fat and bunchy, instead of always staying the same like he did.

3. “Ah, your favourites are amongst these!” I continued, turning to an obscure cushion full of something like cats. “A strange change of favourites,” she observed scornfully. Unluckily, it was a heap of dead rabbits.

4. “So-ho!” cried Kay, throwing his arm upwards to give the hawk a better take-off, and a rabbit was scooting across the close-nibbled turf in front of them, and Cully was in the air. The movement had surprised the Wart, the rabbit and the hawk, all three, and all three hung a moment in surprise.

5. He said that he was in the habit of coming to the garden with his father to get lettuces for their Sunday dinner.

ANSWERS

1. Walter de la Mare, “Nod”. "As a revelation of the wonders of the English language, de la Mare's poems for children are quite unrivalled," said W.H. Auden of this skilled and prolific writer (1873-1956). The peaceful and evocative poem "Nod" was first published in the Listeners & Other Poems in 1912 and conjures up a calm twilight landscape dimming into starlit and secure night, paralleling the process of relaxing into sleep. The Book Case can sell you a CD of the author reading it in 1934 (along with other luminaries such as Tennyson, Yeats, Graves, Frost ... reading their own work, £9.95) (also available at the British Library page http://www.bl.uk/services/publications/audio_05173.html) and you can find the home page of the Walter de la Mare Society at http://www.bluetree.co.uk/wdlmsociety/

2. Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit, 1922. This American story of a toy rabbit who is loved so much that after near-burning and abandonment he becomes real is still popular with children (and their parents); this extract is about the toy's first encounter with live rabbits, who are not impressed. You can find the whole story online (unillustrated) at http://www.mindspring.com/~mccarthys/cybrary/velvet.htm

3. Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, Vol. I, ch. II. Lockwood is failing to make polite conversation with Catherine the younger; things are about to get worse. This Catherine is Heathcliff's daughter-in-law, having married Linton, Heathcliff and Isabella's son. She is the daughter of Heathcliff's lost love Catherine and Edgar (Isabella's brother).

4. T H White, The Sword in the Stone, ch. 1. Kay's petulant behaviour in loosing the hawk when it isn't ready and the Wart's self-sacrificing resolution to stay out all night in the forest to try to recapture Cully results in the boy meeting King Pellinore and Merlin. The boy knows what a blow the loss of the hawk would be to Hob, the falconer, who had trained him. He later meets mad Cully again when he is a hawk himself. White had much experience of training hawks (see his book the Goshawk, 1951). The Sword in the Stone, the first book of The Once and Future King, was published in 1939 and was inspired by White's reading of Malory's Morte d'Arthur. The other three books are The Witch in the Wood (1940), The Ill-Made Knight (1941) and after a long gap,The Candle in the Wind published with the other books as The Once and Future King in 1958. A short fifth book, The Book of Merlyn, was subsequently discovered. This rabbit gets away.

5. Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, 1904. Benjamin Bunny leads his cousin Peter Rabbit into more trouble in Mr McGregor's garden. They are finally rescued from the cat by Benjamin's father. The contrasting body language of bold Benjamin and nervous Peter in the illustrations is wonderful.

Literary Mirrors, May-June 2003

Three works for adults, two for children.

1. And certainly the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist.

2. The mirror crack’d from side to side

3. ... she had never had this difficulty with the mirror there before. Even as she approached from a distance of forty feet, she could see that it was not going to let her pass; the pink was in fact innocently pale, the waistline was too high, the dress flared like an eight-year-old’s party frock. All it needed was rabbit buttons.

4. “ .. tomorrow, place the glass before you, and draw in chalk your own picture, faithfully; without softening one defect; omit no harsh line, smooth away no displeasing irregularity; write under it, ‘Portrait of a Governess, disconnected, poor, and plain.’”

5. They even wanted to fly up to heaven with (the mirror) to mock the angels, but the higher they flew, the more it grinned, so much so that they could hardly hold it, and at last it slipped out of their hands and fell to earth, shivered into hundreds of millions of billions of bits.

ANSWERS

1. Lewis Carroll - Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, Ch. I “Looking-Glass House”. This is where Alice notices she can pass through the glass over the mantlepiece into the reflected room. Carroll was fascinated by the notion of inversion, but according to Martin Gardner in The Annotated Alice, the looking-glass theme was added late to the story, which was originally all about chess. He also points out some of the subtler variations between Tenniel's famous mirrored illustrations.

2. Alfred Lord Tennyson, “The Lady of Shalott”, Part III. The Lady of Shalott brings her doom on herself by looking directly at the reality she is meant to observe second-hand, Sir Lancelot in all his bright regalia AND singing being too much for her to let pass. My notes say the poem is about the maladjustment of the aesthetic spirit to the conditions of ordinary life.

3. Ian McEwan, Atonement, Part 1, Ch. 9. The young heroine has dressed for dinner with some care, hoping to appear sophisticated; in a remarkably observant passage, a series of mirrors cruelly reflect back consecutive outfits, sending her back to change yet again.

4. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, Vol. II, Ch. I. In this famous passage, Jane Eyre is using her artistic skills to contrast her lowly appearance with that of the beautiful and stately Blanche Ingram; the exercise helps her retain her self-control over the disappointment of her hopes of Mr Rochester's love.

5. Hans Anderson, “The Snow Queen”, First Story. In this section, the demons have a distorting mirror which magnifies bad and minimises good; good thoughts appear as grins. When the mirror breaks, a piece goes into Kay's heart and he comes under the Snow-Queen's bleak spell until Gerda's love rescues him.

Literary Cooks, June-July 2003

1. A COOK they had with hem for the nones
To boille the chiknes with the marybones,
And poudre-marchant tart and galyngale.
Wel koude he knowe a draughte of Londoun ale.

2. .. the door burst open and the cook, fierce and furious, came in like a whirlwind, and stood on the corner of the carpet, with a broken basin in one hand and a threat in the other, which was clenched.

3. In the kitchen, Nelly is rolling out a crust. Nelly is herself, always herself; always large and red, regal, indignant, as if she’d spent her life in an age of glory and decorum that ended, forever, some ten minutes before you entered the room.

4. ... the cook took the cauldron of soup off the fire, and at once set to work throwing everything within her reach at the Duchess and the baby - the fire-irons came first; then followed a shower of saucepans, plates and dishes.

5. (She) was so very busy that she sweated great drops as she moved her saucepans. ... ; the wood was blazing, the brazen pan was hissing, and on the long kitchen table, amid the quarters of raw mutton, rose piles of plates that rattled with the shaking of the block on which spinach was being chopped.

Answers:

The only happy cooks here are Chaucer's (who's on holiday) and possibly the French one. Certainly the Nesbit cook has cause to complain since the children are constantly borrowing and breaking the tools of her trade. The children, unaware of how their food gets produced, think she is unreasonable, and everyone is happy when she is magically transported to a tropical island.

Daniel Pool in "What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew", says "Typically (Victorian cooks) worked in a hot kitchen, often in the basement - probably badly ventilated, since holes for ventilation were taxed as windows. And once a roaring fire in the coal stove was built to cook something it heated up the whole kitchen; it couldn't just be turned off like a gas or electric range." He attributes to this cooks' reputation for drinking on the job. In the TV series "The Edwardian Country House", one could see just how demanding the cook's job must have been.

Virginia Woolf in "Character in Fiction" aka "Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown" (1924) commented "The Victorian cook lived like a leviathan in the lower depths, formidable, silent, obscure, inscrutable; the Georgian cook is a creature of sunshine and fresh air; in and out of the drawing room, now to borrow the Daily Herald, now to ask advice about a hat." She attributes this to a shift in human relations in 1910. Nevertheless in "The Hours" she is terrorised by her cook so old traditions probably held good.

1. Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, General Prologue, ll. 379 - (1387-92)

2. E. Nesbit, The Phoenix and the Carpet, Ch. III “The Queen Cook” (1903)

3. Michael Cunningham, The Hours, “Mrs Woolf” (third) (1998)

4. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, ch. VI, “Pig and Pepper” (1865)

5. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, Pt 2, ch. 1 (1857)

Literary Dogs, July-August 2003

As usual, three quotations are from adult books and two from children's.

1. A hound it was, an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen. Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a smouldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flame.

2. ... whether the children saw him or not, they knew he was always there after sunset, keeping watch and ward, and “lanely” because his master had gone away to heaven

3. In the lands of the infidel Franks, the so-called Europeans, every dog has an owner. These poor creatures are paraded on the streets with chains around their necks, they’re fettered like the most miserable of slaves and dragged around in isolation.

4. Suddenly knowing what he had lost - whom he had lost, Ben shouted, “Brown!”

5. “I am so glad to know that you do not like them,” said the good Sir James. “I should never keep them for myself, but ladies usually are fond of these Maltese dogs. Here, John, take this dog, will you?”

ANSWERS

1. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles, ch. XIV (1902). In this book Holmes is brought back by popular demand from his death eight years previously to solve the mystery of the death of Sir Charles Baskerville, apparently caused by this monstrous and spectral hound. It's all done with phosphorous. The hound is never quite scary enough in filmed versions.

2. Eleanor Atkinson, Greyfriars Bobby, ch.11 (1940). Children's book fondly remembered by many, based on the true story of a dog who would not leave his master's grave. He has his own website at http://www.greyfriarsbobby.co.uk/cgi-bin/vote.pl where you are invited to vote on what sort of dog they should use in the film ("Skye Terrier" is winning by nearly 4,000 at present.) He also has a statue.

3. Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red, ch. 3, "I Am a Dog" (1998). Turkish bestseller set in 16th-century Istanbul; which of the talented miniaturists murdered a colleague and pushed him down a well? The story is told in turn by each of the suspects and by some of the subjects they are drawing: in this case, a dog. Everyone and everything also has something to say about philosophy, religion and the rules of art. There's a nice description by Mark Twain of the street dogs of Istanbul being too lazy to move even when being trodden on by a flock of sheep.

4. Philippa Pearce, A Dog So Small, ch. 19, "Brown" (1962). This passage is really the pivotal point in this story about a lonely boy who fantasises an ideal dog so strongly that he can't accept the real one he finally gets. At this point, very near the end, the miserable non-ideal young dog Brown has given up on him. (They are joyfully reunited in the last few sentences.) Philippa Pearce also wrote the prize-winning Tom's Midnight Garden. Both books go unusually deep into psychology for children's books.

5. George Eliot, Middlemarch, Book 1 “Miss Brooke”, ch.3 (1871-2). Nice well-meaning Sir James doesn't have a hope of winning Dorothea with cute little dogs, and settles down happily with her less idealistic sister Celia.

Literary Skylights : August-September 2003

Strange contradictory things, skylights - you don’t notice them much. They’re usually there to allow a little light into a bare and functional room. They’re often rather inaccessible. So they’re effective in literature for providing an unexpected exit, or access for rescuers or things of terror. They feature quite a lot too in supplying hope and cheer to characters confined in these bare and functional rooms: as in Little Princess and O. Henry’s story "The Skylight Room", if the characters can be content with the very limited view they provide (usually a sign of their inner strength and resourcefulness). Another contradiction is that if the character can find a means to climb to the skylight and open it, they are usually rewarded with a splendid view, better than a mere window could have afforded. In another of Rose Tremain’s novels, The Way I Found Her, a boy imprisoned in a dark room first realises that he is under the roof, and then manages gradually to make an overhead opening through the tiles, with a similar effect. There are many many skylights in seafaring novels but they aren’t usually crucial to the plot.

1. All that is known is that the fire began in the late evening, engulfed the workroom and spread ravenously upwards to my parents’ apartment, where, it seems, they were at supper. Their servant, Latimer, managed to open a small skylight onto the roof, to scramble up and endeavour to haul his elderly master and mistress to safety.

2. Ram Dass slipped through his attic window and walked across to hers as steadily and lightly as if he had walked on roofs all his life. He slipped through the skylight and dropped upon his feet without a sound. Then he turned to Sara and salaamed again. The monkey saw him and uttered a little scream.

3. “Quite so. That is the point. Bear that in mind. Now, would you kindly step over to that flap-window and smell the edge of the woodwork? I shall stay over here, as I have this handkerchief in my hand.”

4. Will lay terrified, shaking, feeling himself shake, and yet unable to move. He felt he must be going mad. Outside, the wind moaned, paused, rose into a sudden howl, and there was a noise, a muffled scraping thump, against the skylight in the ceiling of his room.

5. At the top of the house the apples are laid in rows,
And the skylight lets the moonlight in, and those
Apples are deep-sea apples of green.

ANSWERS

1. Rose Tremain, Restoration, Part 1, “The Five Beginnings”, 1989. Both parents of the self-important and self-centred narrator, Robert Merivel, die in this incident. His father had been glovemaker to the King, and through this tragedy the son achieves an introduction at court.

2. Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess, ch. 11, “Ram Dass”, 1905. A beneficial skylight here! All sorts of foods and comforts arrive through it for the deprived little girl thanks to a benevolent neighbour and his Indian servant.

3. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four, ch. VII “The Episode of the Barrel”, 1890. Doesn't Sherlock Holmes talk lovely? The team including a dog are tracking an aboriginal Andaman Islander who has accidentally trodden in some leaked creosote and escaped through the skylight. There's creosote on the handkerchief too. There's also an escape through a skylight in The Copper Beeches.

4. Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising, Part 1, “The Finding” - “Midwinter’s Eve”, 1973. One of the most memorable scary bits in the book - Will is sleeping in his absent elder brother's room at the top of the house when the skylight suddenly crashes in, dumping a load of snow, in which there is a rook's feather ...

5. John Drinkwater, “Moonlit Apples”, 1917. Poet and playwright, 1882-1937. A founder member of the Pilgrim Players, he went on to become the first manager of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. There's an interesting biography taken from Once They Lived in Gloucestershire: A Dymock Poets Anthology by Linda Hart at http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Neil_Maybin/FDP_JD.htm. Amongst other things it describes his love of the countryside and his collaboration as a Georgian with other well-known poets such as Gibson and Brooke. The poem goes on to evoke the peaceful other-worldliness of the "moon-washed apples of wonder".

Literary Cats, September - October 2003

As usual, three quotations are from works for adults and two from children’s books.

1. But oh he pricks and oh he prods
And turns upon her knee
Then lifteth up his innocent voice
In plaintive melody.

2. Smiling to herself, she took up the ball of wool again and something stirred on the mantlepiece. The china Cat twitched its china whisker and lifted its head and yawned. The children could see its glistening teeth and a long pink cat’s tongue.

3. Her conscious tail her joy declared:
The fair round face, the snowy beard,
The velvet of her paws ...

4. The cat, covered in dust and standing on its hindlegs, bowed to Margarita. Round its neck it was now wearing a made-up white bow tie on an elastic band, with a pair of ladies’ mother-of-pearl binoculars hanging on a chord. It had also gilded its whiskers.

5. But the wildest of all the wild animals was the Cat. He walked by himself, and all places were alike to him.

ANSWERS

These cats were mostly chosen for their recognisably cat-like behaviour - the Bulgakov is the exception.

1. Stevie Smith, “The Singing Cat” (from Selected Poems 1962). This fidgety cat is being carried on a train. Stevie Smith, 1902-1971, lived with her aunt in Palmers Green, London, and worked as a publisher's secretary. Cape initially rejected her poems and suggested fiction but by the 1970s her poetry was recognised and her poetry readings popular.

2. P. L. Travers, Mary Poppins Opens the Door, ch. III, “The Cat That Looked At a King”, 1944. Australian born Pamela Lyndon Travers (1899-1995) was a folklorist, mythographer and devotee of Gurdjieff, made famous by her Mary Poppins books, of which the first was saccharined up and filmed by Disney. There are various contradictory stories about her on the internet: she was secretive and possibly inventive about her private life. A documentary "The Shadow of Mary Poppins" was made for Australian TV in 2002 - the site http://members.fortunecity.com/roogulator/fantasy/shadowofmarypoppins.htm suggests that she and Mary Poppins shared the "essential dichotomy" of being "on one hand a lover of magical delights and things child-like, on another ... irascibly proud and determined." Her mystical side certainly comes through in the children's stories; in this one a china cat comes to life with the gift of seeing through the surface of things and questioning the unquestioned.

3. Thomas Gray, “On a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes” (1747). The cat belonged to Gray's friend Horace Walpole. Gray's poetic output was limited but highly crafted; his most well-known poem is of course his Elegy. He lived 1716-1771.

4. Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, ch. 22 “By Candlelight”, 1938. The talking cat Behemoth assists the Devil (The Master). Amazon's synopsis says "The Devil disguised as a magician descends upon Moscow in the 1930s with his riotous band, which includes a talking cat, and an expert assassin. Together they cause chaos in a society which denies the Devil's existence." There's a very detailed site about the book, which has cult status, at http://cr.middlebury.edu/public/russian/Bulgakov/public_html/

5. Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories, “The Cat That Walked By Himself”, 1902. (See "Dancers" answers above.)

Literary Tunnels: October-November 2003

As usual, three quotations are from works for adults and two from children’s books. They aren’t all train tunnels.

1. I opened the door, and stood on the step, while he stood in the doorway. There, was the Danger-light. There, was the dismal mouth of the tunnel. There, were the high wet stone walls of the cutting. There, were the stars above them.

2. The passage was two paces broad, as high as a tall man, and cut through the soil, without bricks or other lining; and what surprised me most was that it did not seem deserted nor mouldy and cob-webbed, as one would expect such a place to be, but rather a well-used thoroughfare; for I could see the soft clay floor was trodden with the prints of many boots, and marked with a trail as if some heavy thing had been dragged over it.

3. All morning we raced down up and down the tunnels - first North, then North-East, and so on. The noise was unimaginable; like shouting down a well. The skylights flew past at regular intervals, which had the effect of a constantly flashing light. This initially proved a little sickening, along with the almighty noise, but, in time, became quite exhilarating, with the smell of the heaving horses and Grimshaw’s exhortations adding to the drama.

4. Now in the dim attenuated light he saw the outlines of the passage ahead of him, and some letters inscribed on the curved roof above him. He turned his head, although it hurt him to do so, but the entrance through which he had come seemed to have disappeared and he was no longer exactly sure where he was. He tried to move forward; he had heard many times ...that there was one tunnel in the labyrinth that led straight into the church.

5. ... they dragged her in, and all three stood in the dark, damp, arched recess while the train roared louder and louder. It seemed as if it would deafen them. ... And now, with a rush and a roar and a rattle and a long dazzling flash of lighted carriage windows, a smell of smoke, and a blast of hot air, the train hurtled by, clanging and jangling and echoing in the vaulted roof of the tunnel.

ANSWERS

There were quite a lot of atmospheric descriptions of the insides of Victorian railway tunnels - they obviously made a big impression - so I went for tunnels that had something distinctive about them. There is also of course the story of the building of Summit Tunnel beyond Todmorden told in the now out-of-print novel A World From Rough Stones by Malcolm Macdonald.

1. Charles Dickens, “The Signal-Man”, 1866 (Household Words Christmas number). In this highly atmospheric story the doomed railway signal-man repeatedly sees an image of the driver of the train which will kill him, standing at the mouth of the tunnel and waving him out of the way, but cannot interpret it.

2. J. Meade Falkner, Moonfleet, ch. 3, “A Discovery”, 1898. The young hero has just discovered a smuggler's passage hidden under the graveyard. He spends quite a lot of time underground altogether. The author is always very precise about his subsoils.

3. Mick Jackson, The Underground Man, “From His Grace’s Journal - October 17th”, 1997. Booker-shortlisted novel about the eccentric 5th Earl of Portland who built extensive tunnels under his estate, and in this extract is racing a coach and horses up and down them.

4. Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor, ch 2, p. 40, 1985. I have to confess I found this book so dismal that I abandoned it at this point where a luckless twentieth-century lad has fallen into a tunnel in a derelict London churchyard and broken his leg. I've no idea if he got out again. I suspect not. Anyway, I remembered the tunnel. Website http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth148 tells us it "was inspired in part by Iain Sinclair's poem 'Lud Heat', written in 1975, which inferred a mystical power from the positioning of the six churches which the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor built in the East End of London during the reign of Queen Anne." The book won Whitbread and Guardian prizes.

5. E. Nesbit, Railway Children, ch xi, “The Hound in the Red Jersey”, 1906. Famously made into a successful film and the best-known of the author's non-magic books. E. Nesbit also goes into some detail about the visual, acoustic and atmospheric differences between travelling through a railway tunnel on a train and on foot, including the colour of the slime of the walls and the uncertain footing. The children have come into the tunnel to find the missing boy from the Grammar School paperchase, who has fallen and broken his leg. (If you plan to break your leg in a tunnel, best to be in a children's book, and avoid Peter Ackroyd at all costs.) It's clumsy Phyllis who needs dragging in.

Literary Colds: November-December 2003

Only one children's book this month.

1. Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold

2. "I perceive that you have been unwell lately. Summer colds are always a little trying." "I was confined to the house by a severe chill for three days last week. I thought, however, that I had cast off every trace of it." "So you have. You look remarkably robust."

3. They gave him what goes
With a cold in the nose,
And some more for a cold
In the head

4. And scattered about it, some in their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the Martians—dead!—slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; ... slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.

5. Two delightful twilight walks ... all over the grounds, and especially in the most distant parts of them ... where the trees were the oldest and the grass was longest and wettest had - assisted by the still greater imprudence of sitting in her wet shoes and stockings - given Marianne a cold so violent as ... would force itself on the concern of everybody and the notice of herself.

ANSWERS

1. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 1. “The Burial of the Dead”, 1922. Madame Sosostris is evidently a London-dwelling emigre from her name and dodgy English. She proceeds to interpret a Tarot reading. Eliot points out in the notes that he has made some of the Tarot cards up. The website http://members1.chello.nl/~a.vanarum8/EliotProject/Waste_notes/Waste_A.htm says that her name is "A mock Egyptian name (suggested to Eliot by 'Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana,' the name assumed by a character in Aldous Huxley's novel Crome Yellow who dresses up as a gypsy to tell fortunes at a fair)." Another website dedicated to interpreting The Waste Land is mentioned under "Dust" above. I don't know why Mme S. has a cold, except that it fits in with the seediness of 1920s London and she might appear too glamorous if she didn't.

2. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, “The Stockbroker’s Clerk”, 1894. Holmes hs deduced Watson's recent illness from his new slippers unusually bought in summer.

3. A. A. Milne, Now We Are Six, “Sneezles”, 1927. One of the poems where one feels rather uncomfortably that Milne is "getting at" his infant son. He does it more blatantly in "Vespers" and "The Engineer".

4. H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, Ch. 8 “Dead London”, 1898. This classic science fiction story of a Martian invasion of Earth, and the systematic extermination of the human race famously led to national panic when Orson Welles adapted it for radio in 1938. Despite their advanced technology, the Martians are no match for viruses. Isaac Azimov apparently read the book as an attack on British colonialism, but this seems doubtful, although it is certainly very prescient about the destructiveness of later wars. The narrator's description of silent dead London prior to his discovery of the dead invaders is highly effective.

5. Jane Austen, Sense & Sensibility, Vol. III, Ch. 6, 1811. Which of course leads to Marianne's life-threatening fever, Colonel Brandon's opportunity to prove his mettle and Willougby's repentance. And still they claim that you can't catch cold from getting your feet wet.

Literary Stars: December 2003-January 2004

As usual, three quotations are from works for adults and two from children’s books.

1. And still they were the same bright, patient stars

2. But the glory kept shining and bright in my eyes,
And the stars going round in my head.

3. ... this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire ...

4. He swished his long palomino tail, raised his hand towards the leafy canopy overhead, then lowered it slowly, and as he did so, the light in the room dimmed, so that they now seemed to be sitting in a forest clearing by twilight, and stars appeared on the ceiling.

5. And foreign constellations west
Each night above his mound.

ANSWERS

1. John Keats, “Hyperion”, Book 1, 1818-19. An unfinished epic, the story centres on the one Titan still at liberty, the sun-god Hyperion, the others (Saturn, Thea, Enceladus ...) having been defeated and chained by the new Olympian gods. Coelus, the father of the Titans, has just urged the angry and frustrated Hyperion to seek out his fallen brethren and take action. The vast murmur ceases but the stars remain.

2. Robert Louis Stevenson, (1850–1894). "Escape at Bedtime" from A Child’s Garden of Verses,1885. "One of the best recollections of childhood in verse" says my Chambers Biographical Dictionary, and the Guardian also gave the book a glowing review on 13 May 1885: "He not only knows what the children like, but he likes it along with them. ... Mr Stevenson knows the secret things that haunt rain-pools and grasses and dusky corners of firelit rooms". Read the whole review at http://books.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchives/story/0,12137,1010570,00.html

3. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, Sc. 2, c.1601. Hamlet already knows that his old friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are up to no good, and is fobbing them off with a description of socially acceptable ennui - which is probably true but beside the point. The quotation is of course from the famous "What a piece of work is man" speech - which concludes with R&G's news of the arriving players.

4. J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, ch. 27, “The centaur and the sneak”. The centaur, whose name is Firenze (the centaurs have random but fitting names - Magorian, Bane ...: Rowling is an discerning magpie), is the new astrology teacher since Professor Trelawney's removal by the dreadfully recognisable Umbridge.

5. Thomas Hardy, “Drummer Hodge” from Poems of the Past and Present, 1902. The poem deals with the death and unceremonious burial of a young Dorset farmboy in the South African War, 1899-1902. Not only the landscape, but even the stars are alien to this unlucky and uneducated permanent exile, but the scene nevertheless has a sort of grandeur.

Literary Kings: January-February 2004

Five kings arriving a week too late for Epiphany - only one from a work for children.

1. The king comes here tonight.

2. . “We are not little men, and there is nothing that we are afraid of except drink, and we have signed a Contrack on that. Therefore, we are going away to be Kings.”

3. A face looked out but it wasn’t the King’s.

4. An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king

5. The cannons of his adversary were thundering in the tattered morning when the Majesty of England drew himself up to meet the future with a peaceful heart.

ANSWERS

1. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act I, Sc. V, c. 1606. Messenger delivers this crucial line to Lady Macbeth and sets the whole tragedy in motion. The King of course is Duncan who will be murdered by his hosts.

2. Rudyard Kipling, “The Man Who Would Be King”, Phantom Rickshaw/Wee Willie Winkie, 1890. Famously filmed in 1975 with Michael Caine, Sean Connery and Christopher Plummer. The two scurrilous ex-soldiers think they will be welcomed as warlords in north-west Afghanistan but come to grief.

3. A. A. Milne, “Buckingham Palace”, When We Were Very Young, 1924. This would have been George V. Christopher Milne complained in his autobiography that the real "Alice" was not so off-hand.

4. Percy Bysshe Shelley, "England in 1819". George III, was sympathetically portrayed by Alan Bennett in his play The Madness of George III, later filmed. Bennett writes entertainingly about the play's development in Writing Home, and gives his sources for the porphyria idea. George III ("Although of German blood ... a typical Englishman, well-meaning and intensely patriotic" says my Chambers) was succeeded in 1820 by George IV of whom no one has much good to say. Shelley left England for Italy in 1818 and was soon to write both The Masque of Anarchy denouncing the Peterloo Massacre and Oedipus Tyrannus or Swellfoot the Tyrant (1820), attacking George IV. The sonnet "England in 1819" proceeds to cast scorn on the country's oblivious and corrupt government, its army, legal system and church, and ends with a vague hope of succour for the suffering people.

5. T H White, The Candle in the Wind (Once & Future King, Book IV) ch. XIV, 1958. See above under "Rabbits" for the development of the series. This sentence concludes the final book as the now old King Arthur, the Wart of the first book, awaits his defeat at the hands of his illegitimate son Mordred - representing the defeat of Right by Might. The old King has just asked the young Thomas Malory to escape the coming battle and carry on his ideas.

LITERARY BELLS: FEBRUARY-MARCH 2004

Three from works for adults, two for children.

1. And the Bellman cried ‘Silence! not even a shriek!’
And excitedly tinkled his bell.

2. “It isn’t the buoy that’s moving,” said John. “It’s us.” They swept past it, missing it by only a yard. The heavy hammer in the cage swung against the bell when they were near enough almost to touch the buoy. The melancholy “Clang!” boomed in their ears. They read the big white letters painted on the side of the cage ... “BEACH END.” A moment later the buoy had faded away into the fog, and the next “Clang!” sounded out of nothingness.

3. ... was it yesterday
We heard the sweet bells over the bay?
In the caverns where we lay,
Through the surf and through the swell,
The far-off sound of a silver bell?

4. The second bell, a harsh, rowdy bell, Mosrael was the waker, the bell (she) should never use, the bell whose sound was a seesaw, throwing the ringer further into Death as it brought the listener into Life.

5. But when he had set them going, when he felt the whole cluster of bells move under his hands, when he saw—for he could not hear it—the palpitating octave ascending and descending in that enormous diapason, like a bird fluttering from bough to bough—when the demon of music, with his dazzling shower of stretti, trills, and arpeggios, had taken possession of the poor deaf creature, then he became happy once more, he forgot his former woes, and as the weight lifted from his heart his face lit up with joy.

ANSWERS

1. Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), The Hunting of the Snark, Fit the Third, "The Baker's Tale", 1876. "A poem over which an unstable, sensitive soul might very well go mad," says Martin Gardner in his introduction to The Annotated Snark: "one shudders to imagine ... a child of today reading and enjoying it" although its author intended it as a nonsense ballad for children. Gardner further mentions "the agony of anticipating one's loss of being" - "The Snark is ... a poem of existential agony." At the point quoted above, the forgetful Baker, also known as Hi, Thing-um-a-jig, etc., has just fainted in the middle of the Bellman's description of the Snark. He has been extensively roused by the company and now passes on his uncle's warning of the Boojum species of Snark: "You will softly and silently vanish away,/And never be met with again!" - which of course happens to him at the very end of the poem.

2. Arthur Ransome (1884-1967). We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea, ch. viii, “The Beach End Buoy”, 1937. What a fantastic book this is! Not only does Ransome unobtrusively cover every tiny detail of tides, weather, geography and housekeeping in making the adventure realistic: the story also covers a wide range of psychological reactions when the children accidentally drift out to sea on someone else's small cutter. The narrative drive is tremendous - continual vital decisions having to be made immediately - as sleepless John and seasick Susan try to behave responsibly towards the boat's owner, their younger brother and sister, their anxious mother waiting back in a rented cottage, and towards other shipping. Even the detail of Jim's being held up on the bus by an old lady blocking the gangway at the wrong time and the children vainly watching the coming and going of buses on the shore from the boat make it all ring so true, and the mostly absent parents are complex and rounded characters with their own relationship. The passage quoted above is when the anchor fails for the second time and the children realise that they are now on their own out at sea, in dangerous waters, in a fog. Unable to see anything and having believed they were safely stationary, they had been puzzled by the apparent fast approach of the huge bell of the buoy. Arthur Ransome was born in Leeds, and apart from his famous children's books, worked as a journalist, sympathised with the Trotskyist cause in Russia, and married Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina, Trotsky's secretary.

3. Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), “The Forsaken Merman” from The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems, 1849. The merman is mourning his lost human wife Margaret who has abandoned him and their children for the Christian religion (the bell in the above extract is from the church on the shore). Matthew Arnold used to be celebrated as a great poet and literary critic and "The Forsaken Merman" was much anthologised and quoted. He "advocated literary and cultural values as an antidote to the progressive materialism of Victorian society" (Mac. Enc.) and caused a stir with his advanced treatment of scripture and personal doubts. The choice of words ("little, grey", "her eyes were sealed") in this poem implies a narrowness of vision in conventional Christianity, which contrasts with the wild grandeur of the sea scenes. See notes on "Dover Beach" under "Seashores" above.

4. Garth Nix, Sabriel, Ch. 5, 1995. First of a series of fantasy fiction for older children by an award-winning Australian author. The books are set in a world where a wall divides the Old Kingdom, a realm of magic and the order of the Charter, now spiralling out of control, from a realm more akin to our own in the early 1900s. This story concerns the young daughter of the Abhorsen, a kind of anti-necromancer, who inherits his responsibility for making sure the Dead stay dead. The primary tools in this task are a set of five bells, each with their own names, natures and magical powers. Personally I had rapidly had enough of prolonged chases by disintegrating dead things (the book is after all partly aimed at teenage boys) but those aside, there is a wealth and depth of striking ideas and originality in the series. The correct flowing of the Charter is a source of infinite strength; Free Magic is enormously powerful and often destructive; a balance must be kept between the two. In an interesting interview with Geoff Fox in Books for Keeps, Jan. 2004, the author says he grew up on Tolkien, Garner, Le Guin, Wynne Jones and Cooper, got the idea of stages of death from his grandfather's series of strokes, and the Wall from a photo of Hadrian's Wall showing green fields on one side and snow-covered hills on the other. The effective boarding-school scenes predate Harry Potter. See http://www.garthnix.co.uk

5. Victor Hugo (1802–1885), Hunchback of Notre Dame, Book VII.iii “The Bells”, 1831. The novel was titled Notre Dame de Paris in its original French version - "a pretentious but picturesque historical romance" says my Chambers Bibliographical Dictionary. Wayne Burrows in the Oxford Good Fiction Guide calls Hugo "the most prolific and influential figure of French Romanticism". This novel tells how corrupt archdeacon Frollo plans to kidnap gypsy Esmeralda but is foiled by the deaf and deformed bellringer Quasimodo. The dramatic plot and photogenic setting make it highly filmable and both the Charles Laughton and Disney versions are effective. Hugo's Les Miserables has also of course been a great success on stage.

LITERARY QUEENS: MARCH-APRIL 2004

To mark International Women’s Day, some Queens: three quotations from works for adults, two for children.

1. “What do you mean by ‘If you really are a Queen’? What right have you to call yourself so? You ca’n’t be a Queen, you know, till you’ve passed the proper examination.’”

2. ’Ave you ’eard o’ the Widow at Windsor
With a hairy gold crown on ’er ’ead?
She ’as ships on the foam - she ’as millions at ’ome,
An’ she pays us poor beggars in red.

3. The cold queen of England is looking in the glass

4. The blue-silk, lace-trimmed cloak did indeed hide some of the Queen’s startling splendours, but the hat fitted very badly. It had pink roses in it; and there was something about the coat or the hat or the Queen, that made her look somehow not very respectable.

5. It was a memorable hand; a thin hand with long fingers always curling as if round orb or sceptre; a nervous, crabbed, sickly hand; a commanding hand too; a hand that had only to raise itself for a head to fall; a hand, he guessed, attached to an old body that smelt like a cupboard in which furs are kept in camphor; which body was yet caparisoned in all sorts of brocades and gems; and held itself very upright though perhaps in pain from sciatica; and never flinched though strung together by a thousand fears; and the Queen’s eyes were light yellow.

ANSWERS

1. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, ch. ix, “Queen Alice”, 1872. This is the bossy Red Queen speaking to Alice who started as a white pawn and according to the rules of chess has earned the right to be a Queen by reaching the eighth row. See Martin Gardner's Annotated Alice for all the moves of the game. Both Queens proceed to give Alice a bad time with nonsense questions until they go to sleep in Alice's lap.

2. Rudyard Kipling, “Widow at Windsor”, Barrack Room Ballads, 1892. This acclaimed collection contained such popular poems as "Gunga Din", "Mandalay", "Danny Deever", "Fuzzy-Wuzzy" and "Tommy" and was both about and aimed at the ordinary soldier. Those who see him as a tub-thumping imperialist often forget this side of him. The Widow of course is Queen Victoria in whose name thousands of "beggars in red" littered the globe with their bones.

3. G K Chesterton, “Lepanto”, 1911. This energetic poem commemorates the important sea-battle in 1571 against the hitherto invincible Turkish fleet, which ended its threat to Europe from the sea. The poem was written for a newspaper, Eye Witness, founded in 1911 by Hilaire Belloc and GKC's brother, to "fight against plutocracy and combat political corruption" (Stephen Medcalf, Introduction to Poems for All Purposes) - and finished under extreme pressure of time (with the postman saying he had 10 minutes to catch the train - Medcalf) to appear on 7th October, the battle's anniversary. Medcalf points out that Chesterton doesn't mention that Christians as well as Muslims used galley slaves, and that the heroic Don John of Austria profited from selling off the slaves after the battle. Since the Pope had excommunicated Elizabeth I in 1570 and was urging her Catholic subjects to depose her, it is unlikely she would have responded to his call to arms in 1571. She also had her cousin Mary Queen of Scots to worry about. The St Bartholomew massacre of Protestants took place in France the following year.

4. E. Nesbit, The Story of the Amulet, ch. viii, “The Queen in London”, 1906. The wilful and strong-minded Queen of Babylon has turned up in Edwardian London and has already caused a near-riot by her bright and presumably immodest dress. She's now demanding to meet the Royal Family and the children are about to divert her with a visit to the British Museum - which causes further trouble. The author uses the Babylonian Queen to express her own views on the stunted lives of the London poor.

5. Virginia Woolf, Orlando, ch. 1, 1929. This is Elizabeth I again, this time elderly, being offered a bowl of rose-water by the young, kneeling Orlando. The novel appeared between To the Lighthouse and A Room of One's Own, and tells the story of a beautiful gender-bending young man/woman who survives from Tudor times to 1928. "Woolf examines the meanings of masculinity and femininity as these definitions changed in Europe over the course of four hundred years" says http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/orlando.html which also gives links to discussions about Sally Potter's 1993 film of the novel. "Orlando, which has been called 'the longest and most charming love-letter in literature', commemorates the love affair between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West," (on whom the character of Orlando is based) says http://orlando.jp.org/VWWARC/DAT/clarke.html

LITERARY MINES & POTHOLES: April-May 2004

Now for a claustrophobic quiz: two of the quotations are from books for children and three for adults.

1. We were buried in the bowels of a huge snow-clad peak. Thousands of feet above us the fresh air rushed over the white snow, but no sound of it reached us. We were separated by a long tunnel and five feet of rock even from the awful chamber of the dead; and the dead make no noise.

2. Both the children had the greatest difficulty in entering the tunnel. For the first yard or so it sloped downwards, and then turned uphill, not sharply, but enough to cause acute discomfort at the bend.

3. When you have finally got there .... you crawl through the last line of pit props and see opposite you a shiny black wall three or four feet high. This is the coal face. ... The first impression of all .... is the frightful, deafening din from the conveyor belt which carries the coal away. You cannot see very far, because the fog of coal dust throws back the beam of your lamp, but you can see on either side of you the line of half-naked kneeling men ... driving their shovels under the fallen coal and flinging it swiftly over their left shoulders.

4. Through one narrow passage after another, over lumps of rock and sand and clay, the thread guided her, until she came to a small hole through which she had to creep.

5. Weir had gone on his hands and knees as the height of the tunnel decreased to about three feet. The sides of it pressed in on them and Stephen found it hard to see the beam of Weir’s lamp ahead of him. His own seemed to illuminate only the nails on the soles of Weir’s boots and the occasional glimpse of cloth on his slowly advancing rear.

ANSWERS

1. H Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines, ch. 18 “We Abandon Hope”, 1885. Wicked old Gagool has just trapped the three English explorers underground in "Solomon's Treasure Chamber", full of tusks and diamonds but no light and little food and water. She was crushed to death herself while fighting the loyal but extremely politically incorrect Foulata. Fortunately our heroes soon notice a draught and let themselves out via a stone trap-door in the floor ... Peter Hunt in his Introduction to Children's Literature places this and several other old-fashioned gungho classics "in the no man's land of books that were read by adolescents of the last generation ... now rapidly becoming at one extreme scholarly curiosities, and at the other, the stuff of which action movies are made."

2. Alan Garner, Weirdstone of Brisingamen, ch. 14, “The Earldelving”, 1960. Susan and Colin are making a deeply unpleasant underground journey in Cheshire, guided by a couple of dwarves and in flight from svarts and the like. To get finally to daylight they have to wriggle along "a medium-size rabbit-hole" with kinks in it, including a hairpin bend and a two-yard underwater stretch. I found it all very upsetting and had to have a cup of tea to recover.

3. George Orwell, Road to Wigan Pier, Part I, ii, 1937. Self-explanatory, really. The book is a "passionate, factual document of the Depression in the North of England" says Trevor Hoyle in the Oxford Good Fiction Guide (OGFG).

4. George Macdonald, The Princess and the Goblin, ch.xx, “Irene’s Clue”, 1872. Princess Irene has followed her magic "grandmother"'s almost invisible thread from her bed, up and into the mountain where the young miner Curdie has been imprisoned by the goblins. She soon comes to an apparent impasse and temporarily despairs of ever getting out again, but her determination leads her doggedly to clear away the stones until she finds Curdie. Peter Hunt calls the strongly Puritan Macdonald a "subversive innovator" - "the books are powerfully symbolic, and have serious things to say about eschatology, mysticism (and) growth".

5. Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong, Part Two, “France 1916”, 1993. See "Draughts" above and my review on the "Words" page. Dickie James in the OGFG says "The descriptions of Stephen's experiences in the dark, surreal world of the trenches are vivid."

LITERARY TICKING CLOCKS, MAY-JUNE 2004

As usual, two of the quotations are from books for children and three for adults. Sorry, no crocodiles!

1. She let the lonely clock on the landing count off fifteen minutes into the abyss of eternity, and asked: “Shall I put the light out?”

2. And the dog, his nose in the wind, just sat back, watchfully ticking.

3. There was a grave clock, ticking somewhere up the staircase; and there was a songless bird in the same direction, pecking at his cage, as if he were ticking too. The parlour-fire ticked in the grate. There was only one person on the parlour-hearth, and the loud watch in his pocket ticked audibly.

4. The hollow darkness around her vibrated with sound; it was a safe sound - solid and regular; and, far above her head, she saw the movement of the pendulum; it gleamed a little in the half light, remote and cautious in its rhythmic swing. [ ... ] Their clock ... after which her family was named! For two hundred years it had stood here, deep-voiced and patient, guarding their threshold and measuring their time.

5. The hands on the hall-clock pointed to half-past six in the morning. The house was a country residence in West Somersetshire, called Combe-Raven. The day was the fourth of March, and the year was eighteen hundred and forty-six. No sounds but the steady ticking of the clock, and the lumpish snoring of a large dog stretched on a mat outside the dining-room door, disturbed the mysterious morning stillness of hall and staircase.

ANSWERS

1. Joseph Conrad: Secret Agent, ch. viii, 1906. This atmospheric passage underlines the appalling failure of communication between husband and wife. Later in the book, in a shocking passage, what at first appears to be the ticking of a clock is in fact something much nastier.

2. Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth, ch. 2 “Beyond Expectations”, 1961. This is the Watchdog, who of course has the body of a clock. And is called Tock. Bored Milo ("who has plenty of time") receives an unexpected present and finds himself in a strange new world full of verbal and numerical puns and conundrums.

3. Dickens, Little Dorrit, ch. 13, "Patriarchal", 1855-57. The false Patriarch, old Casby, lives in a "sober, silent, airtight house" off the Gray's Inn Road. When he leaves the room, the ticking becomes audible again.

4. Mary Norton, The Borrowers, ch. 7, 1952. Arrietty is out on her first borrowing expedition with her father. The entrance to their home is under the grandfather clock, which cannot be moved. (And when Mrs Driver has it moved to block up the Borrowers' entrance and kill them, the clock stops.)

5. Wilkie Collins, No Name, ch. 1, 1862. During the extended opening sequence, the house slowly comes to life with yawning servants making their way downstairs, followed at intervals by members of the family and the governess, with the youngest daughter coming down for breakfast at 10.05. After a bit everything goes pear-shaped and the daughters have to cope as best they can - with great ingenuity in Magdalen's case. Mark Ford in the Penguin edition calls it an "exposure of the strategic manoeuvring and manipulation of identity that determine the social battle for survival." It would make a wonderful TV series.

LITERARY SNAKES, JUNE-JULY 2004

A highly literary quiz this month, but still with two quotations from children’s books

1. He turned twice or thrice in a big circle, weaving his head from right to left. Then he began making loops and figures of eight with his body, and soft, oozy triangles that melted into squares and five-sided figures, and coiled mounds, never resting, never hurrying, and never stopping his low humming song. It grew darker and darker, till at last the dragging, shifting coils disappeared, but they could hear the rustle of the scales.

2. He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips

3. She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue,
Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue;
Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard,
Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr’d;
And full of silver moons, that as she breathed,
Dissolved ...

4. ... on his rear,
Circular base of rising folds, that towrd
Fold above fold a surging Maze, his Head
Crested aloft, and Carbuncle his Eyes;
With burnisht Neck of verdant Gold, erect
Amidst his circling Spires, that on the grasse
Floated redundant

5. God eyed the Puff-Adder anxiously. He didn’t trust this snake at all, with its eye-chips of granite. He was almost sorry he’d made him. When he’d pressed those eyes into place one had cut his thumb, and the wound had festered for days.

ANSWERS

1. Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book, Book 1, “Kaa’s Hunting”, 1894. Kaa, the python, is mesmerising the Bandar-log (monkeys) preparatory to eating them. Baloo and Bagheera also come under his spell which luckily has no effect on Mowgli.

2. D. H. Lawrence, “The Snake”, from The Dial, 1921. This poem was written during Lawrence's years in Italy, at Taormina, following his prosecution for obscenity in England. Lawrence feels belatedly he should try and kill the snake but regrets it. There's a history of The Dial magazine, in which it was first published, at http://virtual.clemson.edu/groups/dial/dialhist.htm

3. John Keats, “Lamia”, 1820. The source of this poem is Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, also the source of St Agnes Eve. The lady and philosopher represent two adverse types of illusion and reality. In the poem Hermes releases this rather highly-coloured snake from her enchantment so that she can be free to pursue a "youth of Corinth" whom she loves. In exchange she reveals to Hermes the secret whereabouts of a nymph he's pursuing. Lamia and Lycius are happy together until their wedding feast where she is recognised in her true serpent form by the old philosopher Apollonius. Lamia then vanishes and Lycius dies. Keats was seriously ill by the time of this poem's publication, and died early the following year.

4. John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IX, ll.497-503, 1667-74. The serpent, Satan, appears to Eve in beautiful form to tempt her.

5. Ted Hughes, Tales of the Early World, “The Guardian”, 1988. Michael Morpurgo reports Ted Hughes as agreeing with his regret "that the literary world considered children’s books lesser things ... as people didn’t think so much of his children’s books ..." Certainly Tales of the Early World, with their not-quite-in-control God, his rancid, mad and powerful old mother and highly individual animal characters, are a delight. In this story God is having trouble getting the Woman he has created to come to life. His Mum, a cosmic cat and a baby help out.

LITERARY STRIKING CLOCKS, JULY-SEPTEMBER 2004

Only one quotation from a children’s book this time.

1. It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.

2. A distant clock struck what sounded to me just like eight. I listened hard and suspiciously. Soon another clock began, on a loud, decisive note. In a leisurely fashion it gave an indisputable eight. Then I knew things were awry.

3. Everybody in the world was ringing a bell. The echoes clashed and chimed and rhymed in the chilly midnight dark. Then all of a sudden there was silence. And out of the silence, solemn and deep, the sound of a great clock striking. “Boom!” said Big Ben. It was the first stroke of Midnight. At that moment something stirred in the Nursery. There came the sound of clattering hooves.

4. Other clocks struck eight from time to time - one gloomily from the gaol, another from the gable of an almshouse, with a preparatory creak of machinery, more audible than the note of the bell; a row of tall, varnished case-clocks from the interior of a clock-maker’s shop joined in one after another just as the shutters were enclosing them, like a row of actors delivering their final speeches before the fall of the curtain; then chimes were heard stuttering out the Sicilian Mariners’ Hymn ...

5. To where St Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

ANSWERS

Striking clocks used to be part of everyday normality, a sign that society was in order. In the oldest quotation, the Hardy, they also signal the individuality of the parts of that society. By the 1920s, the Eliot quotation, the motions are still gone through but their life is in question. In the sentence which opens the Orwell book, society is indeed in order, but of a dreadfully distorted kind; the Wyndham extract points a sharp contrast between reassuring signs of normality and their evident lack in reality. In the only children's extract, the emotionally-charged sound of Big Ben at midnight on New Year's Eve opens the door to a joyful alternative world over twelve pages while the clock finishes its twelve strokes; return to everyday normality is a constant feature of the Mary Poppins books.

1. George Orwell, 1984, Ch. 1 (1949)

2. John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, ch. 1, "The End Begins" (1951)

3. P. L. Travers - Mary Poppins Opens the Door - ch. vii, “Happy Ever After” (1944)

4. Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge, ch. iv (1886)

5. T S Eliot, The Waste Land, 1. “The Burial of the Dead” (1922)

LITERARY WALLS, SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2004

Two extracts from books for children, the rest for adults.

1. This loam, this roughcast, and this stone doth show
That I am that same wall; the truth is so.

2. In three days he had succeeded, with the utmost precaution, in removing the cement, and exposing the stone-work. The wall was built of rough stones, among which, to give strength to the structure, blocks of hewn stone were at intervals imbedded. It was one of these he had uncovered, and which he must remove from its socket.

3. Howsoever carefully she looked, she could see nothing but thickly growing, glossy, dark green leaves. She was very much disappointed. Something of her contrariness came back to her as she paced the wall and looked over it at the tree-tops inside.

4. Now he could discern the wall and, looking upwards, the triple strand of wire and the cruel hooks which held it. Metal wedges, like climbers’ pitons, had been driven into the brick.

5. A great and never-ceasing smother of noise: voices, marching feet, turning wheels, the ring of hammer on armourer's anvil, the clear calling of trumpets over all. This was the great Wall of Hadrian, shutting out the menace of the north.

ANSWERS

As could be expected, all these literary walls derive their importance from shutting people in or out.

1. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V Sc. I, Snout as Wall, pre-1598. The tinker Snout is representing the wall that divides the two lovers Pyramus and Thisbe in the play the working men put on for the court. He only gets this part after the first rehearsal when they realise their problem:

"Snug: You can never bring in a wall. What say you, Bottom?

Bottom: Some man or other must present Wall; and let him have about him some plaster, or some loam, or some rough-cast about him, to signify wall; and let him hold his fingers thus, and through that cranny shall Pyramus and Thisbe whisper."

McLeish & Unwin's Pocket Guide to Shakespeare's Plays comments "Snout plays Wall with great dedication but no skill whatsoever, grunting out his lines and hurrying offstage as soon as he decently can" -

"Thus have I, Wall, my part discharged so;
And, being done, thus Wall away doth go."

2. Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo, ch. 15, 1844-5. Edmund Dantes, imprisoned on false charges for political reasons, has finally found a means of escape: by dislodging stones in the dungeon wall he is able to communicate with another prisoner. There was recently an enjoyable French TV version of this story, starring Gerard Depardieu.

3. Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden, ch. viii “The Robin Who Showed the Way”, 1911. Lonely, cross Mary, helped by the proximity of the friendly robin, has just found the key to the locked garden buried in the ground, but the door is hidden under the ivy. Later in the chapter, a gust of wind stirs the ivy and reveals the door. Mary is finally able to enter the garden and restore it to health, and thus start Colin on the road to recovery.

4. John Le Carre, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, ch. 26 “In From the Cold”, 1963. "The finest spy story ever written", said Graham Greene. It tells of "one last breathlessly perilous assignment for the agent who wants desperately to end his career of espionage - to come in from the cold." The wall in the quotation, very near the end of the book, is the Berlin Wall.

5. Rosemary Sutcliff, The Eagle of the Ninth, ch. 11 “Across the Frontier”, 1954. Young centurion Marcus and ex-slave/gladiator Esca, a Brigante, are about to cross Hadrian's Wall on a mission to discover the truth about Marcus's father's lost legion and its eagle standard. Because of the dangers beyond Roman-controlled territory they are disguised as travelling opticians. Rosemary Sutcliff, who was wheelchair-bound for most of her life, wrote a number of convincing historical novels for young people. C. Walter Hodges's illustrations for the 1977 Puffin edition do the book no favours - the terrifying figures from the pagan ritual of the northern clan are far more impressive in the text than in the bathetic illustrations.

LITERARY BUTTONS: OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 2004

Two quotations are from works for adults, two for children, and one from a crossover.

1. We made good company for each other. Alan, indeed, expressed himself most lovingly; and taking a knife from the table, cut me off one of the silver buttons from his coat.

2. A smell of sulphur and burned rubber drifted through the park. The Park Wardress sniffed. “What's that smell?" she asked. "Children, who of you's smelling?" Faint electric shocks were noticeable in the ground. The Park Keeper began to shift his feet uneasily. His shiny metal buttons were flashing small blue sparks.

3. He was shocked. For every perfect button, smooth-edged, evenly polished, showing no crack or chip, with its eye-holes symmetrically positioned, there were four or five or even six buttons which exhibited evident and undeniable defects. He felt sorrowful. The buttons seemed to look beseechingly at him, to beg him to overlook their individual imperfections.

4. He gave a terrific squirm. Buttons burst off in all directions. He was through, with a torn coat and waistcoat, leaping down the steps like a goat, while bewildered goblins were still picking up his nice brass buttons on the doorstep.

5. Pray you, undo this button.

ANSWERS

1. Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped, ch. 11 “The Captain Knuckles Under”, 1886. The speaker, David Balfour, along with the fervent Jacobite Alan Breck (Stewart), has just fought off the crew of the ship on which he has been taken captive. Alan is very proud of his fine French coat with silver buttons, and it is a mark of his esteem for David after the fight that he sacrifices one of the buttons given him by his father. It later helps David prove his credentials.

2. Tove Jansson, Moominsummer Madness, ch. 6 “About revenge on Park Keepers”, 1955. Rebellious Snufkin, like his father the Joxter, has a deep loathing of authoritarian park keepers, and has sown Hattifattener seeds on Midsummer Eve. Hattifatteners are electric and are attracted to the park keeper's metal buttons.

3. Rose Tremain, Music and Silence, Part One, “Copenhagen, 1629 - Buttons”, 1999. The novel is based around King Christian IV of Denmark. In this passage an old button-maker gives the 6-year-old prince a bag of buttons as a gift. The little boy is thrilled with their beauty, but his father has warned him against shoddiness and the need to rid Denmark of bad craftsmanship. He discards all but the (comparatively few) perfect buttons, but his joy has gone.

4. J R R Tolkien, The Hobbit, ch. 5, “Riddles in the Dark”, 1937. After a narrow escape from Gollum in a dark passage, Bilbo is chased by goblins and gets caught by his buttons in the doorway.

5. William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 5 Sc. 3, 1605. In this request Lear, finally broken by Cordelia's death, breaks his terrible lament: "Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more, Never, never, never, never, never!" with brief forgetfulness as a helpless old man, before a short return to awareness and death.

LITERARY GRAVES: NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2004

Rather late for All Hallow’s and Samhain, all this month’s quotations on this gloomy subject are from works for adults.

1. We buried him darkly at dead of night,
The sods with our bayonets turning;
By the struggling moonbeam’s misty light
And the lantern dimly burning

2. The shape of the letters on my father’s (tombstone), gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the characters and turn of the inscription, ‘Also Georgiana Wife of the Above,’ I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly.

3. The sky was overcast, and somewhere far off an early cock crew. A little way off, beyond the line of the scattered juniper-trees, which marked the pathway to the church, a white, dim figure flitted in the direction of the tomb.

4. ‘Their graves are green, they may be seen,’
The little Maid replied,
‘Twelve steps or more from my mother’s door,
And they are side by side.
My stockings there I often knit,
My kerchief there I hem;
And there upon the ground I sit,
And sing a song to them.’

5. We stood face to face with the tombstone between us. She was close to the inscription on the side of the pedestal. Her gown touched the black letters. The voice came nearer, and rose and rose more passionately still. “Hide your face! don’t look at her! Oh, for God’s sake, spare him -” The woman lifted her veil. “Sacred to the Memory of Laura, Lady Glyde -” Laura, Lady Glyde, was standing by the inscription, and was looking at me over the grave.

ANSWERS

Two of the quotations use graves in a Gothic way, to shock and frighten; in two the living tenderly remember and care for the departed; the child Pip remembers nothing of his parents and siblings and fabricates what he can.

1. Charles Wolfe, “The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna”, 1817. Charles Wolfe was an Irish poet who anonymously published this poem eight years after the event "to great public acclaim".

Sir John Moore was a British general of Scottish descent who had distinguished himself in numerous places, including the American War of Independence, when he was sent in 1808 with a corps of 10,000 men to strengthen the English army in Spain, where he assumed chief command. He was instructed "to cooperate with the Spanish in removing the Napoleonic forces from the Peninsula, and moved his army from Lisbon towards Valladolid.

"But Spanish apathy, French successes elsewhere, and the intrigues of his own countrymen soon placed him in a critical position. When the news reached him that Madrid had fallen, and that Napoleon was marching to crush him with 70,000 men, Moore, with only 25,000, was forced to retreat. In December he began a disastrous march from Astorga to Coruna, nearly 250 miles, through mountainous country, made almost impassible by snow and rain and harassed by the enemy." (Chambers Biographical Dictionary, 1961)

At Coruna, the French were waiting to attack as soon as they began embarkation; on January 16th 1809 the British defeated the French with the loss of 900 of their own men and 2000 of the French but Moore was fatally wounded by a grape-shot and was buried early the next morning. His buriers had yet to get safely away by ship. A description of the battle can be found at http://www.napoleonguide.com/battle_corunna.htm.

The poem turns a bleak and desperate situation to tender and patriotic triumph; it was extremely popular for many years but surprisingly is in neither volume of the The Nation's Favourite Poems. My father won a prize for reciting it at school in the early 1920s and John Bayley quoted it to the Alzheimer-stricken Iris Murdoch when she insisted on going to bed in her overcoat ("He lay like a warrior taking his rest, With his martial cloak around him"). Notable is the proud assumption by an Irish writer that a Scot should be buried as a Briton. There's a suggestion of lack of appreciation - amongst politicians? - back in England, but unfortunately I have no further information on this.

Moore's French counterpart, Marshal Soult, was so impressed by him that he ordered a monument erected to his fallen foe as a sign of respect. Sir John Moore's statue stands in Glasgow, and a brief life can be found at http://www.napoleonguide.com/moore.htm

2. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, ch. 1, 1861. It's in this graveyard on the Kent marshes that Pip has his first, frightening meeting with Magwitch.

3. Bram Stoker, Dracula, ch. xv, “Dr Seward’s Diary” (cont.), 1897. This is the dead and buried Lucy on a vampiric rampage as one of the Undead. Van Helsing eventually manages to dispatch the vampire presence with a stake through the heart, allowing the human Lucy to revert to a normal corpse.

4. William Wordsworth, “We Are Seven”, 1798. Juliet Barker in her biography of Wordsworth says that Wordsworth met the child at Goodrich Castle during his walking tour in 1793; his friend James Tobin begged him to omit the poem from Lyrical Ballads - "if published, it will make you everlastingly ridiculous". In fact, it became one of his most popular poems. The child cannot grasp that her siblings are dead and continues to relate to them as if they were aware of her.

5. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White, The Second Epoch (end): "The story continues in several narratives/v: The narrative of Walter Hartwright", 1860. This book "combines the trappings of the Gothic novel with the modern detective story" says Wayne Burrows in the Oxford Good Fiction Guide. It's all terribly complicated, but the original Woman in White, the simple-minded Anne Catterick, usually confined in an asylum, looks very similar to her half-sister, Laura Glyde, nee Fairlie. It's poor Anne, dead of a heart condition, who is in the grave, while Laura has been imprisoned in the asylum in her place so her husband sir Percival Glyde, can get his hands on her money. In this passage the hero is confronted with the competent Marianne, recovered from typhus, and the real Laura, whom she has helped to escape, and whom he loves and finally marries.

LITERARY STARS 2, DECEMBER 2004 - JANUARY 2005

One quotation is from a work for children, two for adults, and two from cross-overs.

1. Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea

2. The stars above the hill were no stars his eyes had ever seen. Yet he knew the constellations by name: the Sheaf, the Door, the One Who Turns, the Tree. They were those stars that do not set, that are not paled by the coming of any day. He had followed the dying child too far.

3. Where wast thou ... when all the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

4. In the south strode Orion the Hunter with Sirius the Dogstar baying green fire at his heels. At midnight Hunter and Hound were rushing bright in a glacial wind, hunting the false star dwarfs of burnt-out suns, who had turned back into Darkness again.

5. To her surprise she found that the lowest star in the sky was easily within her reach. She stepped up, balancing carefully. The star seemed quite steady and solid. “Come on, Michael!” They hurried up the frosty sky, leaping over the gulfs between the stars.

ANSWERS

1. Alfred Lord, Tennyson, “Ulysses”, 1842. The Hyades, says my COD, is "a group of stars in Taurus near the Pleiades, whose heliacal rising was once thought to foretell rain". The old Ulysses is remembering his travels.

2. Ursula le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea, ch. 5, “The Dragon of Pendor”, 1968. This dead, alternative, world is a recurring theme throughout the Earthsea books; the realm is finally successfully challenged in The Other Wind. In this passage, the young, gifted and powerful, but inexperienced wizard Ged, is trying to heal a child and is dragged into death himself. Only the efforts of his pet Otak recall him to life.

3. Job, ch. 38, vv.4-7, King James version of Bible. The notes to the Oxford World's Classics edition (Carroll and Prickett) describe Job as "among the greatest of ancient writings exploring the problem of suffering in an unjust world where the god(s) appear not to care about the fate of the just". Briefly the man Job is so pious that God cannot refrain from boasting about him to his servant Satan, who remarks that if Job lost everything he would not be so perfect. A sort of wager between God and Satan results, and the latter sets out to cause Job so much suffering that he will cast aside his piety. The notes comment that "this is one of the most read and most disturbing books in the Bible. The passage quoted is from God's reply to Job from out of the whirlwind: "a tour de force that is as ethically unsatisfying as it is poetically splendid".

4. Henry Williamson, Tarka the Otter, ch. 9 “The Great Plain”, 1927. In the bitterly cold winter, the animals and birds are struggling to find food; the old otter Marland Jimmy dies, caught in the ice. "Minutely observed and unsentimental" says the Oxford Good Fiction Guide.

5. P. L. Travers, Mary Poppins Comes Back, Ch. vii, “The Evening Out”, 1935. In Mary Poppins' absence the twins follow a shooting-star which dives through their bedroom window and leads them to a celestial circus in the sky, where the performers are the creatures of the constellations. Mary is already there as guest of honour and dances with the Sun God, though of course she denies it ...

LITERARY SNAILS AND SLUGS: JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2005

Three quotations are from works for adults, and two from children’s books.

1. When he struck a light indoors, there appeared on the table a thin glistening streak as if a brush of varnish had been lightly dragged across it. (His) eyes followed the serpentine sheen to the other side, where it led up to a huge brown garden-slug, which had come indoors tonight for reasons of its own. It was Nature’s second way of hinting to him that he should prepare for foul weather.

2. James went a journey with the goat’s new compass
And he reached the end of his brick.

3. Nay, an you be so tardy, come no more in my sight: I had as lief be wooed of a snail ... for though he comes slowly, he carries his house on his head; a better jointure, I think, than you make a woman.

4. Then seek your job with thankfulness and work till further orders,
If it’s only netting strawberries or killing slugs on borders

5. Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance

ANSWERS

Most of these literary gastropod molluscs are not particularly interesting in themselves - they are there for symbolic reasons. For a discussion of snails in literature, see http://www.conchsoc.org/2index.htm?row2col1=poetry.htm and http://www.conchsoc.org/2index.htm?row2col1=prose.htm, and a snail has an important role in Virginia Woolf's short story "Kew Gardens". The Oxford Book of Children's Verse includes a little-known poem by John Bunyan "Upon a Snail" which points out by way of moral instruction her advantages, the overall message being rather similar to Milne's:

"She ... stilly seizeth on
The flower or herb appointed for her food;
The which she quietly doth feed upon,
While others range, and glare, but find no good."

There's a slug in another Hardy novel, "The Woodlanders" - it turns up cooked in Grace's dinner at Giles's disastrous party.

1. Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, ch. xxxvi, “Wealth in Jeopardy - the Revel”, 1874. A series of signs prepares the shepherd Gabriel Oak for heavy rain - the first had been a toad crossing the path and he later notes the immobility of the sheep. While everyone else drunkenly revels, he saves the ricks - with Bathsheba's belated help. Alan Bates played this role in the film, which did not however include the slug.

2. A. A. Milne, When We Were Very Young, “The Four Friends”, 1924. Nicely illustrated by Shepard, this little poem tells of an elephant, a lion, a goat and a snail. The first two are alpha males who get into a testosterone loud-noise competition which scares the snail, James. He does however achieve a small goal - unlike the lion and elephant who are caged. My money’s on the enigmatic but helpful goat, George, a collector of gadgets. I’m assuming the “wrong” pen is a pun on stall/writing implement.

3. William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act IV Scene I, 1599. Rosalind, for safety's sake disguised as a boy, Ganymede, is pretending to cure Orlando, whom she loves, of his love for herself in her female identity. She's giving him a hard time for being an hour late. This snail has slowness, a shell and horns - the sign of a cuckold.

4. Rudyard Kipling, “The Glory of the Garden”. This popular poem about the work needed to make an English garden was first published in A School History of England, 1911, and "shares with 'If' the distinction of being illuminated and popularly sold for framing" says website http://www.kipling.org.uk/rg_biogs_p.htm. It was written at Kipling's beloved house Bateman's, East Sussex, in which he lived from 1902 to 1936. There's more about the house and garden at http://www.touruk.co.uk/houses/houseesuss_bate.htm The slugs here are merely destructive and to be exterminated.

5. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, ch. x “The Lobster Quadrille”, 1865. This is from the song sung by the Mock Turtle to Alice, and it's based on Mrs Howitt's "The Spider and the Fly", says Martin Gardner in The Annotated Alice. There's no particular reason for the creature being a snail, apart from its slowness. ("Will you walk a little faster?")

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LITERARY FALLINGS IN LOVE, FEBRUARY-MARCH 2005

All the quotations for Valentine’s Day are from works for adults this time. (Spot a certain similarity in most of them.) ____________________________________________________________________

1. O! she doth teach the torches to burn bright.

2. Time was away and somewhere else.
The waiter did not come, the clock
Forgot them and the radio waltz
Came out like water from a rock:
Time was away and somewhere else.

3. (He) was quick in anticipating her. He reached the whip before she did and turned to present it to her. She bowed and looked at him; he of course was looking at her, and their eyes met with that peculiar meeting which is never arrived at by effort, but seems like a Divine clearance of haze. I think (he) turned a little paler than usual, but (she) blushed deeply and felt a certain astonishment. After that she was really anxious to go and did not know what sort of stupidity her uncle was talking of when she went to shake hands with him.

4. Suddenly -
Lucas engineered it - suddenly you.
First sight. First snapshot isolated
Unalterable, stilled in the camera’s glare.
Taller
Than you ever were again.
Swaying so slender
It seemed your long, perfect, American legs
Simply went on up. That flaring hand,
Those long, balletic, monkey-elegant fingers,
And the face - a tight ball of joy.

5. Then she was standing before me, and suddenly the atmosphere underwent a peculiar change - almost as though the two of us had been suddenly thrust on to some other plane of being altogether. I am afraid it is not easy to describe what I mean here. All I can say is that everything around us suddenly became very still; it was my impression that Miss K.....’s manner also underwent a sudden change; there was a strange seriousness in her expression, and it struck me she seemed almost frightened.

ANSWERS

Surprisingly the only one of these encounters not to include the "I saw you and the world went away" theme is the first one: its offspring West Side Story from which the above line comes also highlights the lovers' first meeting with slowed-down muted music and a ghostly out-of-focus background. Something to do with beta phenylethylamine, according to http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/story/0,11711,1415385,00.html

1. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act. I, Sc. V, 1593. Romeo has a run-in with Juliet's cousin Tybalt before he manages to meet her.

2. Louis MacNeice, “Meeting Point”, April 1939 from Collected Poems, 1949. MacNeice was born in Belfast in 1907, went to Oxford, lectured in Classics at Birmingham and London, and joined the BBC, for which he wrote radio plays, in 1941. He died of pneumonia in 1963 after going down a mineshaft to check its sound effects. This particular poem gives a powerful impression of the other-worldliness of love.

3. George Eliot, Middlemarch, Book I, Ch. XII, “Miss Brooke” (Lydgate & Rosamond), 1872. Rosamond has been planning such an event for some time, with a suitable stranger, and although Lydgate is not as bowled over as she hopes (having been previously nursed a mad and fruitless passion), he is certainly attracted and after a falling-out they finally marry, disastrously for him.

4. Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters, “St Botolph’s”, 1998. This first meeting between Hughes and Sylvia Plath at Cambridge University in 1956 was fairly eventful - she left a ring of toothmarks on his face and and Hughes remembers his current girlfriend's "hissing rage in a doorway". Sylvia Plath recalls the scene from her own point of view in her Journals.

5. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day, 1989, “Day Three - Evening; Moscombe, near Tavistock, Devon”. This pair's mutual attraction is never expressed or even overtly recognised. Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson conveyed the scene very well on film.

LITERARY GRAMOPHONES & OTHER MUSIC MACHINES, MARCH-APRIL 2005

Four quotations are from works for adults, and one from a children’s book.

1. On came the Margoletta, sweeping up with the tide, and filling the quiet evening with a loud treacly voice:

“I want to be a darling, a doodle-um, a duckle-um,
I want to be a ducky, doodle darling, yes, I do.”

“Indeed,” muttered Port, with a good deal of bitterness. “Try next door,” said Starboard.

2. When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smooths her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.

3. night number one was in brixton
soprano B sound system
was a beating out a rhythm with a fire
coming doun his reggae-reggae wire
it was a soun shaking doun your spinal column
a bad music tearing up your flesh

4. But asleep he undoubtedly was. And here was (she), gone suddenly sympathetic, afraid to move for fear of waking him and savagely resenting the approach of a boatload of idiots whose gramophone was playing (for a change) “Love in Bloom”.

5. Out there were no people. Puddles were frozen and wee-ones off from school had burst all ice. A car passed and you saw smoke clinging round the exhaust. Miles Davis doing He Loved Him Madly offof Get Up With It was going in the ears. My hands were in the jacket pockets, the nose was cold like it was pinched between finger and thumb; I touched the computer disc in the other pocket, as I walked up to the phonebox I felt the cassette moving next to one pinkie, and it was that bit where the trumpet comes in for the second time: I walked right past the phonebox. It was the feeling the music gave that made me.

ANSWERS

Two of these quotations are from the point of view of people who are annoyed at the noise intrusion; in all of them, I realise, the music is being used as a sort of drug - in 2. and 5. to deaden and in 1., 3. and 4. to enhance collective enjoyment and identity - especially in 3. where it's almost a territorial statement. There's another gramophone in Elizabeth Bowen's "The Last September" - the Black and Tans in Ireland borrow one to hold a dance. It ends up getting smashed as another sort of collective celebration.

1. Arthur Ransome, Coot Club, ch. xxviii, “Wreck and Salvage”, 1934. An alliance of local youngsters and Ransome regulars Dick and Dorothea are being hunted by obnoxious anti-environmental holiday-makers, whose cruiser one of them cast off from its moorings to protect a coot's nest. One of the Margoletta's more obvious features throughout the book is its amplified music for the partying cruisers; the people on board also drive the boat at full speed, damaging the banks and other craft. Port and Starboard are two very competent local girls. The Margoletta is about to sink, after hitting a post as the driver races to attack the children on the Teasel. Actually, I now realise that the Margoletta was playing a radio, not a gramophone - it carries on broadcasting as the boat sinks. But Ransome does complain about the loudness of the people next door's gramophone in his autobiography.

2. T S Eliot, The Waste Land, III. The Fire Sermon, 1922. This is a parody of the Song from Oliver Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield, 1776:

When lovely woman stoops to folly,
And finds too late that men betray,
What charm can sooth her melancholy,
What art can wash her guilt away?

The only art her guilt to cover,
To hide her shame from every eye,
To give repentance to her lover,
And wring his bosom--is to die.

In the twentieth-century version, the young woman has indifferently allowed an unpleasant and spotty young estate agent's clerk to have sex with her - "Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over." Neither alternative seems very appealing; but as Oliver Goldsmith seems to have been far from Taliban-like (he wrote She Stoops to Conquer) we can assume he was deploring the unfairness of society rather than advocating suicide for fallen women. He presents it as "that little melancholy air your papa was so fond of." Jane Austen, citing the same reference, ironically recommends death as a "clearer of ill-fame" for disagreeable women in Emma.

3. Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mi Revolushionary Fren: Selected Poems: “Five Nights of Bleeding” (Seventies Verse), 2002. This rhythmic and violent poem relates the different styles of music from different Black clubs around London during an episode of internecine violence. "Soprano B sound system" was one of the music systems in use at the time - see http://www.vinyl-record-collectors.net/history-of-ska-part16.htm

4. Dorothy L Sayers, Gaudy Night, ch. 15, 1935. Could just as easily have gone in February's quiz, as the turning point of Harriet's falling in love with Wimsey, who's been courting her for years, has just happened. They're in a punt on the Isis, where many of the townspeople's boats have gramophones all loudly playing the same song. Harriet takes the opportunity to go through Wimsey's pockets.

5. Alan Warner, Morvern Callar, first chapter, 1995. The 21-year-old protagonist, a shelf-stacker in a Scottish seaport supermarket, has just found her boyfriend dead on the kitchen floor with his throat cut. After cleaning up a bit, she just goes off to work, listening to the Christmas present Walkman she has just unwrapped; she decides at this point not to bother telling anyone. Throughout the book, she obsessively lists what music she is listening to.

LITERARY NUNS, APRIL-MAY 2005

All quotations are from works for adults.

1. How happy is the blameless Vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot:
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each prayer accepted and each wish resign’d.

2. ... as I live! I saw in the middle of that ghostly chamber a figure all black or white; the skirts straight, narrow, black; the head bandaged, veiled, white. Say what you will, reader - tell me I was nervous or mad; affirm that I was unsettled by the excitement of that letter; declare that I dreamed; this I vow - I saw there - in that room - on that night - an image like - a NUN.

3. Come, pensive Nun, devout and pure,
Sober, steadfast and demure,
All in a robe of darkest grain,
Flowing with majestic train,
And sable stole of Cypress Lawn
Over thy decent shoulders drawn.

4. The nun returned her look with a smile at once sweet and ironical. Her three-cornered face was white and transparent as a winter flower, and the long, very bright eyes that shone between the blackest of lashes were almost the colour of harebells. Yet all this beauty seemed even to Nanda to be touched with frost.

5. She had a vision of her mad wet face against the sky, as she rocked on the slippery stone. She tried to clutch at her habit to help her but the stuff was slimy with wet and dirt. Then Sister Ruth seemed to fall into the sky with a scream, as she went over the railings.

ANSWERS

It's noticeable that the nuns envisaged by male writers are passive and featureless while the women's versions are unbalanced and weird. No doubt the truth lies between the two ...

1. Alexander Pope, "Eloisa to Abelard", 1717. Eloisa in her convent is reflecting that she is unable to annihilate herself to the supposed happy blandness of the dedicated virgin, similar to that she imagines her castrated ex-lover to be experiencing while she herself still burns with passion. The blameless Vestal meanwhile is rewarded with an orgasmic crescendo of heavenly rewards - "To sounds of heavenly harps she dies away, and melts in visions of eternal day." The third line of the quotation was recently used as the title of a film about memory removal.

2. Charlotte Bronte, Villette, ch. 22 “The Letter”, 1853. This is a ghost nun (the school had previously been a convent) who appears Gothically on several occasions, all of them rather scary. Judy Giles on a lit-crit website http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8625 says "The appearance of the nun, like the madwoman in the attic in Jane Eyre, can be read as symbolising the possible destiny of the heroine. Lucy Snowe, who believes herself to be unloved and unlovable, who yearns for companionship, sexual love and intimacy, is unlikely to achieve these things as a single woman with no family and no fortune. Her fate is that of the “snowy-veiled” nun: chastity and celibacy."

3. John Milton, “Il Penseroso”, 1631. This is one of a pair of poems in the tradition of poetic/academic debate contrasting the lively man who seeks Mirth with the thoughtful one who prefers Melancholy (and nuns). Like Pope's nun, Milton's is to confine herself to solitary meditation looking raptly at heaven in holy Passion, but at earth with "a sad Leaden downward cast". This one at least gets some nice clothes to wear.

4. Antonia White, Frost in May, ch. 1, 1933. This autobiographical novel is based on the author's own experience at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Roehampton, which she attended at the behest of her convert father, and from which she was expelled at the age of 14 when the nuns found her writing a novel. See Louise Harrington's essay at http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4687for more information about Antonia White's life. The nun in question, the Mother Superior, is later noticed to be mortifying herself with chains beneath her habit.

5. Rumer Godden, Black Narcissus, ch. 31, 1939. Famously filmed by Powell and Pressburger in 1947, the book tells the story of a party of nuns taken to the foothills of the Himalayas to set up a new convent. Against the beautiful bleak landscape the women struggle with their forgotten desires (Tracey O'Rourke, Oxford Good Fiction Guide). Sister Ruth has descended into madness throughout and finally falls to her death in a struggle with Sister Clodagh who has gone out to ring the bell.

LITERARY CHURCH TOWERS & SPIRES - MAY-JUNE 2005

Three quotations are from works for adults, and two from children’s books.

1. So, that first morning I rolled up my blanket, and, avoiding the bell-rope, walked across to the south window and pulled away my coat hitched across to keep out the rain. It was a simple two-light window, unglazed of course, with a simple mullion strong enough to take my weight. The rain had ceased and the dew glittered on the graveyard grass ...

2. The four wingless children shivered and woke. And there they were - on top of a church-tower in the dusky twilight, with blue stars coming out by ones and twos and tens and twenties over their heads, - miles away from home, with three-and-three-halfpence in their pockets, and a doubtful act about the necessities of life to be accounted for if anyone found them with the soda-water syphon.

3. That was how they set the capstone in place with the wind turning their tunics over their heads. For two days, with the spire vibrating, they dismantled scaffolding, left nothing but the few members for the final placing of the cross with the Nail in a box at its base.

4. Father lifted Mary in his arms, thick with work from wrist to elbow. For a moment again the steeple wasn’t safe on the earth when she felt the slippery gold of the weathercock bulging over her, but she kicked her leg across its back and held the neck. “Get your balance,” said Father. “I’ve got it,” said Mary.

5. The vane on Hughley steeple
Veers bright, a far-known sign,
And there lie Hughley people,
And there lie friends of mine.
Tall in their midst the tower
Divides the shade and sun,
And the clock strikes the hour
And tells the time to none.

ANSWERS
There is a very memorable church tower in Dorothy Sayer's Nine Tailors but I can't keep using it.

1. J L Carr, A Month in the Country, (third section), 1980. This short but memorable novel tells the story of the meeting of two First World War survivors at a quiet English church in 1920. The narrator, played by Colin Firth in the film, is lodging in the belltower while he investigates a historical wall-painting. The novel won the Guardian Fiction Prize and was Booker short-listed. Kenneth Branagh played the other man, who camps in the churchyard.

2. E. Nesbit, Five Children and It, ch. iv “Wings”, 1902. The magically-winged children fall asleep in the sun on top of a church tower after their picnic (on food extracted from the vicar's larder window). The setting of the sun removes their wings and now they are stranded. The children in the book have a far more worrying time than those in the recent film version: they are anxious about getting down (the door is locked), getting home with no money, worrying the women who are meant to be looking after them AND being seen as dishonest by the vicar and his family. In fact the latter are equally alarmed and go to investigate their shouts with a gun.

3. William Golding, The Spire, ch. 9, 1964. This is a story of religious and sexual obsession as the central character, Jocelin, presses on with his determination to add a spire to a church that has no foundations. The building holds up throughout the book and survives Jocelyn but it is understood that it will soon fall. See http://www.william-golding.co.uk/w_spire.html and http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/191/Spire.htm. It's not a cheery read.

4. Alan Garner, The Stone Book, first of the Stone Book Quartet, 1976. This collection of novellas, described by Peter Hunt as "a masterpiece of children's fiction", "presents one notable day in the life of a child from four generations of the Garner family. ... it is about the relationship between the generations but also about craft and its loss, about tradition and time." (An Introduction to Children's Literature, 1994). In contrast to the vertiginous event above, another of the children goes down claustrophobically into the bowels of the earth.

5. A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad, LXI, "The vane on Hughley steeple", 1896. Full of well-known quotations, this poem, set in an idealised English countryside, expresses "with remarkable force the regrets and frustrations that everyone has experienced at some time". Housman apparently did not know Shropshire well as Shropshire County Council points out at http://www3.shropshire-cc.gov.uk/housman.htm. Hughley Church does not have a steeple but a tower.

LITERARY PATHS & ROADS: JUNE-JULY 2005

Three quotations are from works for adults, one from a children’s books, and one is a crossover.

1. The pathway was here also exceeding narrow, and therefore good Christian was the more put to it; for when he sought, in the dark, to shun the ditch on the one hand, he was ready to tip over into the mire on the other; also when he sought to escape the mire, without great carefulness he would be ready to fall into the ditch.

2. ... long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear

3. After a few hours the road began to be rough, and the walking grew so difficult that the Scarecrow often stumbled over the yellow brick, which were here very uneven. Sometimes, indeed, they were broken or missing altogether, leaving holes that Toto jumped across and Dorothy walked around.

4. Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.

5. The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor

ANSWERS

1. John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, 1678-9

2. Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”, 1916

3. L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, 1900

4. Rudyard Kipling, “The Way Through the Woods”, 1910

5. Alfred Noyes, “The Highwayman”, 1907

LITERARY DRUG TAKERS, JULY-AUGUST 2005

All from works for adults.

1. Oh! just, subtle, and mighty opium! that to the hearts of poor and rich alike, for the wounds that will never heal, and for ‘the pangs that tempt the spirit to rebel,’ bringest an assuaging balm; eloquent opium! .... Thou only givest these gifts to man; and thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium!"

2. Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

3. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally, he pressed the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston and sank back into the velvet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction.

4. We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold! And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down

5. It was almost daybreak when our friends finished the letter. Those who had taken the honey were still in a state of smiling stupefaction; those who had drunk only wine were tipsy; the Poet, who had again tasted both substances, could hardly stand. They walked, singing, through the narrow streets and the squares, touching that parchment with reverence, now convinced that it had just arrived from the kingdom of Prester John.

ANSWERS

1. Thomas de Quincy, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, (1821) 1856. Manchester-born de Quincey ran away from school and first wandered in Wales, then lived in poverty in London before going to Oxford University and becoming addicted to opium; he met Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, Lamb and Hazlitt, married and set up as an author. Confessions was first written as a serial in The London Magazine, but he rewrote and enlarged them in book form in 1856. His highly digressive style is appropriate for his drugs experience.

2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”, 1816. A note on the British Museum copy says "This fragment, with a good deal more, not recoverable, composed, in a sort of Reverie brought on by two grains of Opium, taken to check a Dysentary, at a farmhouse between Porlock and Linton, ... in the fall of the year 1797." The book he was reading when he fell asleep referred to the Khan Kubla's building of a palace. Famously, he was called away from the effortless writing up of his expression of the perfectly remembered dream by the arrival of a person on business from Porlock, and after an hour's discussion with him, had lost the vision. (Penguin edition 2004.)

3. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four, ch. 1 “The Science of Deduction”, 1890. Sherlock Holmes is treating himself to a seven per cent solution of cocaine, which he finds "transcendingly stimulating and clarifying to the mind". Dr Watson points out the evil physical effects.

4. Hunter S Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1971. This is the opening of the late author's best-known work, "the hallucinatory misadventures of Raoul Duke and his drug-crazed Samoan lawyer, a manic and very funny clash between the drug culture and representatives of the silent majority" (Jules Smith, Oxford Good Fiction Guide.)

5. Umberto Eco, Baudolino, ch. 12 “Baudolino writes the letter of Prester John”, (2000) English translation 2002. The companions are trying to persuade Barbarossa, Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor, to withdraw from his unending battles with the cities of Italy and direct his energies eastwards to the fabled lands of the Christian Prester John. Under the influence of various stimulants - including a "green honey" brought from Arab lands, they concoct a suitable letter from Prester John to the Emperor.

LITERARY BRIDGES, AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 2005

Three from works for adults, one from a children’s book, one cross-over.

1. In yon strait path a thousand
May well be stopped by three.
Now who will stand on either hand
And keep the bridge with me?

2. They had dropped their sticks in ... and then they had hurried across to the other side of the bridge and now they were all leaning over the edge, waiting to see whose stick would come out first. But it was a long time coming, because the river was very lazy that day.

3. Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay,
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses

4. The Turkish youths formed a round-dance, a kolo, around the cauldrons of halva and then led the dance across the bridge, since it seemed to them that they were flying and not treading the solid earth. The dance wound round in circles about the kapia, the dancers beating their heels and stamping on the new flagstones as if to test the stoutness of the bridge.

5. In a great flurry of merriment, his mother’s maids were leading their mistress and the guests hand-in-hand from the edge of the pond to the hill of maples along a path deliberately complicated by a maze of stone bridges that threaded to and fro across the inlets.

ANSWERS

1. Thomas Babington Macauley, Lord Macauley, “Horatius” from The Lays of Ancient Rome, 1842. Stirring tale of how Horatius and two companions hold off Lars Porsena's huge Etruscan army bent on sacking Rome while the besieged Romans chop down the bridge - the only access point - behind them. With its driving tub-thumping rhythm and simple heroics, it used to be extremely popular and is best recited aloud. J L Carr chose it as one of his little mini reprints. The Opies, in The Oxford Book of Narrative Verse, say the poem "was one of Macauley's reconstructions of the kind of ballad he felt the early Romans would have been handing down until, under Greek influence, their popular literature was lost. It is supposed to be in the voice of a minstrel living about 120 years after the event it celebrates. ... Macauley ... warned that the tale was not to be treated as history." In the end Horatius fails to make it back across the bridge before it falls but manages to swim to safety and is greatly honoured.

2. A A Milne, The House at Pooh Corner, “In which Pooh invents a new game and Eeyore joins in”, 1928. Origin of the famous Poohsticks game. East Sussex County Council says that Poohsticks Bridge was originally called Posingford Bridge, near Upper Hartsfield, was built in 1907 and repaired, with funds from Disney, in 1999.

3. William McGonagall - “The Tay Bridge Disaster”, 1879. All you could possibly want to know about "the writer of the worst poetry in the English language" can be found at Chris Hunt's http://www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk/index.shtml. "Tay Bridge" is his best-known poem and commemorates a real disaster. George Gilfillan on 30th May 1865 pronounced: "I certify that William McGonagall has for some time been known to me. I have heard him speak, he has a strong proclivity for the elocutionary department, a strong voice, and great enthusiasm. He has had a great deal of experience too, having addressed audiences and enacted parts here and elsewhere." Comedians Billy Connolly and Spike Milligan have both expressed enthusiasm for his work.

4. Ivo Andric, The Bridge Over the Drina, ch. IV, 1945, Eng. translation 1959. "In the small Bosnian town of Visegrad the stone bridge of the novel’s title, built in the 16th century on the instruction of a grand vezir, bears witness to three centuries of conflict. Visegrad has long been a bone of contention between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires but the bridge survives unscathed until 1914. ... With humour and compassion, Andric chronicles the lives of Catholics, Moslems and Orthodox Christians unable to reconcile their disparate loyalties." Readers of a sensitive nature should look away during the impaling scene. The book won the author the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The bridge still stands in Visegrad but according to a report at http://www.bosnia.org.uk/bosrep/report_format.cfm?articleid=1123&reportid=165 is in danger. The same site quotes from two other works by Andric on bridges as follows:

from ‘Bridges’ (essay): ‘Of all that man erects and builds in his life’s impetus, nothing is better or more precious in my eyes than are bridges. Belonging to everyone and the same for everyone, useful, always erected for a purpose, at a place where the greatest number of human needs intersect, they are more durable than other constructions and serve nothing that is hidden or evil.’

from ‘The Bridge on the Žepa’ (story): ‘The region could not press close to the bridge, nor the bridge to the region. Viewed from the side, its white and audaciously curved arch always used to look isolated and alone, and would surprise the traveller like an unusual thought, gone astray and snared by the Karst wilderness.

5. Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow, ch. 3, 1968, trans. Michael Gallagher. This scene is near the beginning of the first book in the "Sea of Fertility" tetralogy which he finished the night before he died (he committed suicide by disembowelment in 1970). The aristocratic young hero Kiyoaki and a friend are watching from a concealed position the women having a little outing across a elaborate Japanese garden on the outskirts of Tokyo to a waterfall (which they find blocked by a dead dog). Amongst the women is his childhood companion Satoko, who is in love with him and whom he initially denies loving. This leads to trouble. The book is set just before the First World War in a Japan undergoing transition under influence from the West.

LITERARY BULLS, SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2005

Three from works for adults, one from a children’s book, one cross-over.

1. And as though answering the deep call of male to male, the bull uttered a loud tortured bellow that rose undefeated through the dead sky that brooded over the farm. Seth undid yet another button, and lounged away.

2. He was a huge bull, with a broad brow, and great thick horns springing out just as they should, well forward, which made him come at you straight. In his heart he was lazy; but he had a great conceit of himself, and did not care to be made light of. So he got the name of a busy bull. But though he was a long way from safe, he was safer than he looked, having half his mind on his stall and his feed of mash to follow. Best of all, he had a back like a barrel.

3. And for all I know he is sitting there still, under his favorite cork tree, smelling the flowers just quietly. He is very happy.

4. But the warm weight of his breathing,
The ammoniac reek of his litter, the hotly-tongued
Mash of his cud, steamed against me.
... The brow like masonry, the deep-keeled neck: ...

5. There are only two proper ways to kill bulls with the sword and muleta and as both of them deliberately invoke a moment in which there is inevitable goring for the man if the bull does not follow the cloth properly, matadors have steadily tricked this finest part of the fight until ninety of one hundred bulls that you will see killed will be put to death in a manner that is only a parody of the true way to kill.

ANSWERS

Two of these bulls are kept for breeding, and two for entertainment of different sorts. The middle one gets away with doing his own thing.

1. Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm, ch. 3, 1932. The bull, Big Business, is responding to the taunting of overly hunky Seth (who later gets snapped up by Hollywood). The book parodied the rural life novels of Mary Webb, D H Lawrence and Thomas Hardy: sensible urban Flora Poste briskly sorts out her doomy Starkadder cousins and their farm. The book was faithfully and entertainingly filmed by John Schlesinger a few years ago, starring Kate Beckinsale and Eileen Atkins.

2. Mary Renault, The King Must Die, IV. “Crete”, 4, 1958. With The Bull from the Sea, this retells the legend of Theseus. Captured and enslaved, he and his adolescent companions are learning to be bull-leapers and dancers in Minoan Crete. A predictable bull with a broad back gives a better chance of staying alive. Other sequences of novels tell of the life of Alexander the Great, two Greek lovers during the Peloponnesian War and Dion of Syracuse.

3. Munro Leaf, The Story of Ferdinand, 1936. Ferdinand doesn't want to fight in the bull ring; he just likes to sit quietly smelling the flowers. Unbelievably, the book was thought controversially pacifist on its first appearance and had the distinction of being banned by Hitler - but promoted in Soviet-occupied Poland, says Wikipedia.

4. Ted Hughes, “The Bull Moses”, Lupercal, 1960. Hughes tells how as a small boy he would gaze at the remote and impervious penned or ambling bull "in the locked black of his powers".

5. Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, ch. 19, 1939 (UK ed.). Well, it would be, wouldn't it?

LITERARY WITCHES, OCTOBER - NOVEMBER 2005

To mark Hallowe’en, a mix of traditional and modern witches.

1. Although the old woman appeared to be so friendly, she was really a wicked old witch who was on the watch for children, and she had built the bread house on purpose to lure them to her. Whenever she could get a child into her clutches she cooked and ate it and considered it a grand feast. Witches have red eyes and can’t see very far, but they have keen scent like animals and can perceive the approach of human beings.

2. And so they were: ragged elegant black shapes sweeping past high above, with a hiss and swish of air through the needles of the cloud-pine branches they flew on.

3. How now, you secret, black, and midnight hags!
What is’t you do?

4. That was one of the advantages of dealing with witches; they do not mind if you are a little odd in your ways, frown if you are late for meals, fret if you are out all night, pry and commiserate when at last you return. Lovely to be with people who prefer their thoughts to yours, lovely to live at your own sweet will, lovely to sleep out all night!

5. She screwed up her eyes in a strained expression as though she was trying to remember something. A second later, her hair had turned bubble-gum pink.

ANSWERS

1. Grimm Brothers, “Hansel and Gretel”, 1814-22, 1909 version. The brothers Jakob Ludwig Karl and Wilhelm Karl collected their famous Kinder- und Hausmarchen "from the lips of the people" in Hesse in middle Germany in the early nineteenth century. They "sometimes drastically edited the tales to stress their point of view with regard to religion, politics, and morality" says Compton's; they also had to choose between different versions of a story. In some of the stories they were greatly assisted by "a gifted storyteller called Marie Muller, also called Frau Viehmannin, a peasant who lived near Kassel ... she 'told her stories thoughtfully, accurately, with wonderful vividness. . . . If required, she repeated them more slowly, so that, after some practice, it was perfectly easy to write from her dictation.'" However, it was young Dortchen Wild, who became Wilhelm's wife, who contributed this one. (Opie, Classic Fairy Tales) Thousands of people - 80% of them women, mostly elderly, widowed and poor - thought to be witches were persecuted and legally killed from the sixteenth to eighteenth century in Germany. "Witch crazes were grass-roots phenomena that broke out more readily where the authorities were weak" says an interesting recent article in the New York Times at http://www.rickross.com/reference/wicca/wicca50.html

2. Philip Pullman, Northern Lights, ch. 17 “The Witches”, 1995. See "Angels" and "Dust"; this is the first book in the "His Dark Materials" trilogy which seeks to redress the anti-female bias of organised Christianity.

3. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act IV, Sc. 1. The witches are in a cave circling a boiling cauldron to which they are adding numerous sinister ingredients which they recite. Bits of Jews, Turks and Tartars are included: Kenneth McLeish and Stephen Unwin in their Pocket Guide to Shakespeare suggest that the author "is pandering to his royal master (who wrote an attack on witchcraft)" and "mixes them up with Jacobean demonology". They quote Walter Benjamin: "every great work is also a document in barbarism - and Macbeth stands uncomfortably close to the fanatical denunciations of witches common in Europe at the time". The scene is interrupted by the unnecessary arrival of Hecate who calls in for a song and dance number, Bollywood-style, before Macbeth arrives with his greeting - prefaced by the famous "pricking of my thumbs" from the second witch.

4. Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes, Part 3, 1926. A self-effacing maiden aunt is drawn to solitary existence in the countryside where she discovers the secret that has been nagging at her through her life - her witchcraft. The book is strange, perceptive and funny; it is powerful on the subject of landscape and woods. "Once a wood, always a wood" - including the goods yard at Paddington. The New York Review of Books reissued it in 1999 as part of its Classics series. The feminist issues raised are similar to those explored by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own.

5. J K Rowling, Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix, ch. 3 “The Advance Guard”, 2003. Young Tonks is strictly an Auror. She's trying to cheer Harry up here; she takes part in the big battle against the Death Eaters in the Department of Mysteries at the end, and in Half-Blood Prince develops a love-interest.

LITERARY CAKES & BISCUITS, NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2005

Three from works for adults, two from children’s books.

1. And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray ... my aunt Leonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane.

2. Presently along came a lady cyclist, and as it was a very hot day she stopped at the nice white cottage with the thatched roof, and asked ... if she could have a glass of milk. And while she was drinking it she saw the little cake on the window sill, and the little cake looked so good that the the lady cyclist felt hungry and asked if she could have that too.

3. She had dropped in just as I was having my tea, which consisted of a few rather broken digestive biscuits with a kitchen pot on a tray and without a plate. I was so busy that afternoon and Mrs Heathery, my maid of all work, was so busy too, that I had dashed into the kitchen and taken the tray myself, like that.

4. But when Maria started to explore her room she found that it was not without luxuries. Over the fireplace was a shelf, and on it stood a blue wooden box filled with dainty biscuits with sugar flowers on them, in case she should feel hungry between meals.

5. The tea-tray was abundantly loaded - I was pleased to see it, I was so hungry; but I was afraid the ladies present might think it vulgarly heaped up. I know they would have done at their own houses; but somehow the heaps disappeared here. I saw Mrs Jamieson eating seed-cake, slowly and considerately, as she did everything; and I was rather surprised, for I knew she had told us, on the occasion of her last party, that she never had it in her house, it reminded her so much of scented soap. She always gave us Savoy biscuits. However, Mrs Jamieson was kindly indulgent to Miss Barker's want of knowledge of the customs of high life; and, to spare her feelings, ate three large pieces of seed-cake, with a placid, ruminating expression of countenance, not unlike a cow's.

ANSWERS

1. Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (Du cote de chez Swann), vol. 1, p. 61, 1913. A semi-invalid, Proust withdrew from society at the age of 34 when his mother died and devoted himself to introspection in a sound-proof flat. "Out of this delving into the self below the levels of superficial consciousness, he set himself to transform into art the realities of experience as known to the inner emotional life." (Chambers Biographical Dictionary). This famous passage refers to the deep-seated nature of taste and smell which also have a close relationship with memory.

2. Joyce Lankester Brisley, Milly-Molly-Mandy Stories, ch. 2 “Milly-Molly-Mandy Spends a Penny”, 1928. These soothing stories of simple and innocent goings on in an extended family in an idealised traditional English village first appeared on the Children's Page of the Christian Science Monitor in the 1920s. The author illustrated the stories herself and also supplied a helpful map of the village in the endpapers.

3. Nancy Mitford,Love in a Cold Climate, Part 2, ch. 2, 1949. This comic novel is the sequel to The Pursuit of Love - most of it is about Lord & Lady Montdore and their beautiful daughter Polly, but this episode is the narrator Fanny in the early years of her marriage to an Oxford don. Visiting Lady Montdore is deeply unimpressed by the plateless digestive biscuits. The books were televised very successfully.

4. Elizabeth Goudge, The Little White Horse, ch. 1:3, 1946. This book is thought to be her best work and was recently praised by J K Rowling. An orphaned girl and her elderly governess go to live in a stately home in a remote part of the West Country, where ancient wrongs and misunderstandings are to be righted by love and determination and a little bit of magic. On her first evening, Maria finds her bedroom is at the top of a turret, and has not only a moon and stars on the ceiling and a pine-cone fire but a tin of biscuits! Who could ask for more?

5. Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford, ch. vii, “Visiting”. See "Letters" above - Cranford is based on Knutsford in Cheshire.

LITERARY STARS 3, DECEMBER 2005-JANUARY 2006

Three from works for adults, and two from children’s books.

1. ... look, how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings

2. ... there was a commotion in the firmament, and the smallest of all the stars in the Milky Way screamed out: ‘Now, Peter!’

3. "There's Arcturus looking very bright." "Yes, and the bear. I wish I could see Cassiopeia." "We must go out on the lawn for that. Should you be afraid?" "Not in the least. It is a great while since we have had any star-gazing."

4. ... turning her eyes, she found that the wall had vanished, for she was looking out on the dark cloudy night. But though she heard the wind blowing, none of it blew on her. In a moment more the clouds themselves parted, or rather vanished like the wall, and she looked straight into the starry herds, flashing gloriously in the dark blue.

5. There he sat and never closed his eyes in sleep, but kept them on the Pleiads, or watched Bootes slowly set, or the Great Bear, nicknamed the Wain, which always wheels round in the same place and looks across at Orion the Hunter with a wary eye. It was this constellation, the only one which never bathes in Ocean’s Stream, that the wise goddess Calypso had told him to keep on his left hand as he made across the sea.

ANSWERS

1. William Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, Act V, Sc. I, 1594-5. Lorenzo and Shylock's daughter Jessica are waiting in the moonlight at Belmont for the musicians to come and play to them. The language of the first part of this scene is beautiful and evocative ("In such a night ..."). Lorenzo is referring to the belief that the stars sang in the heavens, but that sinful humankind could not hear them. When Portia arrives she observes the little light of her candle in the hall ("so shines a good deed in a naughty world") and Nerissa remarks that it's only visible because the moon has now gone in.

2. J M Barrie, Peter & Wendy, ch. 2 “The Shadow” (end), 1911. See "Ships" above. The anxious Mrs Darling and her childishly jealous husband have just left the house for a party, watched by the stars. "Stars are beautiful, but they may not take an active part in anything, they must just look on for ever. It is a punishment put on them for something they did so long ago that no star now knows what it was." Peter had been chased off by the dog Nana, leaving his shadow behind, and the stars are anxious for a bit of fun. Of course he not only retrieves his shadow, he abducts the children.

3. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ch. 11, 1814. Fanny is pleased to have her cousin Edmund apparently taking as great an interest in the glories of nature as she does, but is soon disappointed when he leaves her to admire Miss Crawford's musical skills.

4. George Macdonald, The Princess and the Goblin, ch. xv, “Woven and then spun”, 1872. See "Caves and potholes" above. Princess Irene has just fled from a goblin cat which jumped in through the window, but is guided back from the dark mountainside by a silvery globe high in the air in her magical grandmother's window. The grandmother cleans and warms the cold, wet dirty princess, and while Irene waits for her to fetch the magic ball of thread, the walls vanish so that the lamp again shines out and the starry sky can be seen from inside the house.

5. Homer, Odyssey, Book 5, "Calypso", 1200-800 BC. Calypso had been detaining the unwilling Odysseus on her island, but at Hermes's prompting, equips him well with a new boat and provisions and sends him off. He sails for seventeen days until Poseidon spots him and unleashes a storm. Of course the constellations were commonly used for navigation.

LITERARY RIVERS, JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2006

Four from works for adults, and one from a children’s book

1. Wheresoever the strong tide met with an impediment, his gaze paused for an instant. At every mooring chain and rope, at every stationery boat or barge that split the current into a broad arrowhead, at the offsets from the piers of Southwark Bridge, at the paddles of the steamboats as they beat the filthy water, at the floating logs of timber lashed together off certain wharfs, his shining eyes darted a hungry look.

2. ... with one wild cry and flying leap, she vaulted sheer over the turbid current by the shore, on to the raft of ice beyond. ... The huge green fragment of ice on which she alighted pitched and creaked as her weight came on it; but she stayed there not a moment. With ... desperate energy she leaped to another and still another ... Her shoes were gone - her stockings cut from her feet ... but she saw nothing, felt nothing, till dimly, as in a dream, she saw the Ohio side, and a man helping her up the bank.

3. Never in his life had he seen a river before - this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were caught and held again. All was a-shake and a-shiver - glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble.

4. The days that followed were hot and interminable. The river became muddy and narrow, and instead of the tangle of colossal trees that had astonished (him) on his first voyage, there were calcinated flatlands stripped of entire forests that had been devoured by the bellies of the riverboats, and the debris of godforsaken villages whose streets remained flooded even in the cruellest droughts.

5. She continued: “What a terrible river! What a wonderful river!’ and sighed. The radiance was altering, whether through shifting of the moon, or of the sand; soon the bright sheaf would be gone, and a circlet, itself to alter, be burnished on the streaming void.

ANSWERS

1. Charles Dickens Our Mutual Friend, Book 1 “The Cup and the Lip”, Ch. 1, “On the Look-out”, 1864-5. Gaffer Hexam, whose name we don't learn till the end of the first chapter, is out on the Thames with his daughter Lizzie looking for bodies. He soon finds one. Says Carol Birch in the Oxford Good Fiction Guide, "The Thames in this powerful book is a fatal river, giving up its dead and drawing down others to retribution or rebirth." The squalor of the Thames is contrasted with the comic nouveau-riche Veneerings in Chapter 2. There was an excellent TV adaptation a few years ago. [ I accidentally put "beating the filthy water" into Google without quotation marks, and got an appalling list of present day torture victims.]

2. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Ch. vii “The Mother’s Struggle”, 1852. "Uncle Tom" has for some time been a pejorative term, but this book was the bestseller of the nineteenth century, according to the Oxford Good Fiction Guide, and an important anti-slavery novel, with a tremendous effect on public opinion. The young slave Eliza is escaping as Mr Shelby, under financial pressure, has sold both her small son Harry and Uncle Tom to a trader - much to the distress of his wife. She is actually carrying the child as she makes the above desperate attempt across the river, and is directed to a friendly house.

3. Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, Ch. 1 “The River Bank”, 1908. The Mole, fed up with spring-cleaning, is meeting the river for the first time and will soon meet the Water Rat.

4. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, 1985. (Last section). The Doctor and Fermina are taking a steamboat journey up the river Magdalena but its ecology is devastated and the wildlife gone; Fermina has also lost her beauty. See http://www.tygersofwrath.com/marquez.htm for an in-depth review and a short, cross review by me at http://www.btinternet.com/~bookcase/reviews.htm#M

5. E M Forster, A Passage to India, Part 1, "Mosque", ch. iii, 1924. Mrs Moore has just had her friendly and mutually respectful encounter with Aziz in the moonlit mosque and is now talking to her oafish son Ronny and his fiancee Adele by the Ganges. Ronny has just been telling her about the crocodiles in the river, and the bodies that float down from Benares. The power of the waterscape contrasts with Ronny's petty snobbish concerns.

LITERARY MOONS, FEBRUARY-MARCH 2006

Four quotations taken from works for adults and one for children.

1. As I stood there musing over this too perfect triumph of man, the full moon, yellow and gibbous, came up out of an overflow of silver light in the north-east. The bright little figures ceased to move about below, a noiseless owl flitted by, and I shivered with the chill of the night. I determined to descend and find where I could sleep.

2. This way, and that way, she peers, and sees
Silver fruit upon silver trees;
One by one the casements catch
Her beams beneath the silvery thatch.

3. Outside the moon was shining brightly, but patches of cloud passed before it and hid it now and again.. Just as Glam fell, the clouds cleared, and (he) glared up at the moon. Grettir later said that this was the only sight he ever saw which frightened him. Suddenly his strength deserted him ...; he ... lay there hovering between this world and Hell.

4. The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work
That points at him amazed.

5. I drew aside my curtains before I went to bed and looked out from my window. It opened upon the grassy space which lay in front of the hall door. Beyond, two copses of trees moaned and swung in a rising wind. A half moon broke through the rifts of racing clouds. In its cold light I saw beyond the trees a broken fringe of rocks, and the long, low curve of the melancholy moor.

ANSWERS

1. H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, ch. V, 1898. In this early science fiction novel, the narrator has travelled to the future where humankind is divided into frail pacifists who live above ground and brutal warmongers who live underground. He is about to discover that the Time Machine has gone and gives the Eloi a bad time in trying to retrieve it. Later in the chapter he draws a parallel with the class system of Victorian England: "So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour". The "too perfect triumph of man" is the former, and the moon is just for illumination.

2. Walter de la Mare, "Silver", Peacock Pie, 1913. In another of his atmospheric poems for children, the poet describes the transformation moonlight effects upon his surroundings.

3. The Saga of Grettir the Strong (in a mixture of translations). This Icelandic outlaw saga was probably written around 1320 and so is a late one. Grettir is immensely strong but unlucky and in this extract has taken on a ghost called Glam - none of your wispy transparent things but a particularly nasty, huge, strong and evil-minded physical entity. He hadn't been very popular when alive either - "He did not care for singing and was not religious, awkward and uncivil. Everyone found him repulsive." He's found dead on the mountain after a great blizzard, having apparently had a mighty struggle with some unknown evil creature. They are physically unable to move him to church for proper burial, despite great efforts, and bury him under a pile of stones. This is inadequate for keeping him down and he begins to "ride the buildings" at night (sit on the roof banging his heels), kill farm servants and destroy livestock. Strong (and Christian) Grettir takes him on and defeats him, cutting off his head; later the body is burnt and buried far away. However it is at great cost to himself as the scene above deprives him of any further gain of strength, he becomes unlucky and an outlaw, he can never be alone and for the rest of his life he will see Glam's eyes before him. "It has since become a common saying that people who suffer hallucinations have Glam's vision, or that Glam has lent them his eyes." The wonderful Professor Geoffrey Harlow used to paint a memorable word picture of the ghost's eyeballs glistening in the moonlight. See http://www.wwnorton.com/nto/middleages/topic_4/grettir.htm for the whole scene and a summary, or the entire saga can be read in the Everyman paperback Three Icelandic Outlaw Sagas, translated and edited by Anthony Faulkes.

4. Ted Hughes, "Full Moon and Little Frieda", Wodwo, 1967. Frieda Hughes is Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath's daughter and is now a poet and painter herself. Speaking at the Adelaide Festival in 1976 the poet said "This is just a description of a little girl - a two-year-old girl - looking at a full moon. And 'moon' being one of her first words - so she being very excited to use this word." When I first read the poem I thought she was seeing the reflection of the moon in the bucket, but I'm not sure. It's a lovely poem.

5. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles, ch. 6, "Baskerville Hall", 1902. This popular Sherlock Holmes novel has been used before, under "Dogs" above. The moonlight is atmospheric.

LITERARY BATTLES, MARCH-APRIL 2006

To mark the month of Mars, some battles - all from works for adults, and two in translation.

1. The clamour began; the ravens wheeled and the eagles
Circled overhead, craving for carrion; there was shouting on earth.
They hurled their spears, hard as files,
And sent sharp darts flying from their hands.
Bow-strings were busy, shield parried point,
Bitter was the battle. Brave men fell
On both sides, youths choking in the dust.

2. He held the ivory pipe, pertaining to the battery on the right, betwixt the finger and thumb of his right hand, - and the ebony pipe tipped with silver, which appertained to the battery on the left, betwixt the finger and thumb of the other ...

3. And it was indeed only for a few steps that he ran alone. One soldier started after him, then another, until the whole battalion with a shout of “Hurrah!” had dashed forward and overtaken him. A sergeant of the battalion darted up and grasped the standard which was swaying from its weight in X’s hands, but he was immediately shot down.

4. Flash’d all their sabres bare,
Flash’d as they turn’d in air,
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army while
All the world wondered.

5. ... we plunged our camels madly over the hill, and down towards the head of the fleeing enemy. The slope was not too steep for a camel-gallop, but steep enough to make their pace terrific, and their course uncontrollable: yet the Arabs were able to extend to right and left and to shoot into the Turkish brown. The Turks had been too bound up in the terror of Auda's furious charge against their rear to notice us as we came over the eastward slope: so we also took them by surprise and in the flank; and a charge of ridden camels going nearly thirty miles an hour was irresistible.

ANSWERS

1. The Battle of Maldon, an anonymous 11th-century Anglo-Saxon poem fragment, translated here by Kevin Crossley-Holland (in The Oxford Book of War Poetry). It commemorates a battle at Maldon in Essex in 991 when a small force of East Saxons was cut down by Viking invaders.

2. Laurence Sterne, Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, 1760-7, ch. xxvii. Uncle Toby and the corporal are reenacting the Duke of Marlborough's campaigns in miniature in the garden. The corporal, sitting in the sentry box for comfort, is about to get carried away with puffing on the pipes which are meant to represent the guns.

3. Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace, Book 1, Part 3, ch. 16, 1865-8. This is Prince Andrei in the thick of the Battle of Austerlitz; he is about to be wounded and lose consciousness while observing a ludicrous struggle over a mop. When he comes to, the high calm sky seems a world away from the tumult of the battle, and although Napoleon passes by and comments on his bravery, it no longer seems important. For a full account of the Battle of Austerlitz, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Austerlitz: "The battle serves as an episode to exalt Russian values and traditions of spirituality and modesty above the alleged crude logic and arrogance of the French."

4. Alfred Lord Tennyson, “The Charge of the Light Brigade”, 1854. "In 1854, during the Crimean War, an English light-cavalry brigade of over 600 men was led into a hopeless charge against well-protected batteries of Russian artillery at Balaklava. The blunder resulted in the deaths of well over two-thirds of the British soldiers" (Jon Stallworthy in The Oxford Book of War Poetry). You can see Tennyson's original handwritten version at http://etext.virginia.edu/britpo/tennyson/TenChar.html. Wikipedia says "Tennyson wrote the poem inside only a few minutes after reading an account of the battle in The Times, according to his grandson Sir Charles Tennyson. It immediately became hugely popular, even reaching the troops in the Crimea, where it was distributed in pamphlet form." A poor-quality recording of Tennyson reading the poem aloud is available on CD and online. The poem's driving, galloping-horse rhythm is highly effective, and it's still probably one of the more recognised poems though only number 74 amongst the "nation's favourites".

5. T.E. Lawrence (1888-1935): The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Chapter LIII, 1926. "Lawrence of Arabia" was a junior member of the British Museum archaeological team at Carchemish on the Euphrates, which fired his interest in Arab culture and during the First World War, "his ability to penetrate the 'closed shop' of nomadic tribal life enabled him to reanimate the wilting Arab revolt against the Turk' (Chambers). The Seven Pillars of Wisdom was written for private circulation.

LITERARY BLOOD, APRIL-MAY 2006

All of this blood is for adults, though one is arguably a cross-over. One is in translation.

1. See, see, how Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul, half a drop

2. Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.

3. He looked down at her foot and saw how the blood was running out of her shoe. Then he turned his horse and took the false bride home again.

4. As she did so, her eyes glanced casually over the ceiling till they were arrested by a spot in the middle of its white surface which she had never noticed there before. It was about the size of a wafer when she first observed it but it speedily grew as large as the palm of her hand, and then she could perceive that it was red.

5. “It wasn’t. It was liquid.” “It was what?” “Liquid. When I put my hand into it, it was quite wet.” “Great Scott! Half a sec. Where was the blood? Splashed all over the place, I suppose.” “Not exactly. There was a big pool of it underneath the body ... it had collected in a sort of hollow in the rock.”

ANSWERS

The first two are good, aren't they? They don't write 'em like that any more. There was also a LOT of blood in Conan Doyle's historical romances. Another time perhaps ...

1. Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, (last scene) (1604 version). Faustus is counting down his last hour of life before an eternity in hell. His vision of Christ's mercy is soon replaced by that of a vengeful God.

2. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act II, Scene ii, 1606. Macbeth is appalled at the murder he has just committed; his wife is made of sterner stuff ("A little water clears of this deed")

3. Brothers Grimm, “Cinderella” (Ashenputtel) from Household Tales, 1812-22, 1973 translation. The Germanic version of this story is much gorier than Perrault's - not only do the two stepsisters cut off bits of their feet (the first one the big toes, the second one the heels) to fit into the shoes - hence the blood running from them; they also have their eyes pecked out at the wedding. In this version, Ashenputtel is helped by birds that perch on a hazel tree above her mother's grave. It is they who point out to the prince the blood running from the false brides' shoe.

4. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, ch. LVI, 1891. Mrs Brooks, the landlady at The Herons, has already had misgivings about her guests (Alec the rapist, and Tess) and spied on them through the keyhole. The blood that drips through the ceiling is from the murdered Alec. Tess is meanwhile running after her beloved husband Angel Clare. I first heard this passage on the radio as a child and was deeply suspicious of stains on the ceiling thereafter.

5. Dorothy Sayers, Have His Carcase, ch. ix, “The Evidence of the Flat-Iron”, 1932. Harriet is telling Wimsey of her discovery of the body on the Flat-Iron rock on the beach; he is astounded to hear that the blood was still wet when she arrived as normally this would mean the murder had only just happened and the murderer might still have been around. In fact the victim was a haemophiliac, and so the blood did not clot.

LITERARY DEMONSTRATIONS & RIOTS, MAY-JUNE 2006

Marking May Day. All from works for adults.

1. What work’s, my countrymen, in hand? Where go you
With bats and clubs? The matter? Speak, I pray you.

Our business is not unknown to the senate; they have had inkling this fortnight what we intend to do, which now we’ll show ‘em in deeds. They say poor suitors have strong breaths; they shall know we have strong arms too.

2. Someone, snatching a raw potato from a sack in the greengrocer’s shop behind him, threw it at the constable, and hit him on the mouth. Straightway raw potatoes and turnips were flying by twenties at the windows of the Seven Stars, and the panes were smashed. (He) ... heard the voices turning to a savage roar, and saw a rush towards the hardware shop, which furnished more effective weapons than turnips and potatoes. Then a cry ran along that the Tories had sent for the soldiers ...

3. . “They’re at the gates! Call John, Fanny - call him in from the mill! They’re at the gates! They’ll batter them in! Call John, I say!” And simultaneously, the gathering tramp ... was heard right just outside the wall, and an increasing din of angry voices raged behind the wooden barrier, which shook as if the unseen, maddened crowd made battering-rams of their bodies.

4. As it appeared, it burst into music. First a purple banner, upheld on crimson poles with gilded lance-points; then a brass band in full note; and then children, children, children - little, middling and big. As the procession curved down into Trafalgar Road, it grew in stature, until, towards the end of it, the children were as tall as the adults who walked fussily as hens, proud as peacocks, on its flank. And last came a railway lorry on which dozens of tiny infants had been penned; and the horses of the lorry were ribboned and their manes and tails tightly plaited.

5. Mounted police appeared at the trot, and on a sudden, a swarm of plain-clothes men descended from nowhere and began to snatch the placards from the hands of the demonstrators, flinging the posters to the ground and trampling them underfoot. Amazed, incredulous, all who had witnessed the incident were shocked to inaction.

ANSWERS

Jane Austen refers jokingly to middle-class anxieties about the mob in "Northanger Abbey", ch. 14, when Henry Tilney's sister Eleanor interprets Catherine's remark about "something very shocking" about to come out in London - meaning a Gothic novel - as a full-scale violent riot to be quelled by the cavalry. Protest became more organised and in the main orderly as the century wore on.

1. William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, Act 1, Sc. 1, 1608-9. The aristocrat Menenius Agrippa meets a Company of starving and mutinous Citizens, and encourages them to join together for the general good; the successful soldier Coriolanus cannot bring himself to accommodate with them. McLeish and Unwin speak of Shakespeare's treatment of the self-contradictory Mob as "amorphous, a continuum of discontent which helps to create the unstable, volatile atmosphere of this unsettling play." It's currently playing at The Globe in London.

2. George Eliot, Felix Holt the Radical, ch xxxiii, 1866. The book is set at the time of the Reform Bill of 1832, and this riot takes place on the afternoon of the local election (in which, obviously, only limited numbers could participate at that time). Felix has been urging political reform, but more cynical and demogogic activists have been at work and the drunken crowd quickly turns violent. In attempting to lead them out of town so they cannot cause serious damage, Felix, wounded by the soldiers guarding the great Manor, is identified as a "leader" and brought to trial when a constable is accidentally killed. The book is an interesting study of the local politics of the time, and the relationship between the obnoxious "Radical" young local landowner and his parents is well drawn, but I felt the book lost its way and couldn't raise much interest in either Felix or Esther. George Eliot wrote an "Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt" in 1867, at the urging of her publisher, advising them how to use their new votes following that year's Reform Bill.

3. Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South, ch. xxii, “A Blow and Its Consequences”, 1855. Mrs Thornton, mill-owner John's mother, is preparing for the arrival of the striking mill-workers at the mill gates. They furiously resent the use of the Irish strike-breakers who are hiding at the top of the mill, groan loudly at the mill-owner (a custom still in use in the early 20th century in Hebden Bridge), and finally break the great gates down. Naive Southerner Margaret urges John to go to speak to the workers; they prepare to throw their clogs at him and Margaret is hit on the head by a stray stone - which causes a general retreat amongst the strikers, before the soldiers finally arrive, too late to be of use. The book was recently televised. In Gaskell's earlier book Mary Barton, the Manchester strikers resort to throwing acid in the faces of the "knobsticks" or strike-breakers.

4. Arnold Bennett, Clayhanger, Book 2, "His Love", ch. 10 “The Centenary”, II, 1910. This is a procession, not a demonstration, though the use of big decorative banners used to be common in both. The parade celebrates the centenary of the establishment of Sunday Schools and takes place on a baking hot day in the Potteries; the unfortunate participants are then confined to the square in the full heat of the day while the dignatories on the platform hold forth. Edwin, the main character of the book is struck by the insistence on blood in the hymns chosen. The author remarks on the shabby treatment of pathetic old Mr Sushions, a key figure in the establishment of Sunday Schools before they were fashionable, by the "indulgent and shallow Samaritans".

5. Walter Greenwood, Love on the Dole - ch. 10 “Historical Narrative”, 1933. "One of the most vivid and moving fictional representations of the 1930s Depression in Great Britain" (Sherry Ashworth). The Working Class Movement Library in Salford (http://www.wcml.org.uk/people/greenwood.htm) gives an interesting account of Salford-born Walter Greenwood's background and identifies the real-life people present at the above demonstration of the Unemployed Workers'Movement, of which he was an eye-witness.

LITERARY WWII AEROPLANES, JUNE-JULY 2006

All from works for adults, two written during the war. Me, a nervous flier?

1. The Bedouin knew about fire. They knew about planes that since 1939 had been falling out of the sky. Some of their tools and utensils were made from the metal of crashed planes and tanks. It was the time of war in heaven. They could recognise the drone of a wounded plane, they knew how to pick their way through such shipwrecks. A small bolt from a cockpit became jewellery.

2. The mountains had already slipped away ... when the trouble in the port engine began. It was if the engine ejected something violently. It seemed to lose suddenly part of its weight. The whole aircraft skewed violently to port and took a sideways and downward slip. The level skimming of the wings that had remained constant now for so long was broken in a second. The violence of the dive took him by surprise and had lost about five hundred feet before his reactions became clear again ...

3. Then the voice from the ground said something; the pilot said “Roger”, and the plane vaulted up the sky. This ranked easily as one of the nastiest sensations I have felt. We climbed, in a matter of seconds, from 11,000 to 22,000 feet. One’s body turned to iron and was crushed down, feeling as if an enormous weight were pressing on something that would not yield. My oxygen mask was too large and had to be held on, and ... I held it with my right hand, and held onto some kind of steel shelf with my left hand ...

4. He felt sick. Then he felt worse than sick: he felt disorientated. He did not know which way up he was; sudden clouds were covering the light of the moon. He pulled the stick back to climb, but felt he was spinning; he was aware of the vastness of space around him and the little box in which he was plummeting.

5. Oh God! Oh God! Oh God! Oh God! he had shrieked beseechingly through lips that could not open as the plane fell and he dangled weightlessly by the top of his head until Huple managed to seize the controls back and leveled the plane out down inside the crazy, craggy, patchwork canyon of anti-aircraft fire from which they had climbed away and from which they would now have to escape again.

ANSWERS

No.s 2 and 3 were written during the war - Bates was recruited to the RAF to write morale-boosting short stories, but as far as I know didn't actually fly though he served in Burma. Presumably he would have accompanied a mission or two, to get the realistic detail of his accounts. Martha Gellhorn's is a journalistic account of going up in a P-61 in a night-time flight. Joseph Heller served as a bombardier, flying from Corsica, aged 19 and his experiences inspired the later, blackly comic, Catch-22. The two later novels are well-researched reconstructions.

1. Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient, ch. 1, 1992. Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka and now lives in Canada. The novel tells the story of four entangled damaged lives in an Italian monastery towards the end of WWII; the English patient is a dying burns victim, whose memories unfold throughout the book. There was a successful, though rather long, film.

2. H E Bates, Fair Stood the Wind for France, ch. 1, 1944. The book opens atmospherically as an RAF plane returns routinely from a flight to Italy before something goes wrong and it comes down in France, where a local farming family help the members of the crew. The pilot is injured during the crash and his slow recovery is well told. "Much of Bates's fiction is set against the backdrop of the Second World War, exploring its effect upon ordinary lives" says Dickie James in the Oxford Good Fiction Guide.

3. Martha Gellhorn, The Face of War, “The Black Widow”, January 1945. Brave, vivid and entertaining American war correspondent whose three husbands included, disastrously, Hemingway. Her letters have just been published by Chatto.

4. Sebastian Faulks, Charlotte Gray, Part 1 “Early 1942”, ch. 1, 1998. The pilot is lost in France, and his lover, Charlotte Gray, goes there to look for him. He was minimised in the appalling film.

5. Joseph Heller, Catch-22, ch.22, “Milo the Mayor”, 1955. This pilot is seriously incompetent; the cult novel is full of desperate chaos. There is also the memorable scene where a young man, jumping from a raft to touch a low-flying plane, is sliced off at the legs. "Possibly the best - undeniably the funniest - novel of the Second World War" and an impossible act to follow, says Trevor Hoyle in the OGFG.

LITERARY STAIRS, JULY-AUGUST 2006

One quotation from a children's book, one from a crossover.

1. It was not only that the flash shone in on every side through breaches in the wall, so I seemed to be clambering aloft upon an open scaffold, but the same passing brightness showed me the steps were of unequal length, and that one of my feet rested that moment within two inches of the well.

2. “Wonderest thou whose are the feet that have worn away the rock ...?” she asked. “They are mine - even mine own light feet! I can remember when these stairs were fresh and level, but for two thousand years and more have I gone down hither, day by day, and see, my sandals have eaten out the solid stone!”

3. At the first turning of the second stair I turned and saw below
The same shape twisted on the banister
Under the vapour in the fetid air
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears
The deceitful face of hope and of despair.

4. I came forward to the head of the stairs and stood there, smiling, my hat in my hand, like the girl in the picture. I waited for the clapping and laughter that would follow as I walked slowly down the stairs. Nobody clapped, nobody moved.

5. “The staircase is a right-handed spiral, and makes one complete turn. The treads are composed of pierced iron-work. The hand-rail has a number of iron knobs on it, about the size of small walnuts. The stairs are apt to be slippery. The stair is well lit.”

ANSWERS

1. Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped, ch. 4 “I run a great danger in the House of Shaws”, 1886. Young David's wicked uncle Ebenezer has sent him up these dangerous stairs on a dark night to fetch a non-existent chest in the hope he will fall to his death.

2. H Rider Haggard, She, ch. 20, “Triumph”, 1887. The speaker, Ayesha, a bewitching and destructive white queen who rules over a lost empire in Africa, and who has fallen in love with the hero, for whom she has waited for 2000 years, is soon to die of extreme old age from contact with a mystical Fire which had previously brought her life. "She is seen by many as an expression of Victorian anxieties about religious cynicism and the decline of imperial domination" says Emily Weygang in the Oxford Good Fiction Guide. See "Mines and Potholes" above.

3. T S Eliot, Ash Wednesday, Part 3, 1930. Chambers Biographical Dictionary says that this poem is "the first fruits of [a] new sacramental attitude" springing from the poet's growing association with the Anglo-Catholic Church. John Cunningham in The South Atlantic Quarterly says "Ash Wednesday throughout holds together the vagaries of any sentient Christian soul in a kind of timeless moment. The soul ever knows at once her Ash Wednesday and also ever rejoices at the brink of Easter." - http://muse.jhu.edu/cgi-bin/access.cgi?uri=/journals/south_atlantic_quarterly/v103/103.1cunningham.html C E Chaffin in an essay on the poem at http://www.melicreview.com/archive/iss24/Chaffin%20Eliot%20Essay.htm says that the stair echo those in "Prufrock" and Dante. The shape below is an earlier self and the devil some personal demon.

4. Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca, ch. 16, 1938. The hostile housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, has tricked the unnamed heroine, played by Joan Fontayne in the film, into dressing in an outfit identical to the one worn by the heroine's powerful, dead, predecessor, Rebecca, at the previous costume ball. Her husband Maxim thinks she has done it on purpose.

5. Dorothy Sayers, Murder Must Advertise, ch. II, “Embarrassing Indiscretion of Two Typists”, 1933. It is down these stairs in an advertising agency that the murder victim has fallen. The stiltedness of the style in this extract is because it is the photographer's statement to the coroner's inquest. Wimsey, in his assumed personality of a silly-ass new recruit, objects to the knobs on the banisters.

LITERARY PICNICS: AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 2006

Four from works for adults, one from a children’s book.

1. Seven miles were travelled in expectation of enjoyment, and everyone had a burst of admiration on first arriving; but in the general amount of the day, there was deficiency. There was a languor, a want of spirits, a want of union, which could not be got over. They separated too much into parties.

2. At lunch they had a very bad time of it. People wanted them to sit on the grass, and the grass was dusty; and the tree-trunks, against which they had been invited to lean, did not appear to have been brushed for weeks, so they spread their handkerchiefs on the ground and sat on those, bolt upright. Somebody, in walking about with a plate of beefsteak pie, tripped up over a root and sent the pie flying.

3. The girls quickly dressed and sat down to the fragrant tea. They sat on the northern side of the grove, in the yellow sunshine facing the slope of the grassy hill, alone in a little wild world of their own. The tea was hot and aromatic, there were delicious little sandwiches of cucumber and caviar, and winy cakes.

4. A knapsack full of bun-loaf and apples and tea and sugar and chocolate, a jar of marmalade, the paper bag of Mrs ....’s toffees (molasses), a tin of pressed beef (pemmican), a bottle of milk, one spoon and enough mugs to go round ...

5. It is the first warm day of spring, and all over the chosen segment of moorland holiday-makers are taking the sun, even picnicking as presumably she and Stan had done in the happier times now being ultimately commemorated. It seems sensible to me convey the urn and its contents to a stretch of heather that is less popular, and I diffidently suggest this.

ANSWERS

1. Jane Austen, Emma, Vol. III, ch. 7, 1816. This is the famous Box Hill picnic, at which Emma is unforgivably rude to Miss Bates.

2. Jerome K Jerome, Three Men in a Boat, ch. 7, 1889. "Magnificently ridiculous," says my Chambers Biographical Dictionary; "a modern classic of the farcical". "One of the great comic novels of all time," says the Oxford Good Fiction Guide. JKJ is here reminiscing about some young ladies who had turned up over-dressed to a picnic. Like so many of our favourite Englishmen, JKJ was of foreign origin - Hungarian, though born in London.

3. D H Lawrence, Women in Love, ch. 14, 1920. Sisters Ursula, a teacher and Gudrun, an artist, have slipped away from a crowded and conventional garden-party and rowed to a quiet isolated spot where they strip and swim before running themselves dry and sitting down to the picnic quoted. Gudrun begins to do eurythmic dancing, while Ursula sings; some Highland cattle turn up and Gudrun continues to dance to hypnotise them until bossy Gerald turns up and drives them away.

4. Arthur Ransome, Swallowdale, ch. 3, “Horseshoe Cove and the Amazon Pirates”, 1931. This typical Ransome feast could have been taken from any of the books*; it seems to be obligatory to carry at least two heavy glass containers, preferably full of liquid. It should be remembered that the knapsacks of those days were the sort that dragged on your shoulders.

*Thanks to Steve Owen who pointed out "I have to take issue with you about the Arthur Ransome extract being described as 'could have been any of them'. I identified it as Swallowdale because that is where we find out what pemmican is. The first one I ever read, in 1957, was Pigeon Post, which has a plethora of allusions to pemmican but never a word about what it might be. The bun loaf is a give-away, too. But anyway, when I saw 'pressed beef (pemmican)', I knew it had to be one of the first two, and the second, i.e. Swallowdale, has the children adventuring on land, rather than water. Q.E.D. "

5. Alan Bennett, Untold Stories, 2005. This widely acclaimed autobiographical addition to Bennett's writings tells us in particular about his mother, his father, and his two favourite aunts - including outgoing Auntie Myra who insists on scattering her dead husband's ashes on Ilkley Moor amongst startled picknickers, while Bennett cringes in the car.

LITERARY TELEPHONES: SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2006

These are all from works for adults. The last one is a bit unfair as it’s from a new book, but I wanted to include mobiles.

1. The receiver gave out a buzz of a kind that K. had never before heard on a telephone. It was like the hum of countless children’s voices - but yet not a hum, the echo rather of voices singing at an infinite distance - blended by sheer impossibility into one high but resonant sound which vibrated on the ear as if it were trying to penetrate beyond mere hearing.

2. Just after the duck came in, the dining-room telephone started ringing. They let it ring for some seconds while they looked at each other.
“I’ll answer,” said Anna - but not moving yet.
Thomas said, “No, I think I’d better go.”
“I could, if you’d both rather,” St Quentin said.
“No, nonsense,” said Anna. “Why shouldn’t I? It might not even be anything at all.”
St Quentin steadily ate, his eyes fixed on his plate: Anna kept shifting her grip on the receiver. “Hullo?” she said. “Hullo? Oh, hullo, Major Brutt ...”

3. Phone for the fish-knives, Norman

4. I reached for the receiver. My hand advanced a few inches, then went limp. I forced it towards the receiver again, but again it stopped short, as if it had collided with a pane of glass. I wandered into the dining room.

5. After all, what’s the point your dad havin a blinger fone than you when he probly can’t even use the thing proply. So say your dad gets a handset upgrade to some slick Samsung on his Orange network and you want to swap it with your Nokia 6610 that you got on a T-Mobile network.You can’t just stick the SIM card carrying your fone number and tariff an stuff into your dad’s new handset.

ANSWERS

1. Franz Kafka, The Castle, ch. 2, 1926. K's strange new assistants Jeremiah and Arthur have just phoned the Castle from the Inn to ask if K could accompany them to the Castle but this is emphatically refused. When K tries to phone the Castle back to argue the point he gets the above sound, and it is some time before a loud remark of his brings a response from the other end. The world of The Castle is the same as that of The Trial, "one in which the individual struggles against ubiquitous, elusive and anonymous powers determining yet simultaneously opposing his every step". "Possibly Kafka's most profound statement, and most difficult book," says Trevor Hoyle in the Oxford Good Fiction Guide.

2. Elizabeth Bowen, Death of the Heart, Part III “The Devil”, ch. 6, 1938. Portia, the orphaned teenage ward of the Quaynes, has gone missing on finding that Anna has been reading her diary, and she has taken refuge with kindly and responsible Major Brutt, a friend of the family. The Quaynes who have not taken to Portia and have few natural feelings decide to have dinner, when the phone call comes. Portia has just devastated Major Brutt by revealing that Anna despises him.

3. John Betjeman, “How to get on in Society” 1954. The poem mocks "non-U" usage (upper-class people say "telephone" and presumably don't use fish-knives) and was published at the end of Nancy Mitford's book Noblesse Oblige on U and non-U social indicators. Kate Fox mentions many of the same sort of social indicators in her chapter on Linguistic Class Codes in her entertaining book Watching the English - the hidden rules of English behaviour, 2004 (sofa or settee, lounge or sitting-room).

4. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, ch. 10, 1963. Esther has failed to get onto the writing course at Harvard - her friend Jody tells her to come anyway and take another course, but Esther's mental state does not allow her to take this positive action.

5. Gautam Malkani, Londonstani, Part 1, Paki, ch. 4, 2006. The young British Asian narrator is a gangster wannabe; he and his mates talk tough, cruise in a lilac BMW and reprogram mobile phones for a living. But they all still live with their parents. He says: "Rudeboy Rule #2; Havin the blingest fone in the house is a rudeboy’s birthright. Not just for style but also cos fones were invented for rudeboys. They free you from your mum and dad while still allowing your parents to keep tabs on you."

LITERARY POLICEMEN, OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 2006

1. The policemen looked at each other. Then one began, and stated that having heard the report of a gun in Turner-street, he had turned down that way ..; that as he ... came nearer, he had heard footsteps as of a man running away; ... That he had even been startled when close to the body by seeing it lying across the path at his feet. That he had sprung his rattle; and when another policeman had come up, by the light of the lantern they had discovered who it was that had been killed.

2. A local constable in uniform cast a sidelong glance, and said with stolid simplicity: “He’s all there. Every bit of him. It was a job.”

3. “Right down wicked, I call it,” said Bill’s mother. “He ought to be grateful, he ought, with you bringing of ‘em back. Didn’t, he’d be looking for ‘em still. And there he go asking if we give you pocket money and how much. I tell him you have plenty ... And he say ‘Ar’ that silly, I could have slam the door on him.”

4. "Make way please," said the policeman politely. "Everything is all right. These children were locked in the lighthouse and couldn't get out. Make way please. There is no need for any excitement."

5. A row of police vans covered the mouth of [the street]. Behind them a legion of policemen stood with arms folded and feet turned out. A length of tangerine-and-white-striped tape stuck the sides of the street together. “Let me through,” said N-. “The street is closed, madam. Go back.” The policeman sounded friendly but decisive. He seemed to think the conversation was finished.

ANSWERS

Marlowe in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness", uses the phrase "utter solitude without a policeman" to convey the isolation that has led Kurtz to take "a high seat amongst the devils of the land". Thanks to Anthea Trodd for pointing this out.

1. Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton, ch. 18, 1848. The victim is Henry Carson, son of the local mill-owner; he had recently been Mary Barton's lover until she realised she truly loved the young engineer Jem, and had only been flattered by Henry's attentions. The finger of suspicion falls on Jem who had recently confronted Henry; the real culprit is Mary's moody father John, who had drawn the short straw in an early Chartist attempt to frighten the bosses. "On one level, the novel is a page-turning romance; on another it describes the plight of the workers in the industrial north graphically and movingly," says Sherry Ashworth in the Oxford Good Fiction Guide.

2. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent, ch. V, 1907. This policeman has had the unenviable job of collecting together the body parts of Stevie, the simple brother of secret agent Verloc's wife; he had tripped on his way to plant a bomb at the Greenwich Observatory and thus became an early involuntary suicide bomber. An anarchist sympathiser called Bourdin had indeed been killed in Greenwich Park by the bomb he was carrying, but not so spectacularly - Roger Tennant says in his introduction to the Oxford World's Classics edition, "the manner of Stevie's death is carried rather beyond the bounds of what it is physically possible for a small bomb [of those days] to do". Verloc is actually a double agent and the intention had been to discredit the anarchists.

3. Arthur Ransome, Big Six, ch xxi, “Morning Visitors”, 1940. One of the many enjoyable things about Arthur Ransome's books for children is the way his adult characters with small walk-on parts emerge alive from the page. The Coot Club members, whose aim is bird conservation, are being set up as vandals and thieves by a local adolescent and his friend, and the town's well-meaning but none-too-bright policeman, Mr Tedder, has fallen for this and fancies himself as a detective. Bill's mum is having none of this, to Bill's delight. In this case, the boys had taken some stolen shackles they had found planted on their boat to Tedder, and he had seen this as evidence of their guilt.

4. Enid Blyton, Five Go to Demon's Rocks, ch. 22 "The end of the adventure", 1961. Very little character about this policeman; there are always some generic policemen in the last chapter of the Famous Five books to say, "Well done, you children," as they lead the villains away in handcuffs. The books still sell.

5. Monica Ali, Brick Lane, ch. 21, 2003. Nazneen is looking frantically for her rebellious older daughter Shahana who has run away with a friend with the plan of living in Paignton, where "there were no Bangladeshis and they could do as they pleased"; she's trying to forestall her father's intention of taking them all back to Bangladesh. The girls had met at the Shalimar Cafe on Brick Lane, now closed by rioting, and turn out to be trapped there. "Surprises with its depth and dash" said the Guardian; "warm, shrewd, startling and highly readable" said the Observer; "a mixture of passion and restraint that is totally exhilarating" said India Today.

LITERARY OWLS: NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2006

1. And yesterday the bird of night did sit,
Even at noon-day, upon the market-place,
Hooting and shrieking.

2. The owls have hardly sung their last
While our four travellers homeward wend;
The owls have hooted all night long,
And with the owls began my song,
And with the owls must end.

3. Outside the owls hunted maternal rodents and their furry brood.

4. He stood there with closed eyes and an expression of rapture on his face, as if he were saying Grace, and then, with the absurdest sideways nibble, took the morsel so gently that he would not have broken a soap bubble. He remained leaning forward with closed eyes, with the mouse suspended from his beak, as if he was not sure what to do with it. Then he lifted his right foot ... and took hold of the mouse. He held it up ...., looked at it and nibbled its tail.

5. Below him the wood held a noise that came closer, yet was hard to place amongst the trees, and the rain and the river crashed in flood ... If it was anything it was the noise of a wind on the pass ... or it was the noise of owls hunting, though he had never heard so many: never a wood of owls.

ANSWERS

1. William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 1, Sc III (1599). Casca and Cicero are discussing the storms and portents which prefigure the unnatural act of the assassination of Caesar.

2. William Wordsworth, “The Idiot Boy”, 1798. This long narrative poem is based on a real incident: a simple woman's neighbour seems very ill, her husband is away, and in despair she sends her even simpler son Johnny on a quiet little pony to fetch a doctor from town, by night. The two go off at 8pm - 11, 12 and 1 am pass with no return and fearing the worst, the mother sets off herself to town to find her son and the doctor. She finally finds the boy sitting safely on the pony near a waterfall, having forgotten his errand - the neighbour recovers - and the four come home together, Johnny exclaiming "The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo, and the sun did shine so cold!" The owls keep up quite a racket throughout the poem. Wordsworth's biographer Juliet Barker tells us that he wrote the poem "almost extempore" in the woods of Alfoxton, and enjoyed himself enormously doing so.

3. T H White, The Sword in the Stone, ch. III, 1958. The Wart - the future King Arthur - has just met Merlin and his owl Archimedes. Archimedes is shy so the Wart gives him a mouse. T H White was enormously knowledgeable about birds, especially birds of prey, and this description is clearly taken from life.

4. Evelyn Waugh, Scoop, last line, 1938. William Boot, the nature writer of a London paper, is by mistake sent to cover a war in a fictional East African country, Ishmaelia - and by chance achieves the scoop of the title. The style of his nature column, Lush Places, had been modelled on that of its previous writer, the Rector of Boot Magna, and is comically overdone - "Feather-footed through the plashy fens passes the questing vole" has become almost a catch-phrase. Home again at last, Boot starts to write his next column: "... maternal rodents pilot their furry brood through the stubble; ..." and the book ends with the owls, more realistically, trying to eat them. The Guardian's online assessment of the book sees this as foreshadowing the outbreak of WWII. Nature columns these days tend to note that the traditional signs of the seasons are breaking down with global warming.

The overt racism of Scoop startles and shocks the modern reader; "coon" is used to describe a taxi driver, and the n- word is also used. Several online discussion pages say that it must be seen in the context of its time - and also its class. The English journalists - with the exception of the naive Boot - are universally portrayed as gross and unprincipled.

5. Alan Garner, The Owl Service, ch. 27, 1967. The book is reaching its denouement; an ancient story of love, revenge and death is constantly reenacted, with the forces concerned held in a kind of balance in the pattern of a plate service - a visual illusion of flowers and owls. The book won the Carnegie Medal on publication.

LITERARY NEW YEARS, DECEMBER 2006-JANUARY 2007

1. Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

2. This journey on New Year's Eve was a premeditated act of vengeance which she had kept in her heart ever since Godfrey, in a fit of passion, had told her he would sooner die than acknowledge her as his wife. There would be a great party at the Red House on New Year's Eve, she knew: her husband would be smiling and smiled upon, hiding her existence in the darkest corner of his heart. But she would mar his pleasure ...

3. The sky was almost black, but the snow shone a bright blue in the moonlight. The sea lay asleep under the ice, and deep down among the roots of the earth all small beasts were sleeping and dreaming of spring. But spring was quite a bit away because the year had only just got a little past New Year.

4. The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.

5. "There! Go along with you," said the Alderman, "and repent. Don't make such a fool of yourself as to get married on New Year's Day. You'll think very differently of it long before next New Year's Day: a trim young fellow like you, with all the girls looking after you. There! Go along with you!"

ANSWERS

Another famous literary New Year occurs in the late medieval poem "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" - Gawain deceives his host by not handing over the green lace girdle the lady of the house has given him, and soon afterwards suffers a slight nick from the Green Knight's axe in consequence. There is a very jolly New Year's Eve in Mary Poppins Opens the Door, used above under "striking clocks". "Inside the crack" (between the Old Year and the New), explains the Sleeping Beauty, "all things are at one. The eternal opposites meet and kiss" - and moreover, characters can get out of books left open. Susan Cooper's children's book The Dark is Rising makes much of the significance of the twelve days of Christmas, but New Year passes almost unnoticed amid the growing bad weather.

1. Alfred Lord Tennyson, “In Memoriam”, cvi, 1850 (begun 1833). With this long poem Tennyson paid tribute to his dead friend Hallam and worked through a long process of desolation, grieving and new hope. The New Year bells symbolise rebirth and a farewell to narrow self-interest, greed, war and vanity. The poem was admired by the Prince Consort, and Queen Victoria offered Tennyson the laureateship, vacant after Wordsworth's death. After Prince Albert's death in 1861, the Queen told Tennyson that she often turned to the poem for comfort.

2. George Eliot, Silas Marner, ch. 12, 1861. The squire's eldest son Godfrey is secretly married to opium-addict Molly but has repudiated her. Resenting the wealth and conviviality which he enjoys, Molly plans to present her little daughter to the squire and shame her husband before the celebrating company, but overtaken by snow and the drug which she takes for comfort, dies of exposure; the little girl Eppie is adopted by the solitary weaver Silas Marner.

3. Tove Janson, Moominland Midwinter, ch. 1 “The snowed-up drawing-room”, 1958. This is the fifth in the Moomin series and evokes the dark, comfortless and threatening cold of a Nordic winter. Sensitive Moomintroll wakes unexpectedly from his hibernation and bitterly misses sunshine and company; the two main female characters in the book, practical Too-ticky and anarchic Little My, cope much better, and make their own entertainment.

4. Thomas Hardy, "The Darkling Thrush". This wonderfully terse and evocative poem is dated 31st December 1900. The poet looks at a landscape where everything seems dead and shrunken and is surprised by the joyful song of a decrepit thrush. It was first published in Graphic a few days before the end of 1900, with the subtitle "By the Century's Deathbed", and was republished in the Times on New Year's Day 1901. It is at no. 39 in The Nation's Favourite Poems.

5. Charles Dickens, The Chimes, First Quarter, “Alderman Cute’s Advice”, 1844. Alderman Cute with his overfed and smug companions has come upon the poor, frozen old messenger Trotty being treated to tripe by his daughter Meg to celebrate her engagement to the young smith Richard. After exclaiming about such wasteful decadence, Cute brutally attempts to put the young couple off marriage - he says they will not be able to support their children. The Alderman fancies himself as a man of the people, who understands them and can talk to them in their own language - and is portrayed horribly convincingly by Dickens. All ends happily, but not until after a great deal of suffering and anxiety. The three "Christmas Books", Christmas Carol, The Chimes andThe Cricket on the Hearth, published 1843-5, were enormously popular.

LITERARY HANDKERCHIEFS, JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2007

1. I saw the handkerchief. - He found it then; I never gave it him.

2. It was my good fortune, that no ill accident happened in these entertainments; only once a fiery horse, that belonged to one of the captains, pawing with his hoof, struck a hole in my handkerchief, and his foot slipping, he overthrew his rider and himself; but I immediately relieved them both, and covering the hole with one hand, I set down the troop with the other, in the same manner as I took them up. The horse that fell was strained in the left shoulder, but the rider got no hurt; and I repaired my handkerchief as well as I could: however, I would not trust to the strength of it any more, in such dangerous enterprises.

3. He was seeking in his mind, then, for the least awkward means of retreat, when he remarked that Aramis had let his handkerchief fall, and by mistake, no doubt, had placed his foot upon it....

4. She staggered and fell: nearly blinded with the blood that rained down from a deep gash in her forehead; but raising herself, with difficulty, on her knees, drew from her bosom a white handkerchief ... and holding it up, in her folded hands, as high towards Heaven as her feeble strength would allow, breathed one prayer for mercy to her Maker.

5. “I’ve lost my pocket-handkin! Three handkins and a pinny! Have you seen them, Tabby Kitten?”

ANSWERS

1. William Shakespeare, Othello, Act V, Sc. II, 1604. "The most domestic of Shakespeare's tragedies," say McLeish and Unwin in their Pocket Guide to Shakespeare's Plays, "about the end of a marriage, ... intimately concerned with the details of sexual jealousy." This is the scene where Othello comes to the sleeping Desdemona, convinced that the missing handkerchief planted in Cassio's bedroom by Iago is evidence of his wife's infidelity; soon after this he smothers her.

2. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, Part I, “A Voyage to Lilliput”, ch. III, 1726. This great work is a mixture of satirical comment and a parody of travellers' tales. In the Lilliput section, Gulliver is among tiny people, and there is a series of whimsical activities to illustrate the difference in size. In the above incident, Gulliver has made an aerial parade-ground of his handkerchief suspended between sticks for the King's horsemen to ride on.

3. Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers, Ch. 4. “The Shoulder of Athos, the Baldric of Porthos and the Handkerchief of Aramis,” 1844. The young Gascon D'Artagnan has already upset two of the musketeers, Athos and Porthos to the extent of appointments made to duel, and his attempt to ingratiate himself with the third one, Aramis, only leads to more trouble. The richly embroidered handkerchief belongs to Aramis's mistress Madame de Bois-Tracy, but, destined for the church, he indignantly denies it and accuses D'Artagnan of compromising a lady. A third duel is planned.

4. Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, Chapter XLVII, “Fatal Consequences”, 1837-9. Nancy has been trying to stop her violent criminal lover Bill Sikes from murdering Oliver Twist and in rage he bludgeons her to death with his pistol. The handkerchief had come from the virtuous young orphan Rose Maylie. There are of course a lot of handkerchiefs, mostly stolen, in Oliver Twist, which even survive into the musical version. "Large silk handkerchiefs were both practical and fashionable accessories for both men and women, women's slightly smaller than men's, which were about thirty inches square," says Stephen Gill in the Oxford World's Classics edition.

5. Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, 1905. Little Lucie of Little-town Farm is upset at losing her handkerchiefs and pinafore, but thinks she sees white things spread on the grass high up the high, and climbs up to meet the hedgehog washerwoman Mrs Tiggywinkle. The book is dedicated to "the real little Lucie of Newlands".

LITERARY BICYCLES, FEBRUARY-MARCH 2007

1. “No one’s going to run him down. Hears the bell! Wabble. Gust of wind. Off comes the hat smack into the wheel. Wabble. Lord! what’s going to happen? Hat across the road, old gentleman after it, bell, shriek. He ran into me. Didn’t ring his bell, hadn’t got a bell - just ran into me. Over I went clinging to his venerable head. Down he went with me clinging to him. Oil can blump, blump into the road.”

2. So they chased her up Rose Street, and across Oak Street, and along Oak Lane. At the end of Oak Lane, Catherine Crumb turned left into Meddlecum Road and [they] were close behind her. But Wilfrid Leathercow’s bicycle was a racing bicycle, and Catherine Crumb rode very fast, with her head right down over the handle-bars, and her long thin legs going like pistons. ... D. and D., because they had not had very much practice at being kangaroos, were by now somewhat tired.

3. He knocked his leg on the bicycle pedal, swearing at the pain, complaining at Jack’s barminess for leaving it in such an exposed position. How does he think I’m going to get in with that thing stuck there?” he joked. “Tell him I said to leave it in the backyard next week, out of ‘arm’s way.”

4. There, to her immense satisfaction, was the bicycle, oddly surrounded on the floor by egg-cups, a candlestick and a roast chicken. She walked round the bicycle several times, admiring its shiny black and silver newness and its completeness of equipment with the pride of a creator.

5. “The behaviour of a bicycle that has a high content of humanity,” he said, “is very cunning and entirely remarkable. You never see them moving by themselves but you meet them them in the least accountable places unexpectedly. Did you never see a bicycle leaning against the dresser of a warm kitchen when it is pouring outside?”

ANSWERS

Bicycles are also important in "The Big Six" (see Policemen above) where the tyre-tracks (Dunlop) are helpful in identifying the villains.

1. H. G. Wells - The History of Mr. Polly, ch. 5, “Mr. Polly Takes a Vacation”, 1910. Young impressionable Mr Polly is showing off to his shrieking cousins and unwisely marries the least shrieky one, Miriam, with whom he becomes very unhappy. Filmed with John Mills in the title role in 1949. One of Wells's best-known non-SF works.

2. Eric Linklater, The Wind on the Moon, ch. 7, 1944. In this splendidly anarchic Carnegie Medal winner, the two sisters, Dinah and Dorinda, have been turned into kangaroos by a helpful witch, so that they can get their revenge on the bullying villagers - especially the spiteful but athletic Catherine Crumb. Unfortunately they are caught and put in a zoo - which leads to further adventures.

3. Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, ch. 1, 1958. Tim Adams calls this “the definitive postwar working-class novel” in an article in the Observer - http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,,1998476,00.html - to mark its 50th anniversary. Much has changed in Nottingham since then, and since the Albert Finney film of the 1960s - "just down the road was the old Raleigh bike factory where Sillitoe's roguish hero Arthur Seaton worked. The factory, like all the big factories round here, is long gone, turned into student flats" and "drug gangs and drive-by shootings" have replaced the old working-class culture. Arthur's joke is against the man he is cuckolding.

4. Catherine Storr, Marianne Dreams, ch. 12, "The Tower", 1958/64. Another highly original children's book, and a terrifying one. Bed-bound Marianne draws a sketchy house with a special pencil - and finds herself on an ominous plain with the house before her. She finds the house has an occupant - and as she continues to draw, the plot develops, more and more threateningly. When she finally manages to draw a bicycle, a means of escape is supplied. The food on the floor is what she can manage to draw for her companion to eat.

5. Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman, ch. 6, 1967, but written 1940. "O'Brien's masterpiece" says Jules Selby (Oxford Good Fiction Guide) - a complex, funny, eccentric, disturbing novel helped along with cod scholarship. One theory put forward in the book is that owners exchange molecules with their bicycles (from the close contact) so that the bicycles become humanised and the owners begin leaning against walls for support.

LITERARY HAIRSTYLES, MARCH-APRIL 2007

1. This nymph, to the destruction of mankind,
Nourish’ed two locks, which graceful hung behind
In equal curls, and well conspired to deck
In shining ringlets the smooth ivory neck.

2. The next day, [she] was standing in front of the mirror with a comb in her hand and her mouth full of hairpins, attempting a new coiffure which ... was called "Cats, Rats and Mice" and presented many difficulties. The hair was parted in the middle and arranged in three rolls of graduating size on each side of the head, the largest, nearest the part, being the "cat." The "cat" and the "rat" were easy to fix but the "mice" kept slipping out of her hairpins in an exasperating manner.

3. His blond hair was arranged, by art or nature, in three precise blond ledges which reminded me of steps so that I didn’t like them. I wouldn’t have liked them anyway.

4. She had a timid, wavering voice, and green eyes, with flecks of dark green on a light-green iris, like gooseberries, and sandy hair which curved across the front of her head in a high hollow crescent, the shape of a boat turned upside down. We used to imagine her walking across England and coming to the Severn or the Wye or the Ouse, and taking off this crescent and launching it the right way up and floating in it to the opposite shore, shading her green eyes and calling apologetically ‘Ahoy, there’.

5. Her hair was silken and slippery ... and it kept escaping from the pins and slithering out of Melanie’s fingers and it took a long time to coil it up and secure it becomingly on top of her aunt’s head. And then she thought: “No. Today shall be different.” And she pulled out all the pins again and let the hair fall down like a shower of sparks.

ANSWERS

1. Alexander Pope, “The Rape of the Lock”, Canto II, 1714. This is a mock-heroic poem written by Pope to try to reconcile a rift between two aristocratic Catholic families - a young man belonging to one had cut off a lock of hair belonging to a young woman of the other without permission.

2. Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind Ch. 13 part 2, 1936. This is Scarlett trying to look nice for Rhett, who is coming to supper and always notices her hairstyle, which is said to be all the rage in Richmond, capital of Virginia. The book, which wa the only one Margaret Mitchell wrote, won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize, but is little read nowadays, though most people are familiar with the film.

3. Raymond Chandler, Farewell My Lovely, ch. 8, 1940. I couldn't find many men's hairstyles in literature, but this is one, worn by Lindsay Marriott, a society gigolo who is about to hire Marlowe to accompany him to a blackmail rendezvous. Marlowe is off steps because he has just had to climb a great many to the top of the cliff.

4. Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows, ch. vii, 1957. The hairstyle belongs to Miss Furness, a geography teacher, who isn't otherwise important. Appearance counts for a great deal and is always commented on in detail in this autobiographical novel; blonde curls are commented on most favourably.

5. Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop, ch. 9, 1981. A dark novel in which two suddenly orphaned children go to live in an eccentric and sinister household, dominated by a violent and unpredictable toymaker uncle. His Irish wife and her two brothers also live in the household, and in the passage above Melanie is trying to encourage the oppressed wife to break free. At the end a fire consumes the house, the sinister toys, the husband and presumably the wife and her lover-brother.

LITERARY DOCTORS, MAY-JUNE 2007

A nod to the Calder Valley Pace Egg Play, performed on Good Friday: “A doctor! A doctor! Ten pounds for a doctor!” One extract from a work for children.

1. Charles in snow and rain trotted across country. He ate omelettes on farmhouse tables, poked his arm into damp beds, received the tepid spurt of blood-lettings in his face, listened to death-rattles, examined basins, turned over a good deal of dirty linen ...

2. “Well,” said old Timothy, “’tis a strange thing about doctors that the worse they be the better they be. I mean that if you hear anything of this sort about ‘em, ten to one they can cure ye as nobody else can.”

3. He does not rise in piteous haste
To put on convict-clothes,
While some coarse-mouthed Doctor gloats, and notes
Each new and nerve-twitched pose,
Fingering a watch whose little ticks
Are like horrible hammer-blows.

4. "... everyone is most impressed - echinococcus it was. That’s a real diagnostician, they’re all saying. That’s all everyone’s talking about." Just then the head doctor came in , greeted them both and said, "What the devil’s happening to this place? What a filthy mess it is! By the way, ... it was echinococcus after all; just fancy, we were wrong. Congratulations."

5. Physicians of the Utmost Fame
Were called at once; but when they came
They answered, as they took their Fees,
“There is no Cure for this Disease.”

ANSWERS

1. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, Part I, IX, 1856. All is reasonably well at this point - Dr Bovary is working hard and building his reputation; his wife Emma is rather bored, but making an effort to keep him happy. Henry James called the novel "one of the first of the classics" and the prosecution of the author and publisher for irreligion and immorality did not succeed, but helped the book's sales.

2. Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders, Ch. IV, 1887. Timber merchant Mr Melbury's employees are discussing the new young Dr Fitzpiers who has been dabbling in chemical experiments and so is thought to be possibly in league with the devil. In fact he's just a dilettante (and the cause of a lot of the unhappiness in the book, which was Hardy's favourite).

3. Boris Pasternak, Dr Zhivago, ch. 1, 4, “The Advent of the Inevitable”, part 5, 1958. Dr Zhivago, known as Yurii Andreieivich, has diagnosed a woman's death as caused by "echinococcus of the liver" against the opinion of the others. His wife Tonia now lies exhausted from giving birth; the autopsy results from the dead woman come through, and Zhivago is vindicated. Echinococcus covers six kinds of tapeworm. The novel was begun before 1920 but not finished until 1957 and published in Russian in Milan in 1958. It was not published in Russia until 1988. It is set against the First World War and Russian Revolution; Zhivago is a kind of "holy fool".

4. Hilaire Belloc, Selected Cautionary Verses, “Henry King, who chewed bits of string and was early cut off in dreadful agonies”, 1940. See "Horses and Ponies" above.

5. Oscar Wilde, Ballad of Reading Gaol, 1898. Wilde was in Reading Prison at the same time as Charles Thomas Wooldridge, a Guardsman who cut his wife's throat when she told him she was interested in another man. He was hanged in 1896. The stanza above is one of a series following the line "For each man kills the thing he loves,/Yet each man does not die."

LITERARY FALSE TEETH, MAY-JUNE 2007

All from works for adults, though one is a crossover.

1. “Oh, Lord,” [he] groaned ...; and, as was his way when perplexed, put his hand to his false teeth, dragging the top set down and allowing them to fly back to his jaw with a snap. It was a most fortunate move ...

2. Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart.
He’ll want to know what you done with the money he gave you
To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.
You have them all out, Lil, and get yourself a nice set,
He said, I swear, I can’t bear to look at you.

3. “God knows it. He knows in fifteen years I ain't et the victuals He aimed for man to eat to keep his strength up, and me saving a nickel here and a nickel there so my family wouldn't suffer it, to buy them teeth so I could eat God's appointed food. I give that money. I thought that if I could do without eating, my sons could do without riding.”

4. ... it was those bloody false teeth. The things were magnified by the water in the tumbler, and they were grinning at me like the teeth in a skull. It gives you a rotten feeling to have your gums meet.

5.Within two weeks ... she had ordered a porcelain bridge that could be attached to her remaining molars, but the thing turned out to be so uncomfortable that she preferred wearing her denture on a ribbon round her neck.

ANSWERS

1. H Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines, ch. 7, “King Solomon’s Road”, 1885. Already used in "Mines and Potholes" but an interesting early literary appearance for false teeth. Our heroes are cornered by the fierce Kukuana but Captain Good, who is also half-shaven and has a glass eye, gains a psychological advance on people who have not seen false teeth (or glass eyes) before. Penguin is currently promoting others of this end-of-empire gung-ho genre (She, The Lost World, Riddle of the Sands) for Father's Day.

2. T S Eliot, The Waste Land, II “A Game of Chess”, 1922. This poem has already been used for Dust, Coughs, Clocks and Gramophones. Is there no end to its versatility? It's available on CD read by Paul Schofield and also by the author himself who isn't very good at Cockney accents, though he gets it right on the page.

3. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, “Armstid”, 1930. The death and burial of Addie Bundren told in a series of stream-of-consciousness chapters by members of her family and neighbours. Following heavy rain, the rivers are in flood and the dead woman's useless husband and various children struggle to get the increasingly malodorous coffin to Jefferson for burial as she had requested. This chapter is narrated by a helpful farmer, Mr Armstid. Anse Bundren, the father, has just swapped his son Jewel's beloved horse for two new mules, the original ones having been drowned in the river. In the last chapter we find out that Anse's determination to get to Jefferson was not out of duty to his wife but to get himself false teeth. He steals his daughter's money to pay for them, and promptly marries another woman.

4. George Orwell, Coming up for Air, p. 1, 1939. A glum novel, in which depressed middle-aged George Bowling tries unsuccessfully to escape a joyless marriage and meaningless existence.

5. Isabel Allende, House of the Spirits, ch. 7, “The Brothers”, 1985. Clara has just had most of her teeth knocked out by her fiercely patriarchal and violent husband Esteban for defending her daughter's choice of lover. She promptly leaves him along with her daughter. Isabel Allende began the book as a letter to her 99-year-old grandfather who was dying, and as an attempt to come to terms with the Pinochet dictatorship - the last section of the book is clearly based on the violent overthrow of her uncle Salvador Allende's government in 1973, and for those not that keen on magical realism, the most effective part of the novel.

LITERARY BREAKFASTS, JUNE-JULY 2007

1. ... I then summoned them all to prayers, soon after which we began our breakfast. So severely had we dealt with our supper the previous night, that we had little to eat but the biscuits, which were so dry and hard, that, hungry as we were, we could not swallow much. Fritz and I took some cheese to help them down, while my wife and younger sons soaked theirs in water. Ernest roamed down to the shore, and looked about for shellfish. Presently he returned with a few whelks. `Ah,' said he, `if we had but some butter.'

2. ... he caught a deep breath, which latter proceeding caused him to catch also the attractive odour of something fried in fat. “I beseech you to have a morsel,” murmured his hostess. (He) looked up and saw that the table was spread with mushrooms, pies and other viands. “Try this freshly-made pie and an egg,” continued Madame. ... “And also a few pancakes?” suggested Madame.

3. For breakfast you got two rashers of bacon and a pale fried egg, and bread-and- butter which had often been cut overnight and always had thumbmarks on it. ... I never saw anyone brave the marmalade jar, which was an unspeakable mass of stickiness and dust.

4. Down at breakfast, how they chattered!
What an appetite they had!
Porridge, piping hot, with cream on!
How they loved it! Weren’t they glad!

5. It is no secret ... that (he) ...is seldom a ball of fire at the breakfast table. Confronted with the eggs and b., he tends to pick cautiously at them as if afraid they may leap off the plate and snap at him. Listless, about sums it up. Not much bounce to the ounce.

ANSWERS

1. Johann David Wyss and Johann Rudolf Wyss, The Swiss Family Robinson, ch. 2, 1812. The father was a Swiss pastor; the son a Professor of Philosophy who completed and published his father's story, first written to draw moral lessons and teach good husbandry. The family are shipwrecked on an island, and like Robinson Crusoe, to whom the title refers, manage to survive and build a house by using the island's resources and many items retrieved from the ship. The story has been filmed many times.

2. Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls, ch. 3, 1842. In this satirical black comedy, the main character, Chichikov, is bargaining with the landowners for the "souls" of their dead serfs; they are being taxed on them - he wants them to borrow against. Everyone is anxious to please this apparently wealthy and important young man. "One of the greatest novels in world literature" says my Chambers.

3. George Orwell, Road to Wigan Pier, ch. 1, 1937. This book was previously used for the Mining quiz. To spoil the story, Orwell apparently spurned the clean and comfortable accommodation he was offered by a local trade unionist, and went looking for the nastiest place he could find to stay in.

4. W. Perring (verse), illus. A. J. McGregor, Lost at the Fair (Ladybird book), 1948. One of Ladybird's first series of rhyming animal stories for small children, series 401. One-parent-family Mrs Dormouse takes her two children to an exciting local event, a Fair. On the way they find a sobbing and penniless young fieldmouse, and take him with them. The climax of the day is an elephant ride but young dormouse Danny gets stuck in a tree and has to be rescued by a blackbird. A. J. McGregor usually gets all the praise for his colourful and detailed pictures for this series; he excels in expressions and well-observed body language - but W. Perring (male or female? I can't find any info) deserves credit for the concise and dramatic telling of the story, in natural rhythms, with clever mood-swings. The quiet dawn opening is shattered by the startling banging on the window - drowsiness turns to excitement as they eat their post-WWII breakfast - sympathy for poor Fieldy Mouse - fun and treats at the fair - the show-stopping elephant - crisis as Danny is left hanging in the tree and falls, to be caught just in time by the blackbird - horror back at the fairground - the pompous policeman's slow note-taking - relief as the blackbird arrives and the happy group wend their way home in the setting sun. Questions: what happened to Mr Dormouse? (Mrs Dormouse shares a bed with her children.) Why had Fieldy Mouse's family abandoned him? Why is Mr Squirrel the only character with no clothes? Why doesn't the elephant (who can talk) turn back, and why had the keeper not gone with them? And of course the major discrepancy, which I didn't notice until adult - the colossal size-changes of the characters. When the young mice climb onto the elephant, they are human-sized (judging from neighbouring trees, the elephant is normal) - but Danny has reverted to mouse-size when he climbs onto the blackbird's back. It's all done with perspective ... Anyway, not great literature perhaps, but fun (though I'm sorry the two boys get all the action - Daisy seems totally passive), and the parents of small children bought the series enthusiastically from the 1940s until at least the 1970s. The whole series is now out of print.

5. P G Wodehouse, Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, ch. 1, 1965. Bertie Wooster comments later in the book that dinner is the meal that brings out the best in him, but unusually this novel opens with a joyous breakfast ("I marmaladed a slice of toast with something of a flourish") because Jeeves is back to look after him.

LITERARY FIRES, JULY-AUGUST 2007

All of these are from works for adults.

1. Then Kari took up a blazing bench in his hand, and runs up along the cross-beam, then he hurls the bench out at the roof, and it fell among those who were outside. Then they ran away, and by that time all Kari’s upper clothing and his hair were ablaze, then he threw himself down from the roof, and so crept along with the smoke.

2. We ...there stayed till it was dark almost and saw the fire grow; and as it grow darker, appear more and more, and in Corners, and upon steeples, and between churches and houses, ... in a most horrid malicious bloody flame, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire. ... We stayed till ... we saw the fire as only one entire arch of fire from this to the other side of the bridge, and in a bow up the hill, for an arch of above a mile long. It made me weep to see it. The churches, houses, and all on fire and flaming at once, and a horrid noise the flames made, and the cracking of houses at their ruine.

3. There was a fire-storm out there. The one flame ate everything organic, everything that would burn. It wasn’t safe to come out of the shelter until noon the next day. When the Americans and their guards did come out, the sky was black with smoke. The sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead. So it goes.

4. The books leapt and danced like roasted birds, their wings ablaze with red and yellow feathers.

5. There was a fearful explosion almost under my feet and the frapping burst, went flying in the air, and at once there were two other explosions, one after the other. I saw the deck split open from my feet right to the fo’castle itself. The whole ship opened and sent up a tower of bright flame in the midst of which what was left of the main mast fell thunderously.

ANSWERS

All of these fires are destructive, some on a massive scale. I didn't use, because it isn't well-known, but would like to quote here, a powerful passage from chapter 3 of Akira Yoshimura's "One Man's Justice", a novel which includes the American bombing of civilian Fukuoka:

The moment he opened the double steel doors he was consumed by a deafening roar. Each breath of the superheated air seemed to scorch the inside of his lungs. Everything on the outside - the trees, the headquarters building, the ground - was bright red. Powerful gusts of wind lashed the branches of trees, and singed leaves danced across the ground.

Takuya stepped away from the doors and ran a few paces to the edge of the backyard, where he stopped, riveted by the terrifying scene before his eyes. Huge swirling towers of flames reached skyward from a seething conflagration covering an almost endless expanse below him. One thunderous roar followed another, resounding like waves crashing into a cliff, hurling sheets of fire and angry streams of sparks into the night sky. The barracks just to the west of where Takuya stood had been razed, and a frenzied swarm of soldiers were using hoses and buckets to throw water onto the headquarters building. The men were all tinged red, as everything else was in this inferno.

Takuya had heard reports of cities being devastated by incendiaries, but the destruction he was witnessing far surpassed anything he had ever imagined. ... The city contained no military installations or munitions factories, so the purpose of the fire raid could only have been to kill and maim civilians and reduce their dwellings to ashes. The thought flashed through his mind that the scene he was witnessing had been repeated time and again in other cities and towns all over Japan, with innumerable non-combatants sent to their deaths.

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1. The Story of Burnt Njal, ch. 128 “Njal’s Burning”, c. 1280, Dasent translation, 1911. One of the "big five" Icelandic sagas, this one tells the story of rural lives disrupted by ongoing violent feuds. In this incident, chieftain Flosi with a number of companions rides to Bergthorsvol, where Njal and his family live, and set fire to the house in an attempt to kill Njal's sons in a revenge attack. Skarp-hethin, Grim and Helgi die in the attack, as do the elderly Njal and his wife Bergthora who refuses to leave her husband. Kari Solmundarsson from Orkney, who has helped Njal's sons in the past, puts up a brave fight but finally manages to escape. He later attempts to hunt down the Burners. The change to the present tense for action scenes is typical of the sagas.

2. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 2 September 1666. Pepys, 1633-1703, was the son of a London tailor educated at Cambridge. He began in poverty but rose in the Admiralty after the Restoration. His famous diary runs from 1st January 1660 to 31st May 1669, when his wife died and his eyesight failed. His account of the Great Fire of London (above) is one of the diary's highlights, along with the Great Plague and the Dutch fleet sailing up the Thames.

3. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5, ch. 8, 1969. Vonnegut himself witnessed the aftermath of the bombing of Dresden and this book, which is partly a sci-fi book involving time-travel, was instrumental in publicising it. "So it goes" is intended ironically. Time magazine placed the book amongst its "all-time 100 novels" and commented: "For Vonnegut, man's worst folly is a persistent attempt to adjust, smoothly, rationally, to the unthinkable."

4. Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, Part 3, “Burning Bright”, 1954. Another sci-fi book, with an urgent message: in it, the written word is forbidden, and any books found are destroyed by "firemen" while the bulk of the population watch interactive TV soap operas. A small band of rebels memorise works of literature and philosophy for posterity. 451 degrees Fahrenreit (223 Celsius) is the temperature at which book paper burns. Bradbury has said recently recently that the book is not about state censorship, but about the deadening effect of TV and indeed I-pods and the like (Wikipedia). One of the Dr Who TV episodes made a similar point.

5. William Golding, Fire Down Below (To the Ends of the Earth, Vol. 3), ch. 21, 1989. This incident comes towards the end of the third of this splendid and atmospheric seafaring trilogy set on a decrepit Australia-bound sailing vessel in the early nineteenth century. Personally I enjoyed the second and third volumes more than the first; the characters have a chance to deepen, the narrator becomes less irritating and there are all sorts of excitements. Decent and sensible First Lieutenant Charles Summers, at loggerheads with "Captain's pet" vivacious and charming Lieutenant Benet, has been worrying all along that it had been unwise to put redhot iron in the bowels of a wooden ship.

LITERARY MONKEYS, AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 2007

There is one work for children this month.

1. One of them showed me a ring that he had of your daughter for a monkey.

2. I began now to perceive an outline of something black, and I soon saw, with tolerable distinctness, the outline of a small black monkey, pushing its face forward in mimicry to meet mine; and I now dimly saw its teeth grinning at me. ... I poked my umbrella softly towards it. It remained immobile - up to it - through it.

3. “They are very many, evil, dirty, shameless, and they desire, if they have any fixed desire, to be noticed by the Jungle People. But we do not notice them even when they throw nuts and filth on our heads."

He had hardly spoken when a shower of nuts and twigs spattered down through the branches; and they could hear coughings and howlings and angry jumpings high up in the air among the thin branches.

4. Then he thrashed and turned in the water, the black muzzle opened widely and Vasco yearned up at the sky. This brief struggle over, the monkey sank again, and they had a last glimpse of his orange-coloured arms and feet vividly refracted below the surface, dangling like roots.

5. The monkey, propped securely in a fork high up on a banyan tree, was awakened by the first rays of the sun spreading warmth across his back and a sudden emptiness in the pit of his stomach. He recalled, fuzzily, having been hungry when the sun last set, but the encounter with the fragment of brick had already begun to fade into the undifferentiated grey mist that constituted his past.

ANSWERS

1. Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, Act III, Sc. 1. Tubal is enjoying upsetting Shylock about his runaway daughter Jessica's behaviour. Shylock famously replies, "I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys" - his deceased wife Leah had given him the ring Jessica has bartered away when they were courting.

2. Joseph Sheridan Lefanu, “Green Tea” from In a Glass Darkly, 1872. (Though apparently Dickens included it in All the Year Round in 1869). This is the first appearance of the aggressive phantom monkey that haunts the speaker until he finally kills himself; it is brought on by drinking too much green tea, which opens his Inner Eye. These days all sorts of health claims are made for green tea, but too much caffeine of course has strange effects. A community of Canadian nuns had been having problems blamed on green tea at the time the story was written. Lefanu was a great tea drinker himself.

3. Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book, "Kaa's Hunting - Maxims of Baloo", 1894. The bear Baloo is teaching Mowgli the law of the jungle, and is here warning him against the Bandar-log - the monkey people. Later in the story the latter kidnap Mowgli and Baloo and Bagheera incite the great python Kaa to help them rescue him. Kaa hypnotises the monkeys before feasting on them.

4. Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger, ch. 33, 1992. Psychotic Captain Thurso, captain of a slaver ship off Africa, has thrown Cavana's pet monkey Vasco overboard in a rage. Much later we learn that following Paris's spontaneous protest against the killing of the slaves, it is Cavana who spears Thurso in revenge. This substantial novel, a Booker Prize winner, is gripping, informative and convincing.

5. Vikram Chandra, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, "... before", 1995. This monkey is a present-day one, tolerated by Abhay's family despite his thieving habits. Abhay, newly arrived from the US, shoots the monkey because it steals his jeans. The family, aware of the connection with the monkey god Hanuman, try to nurse the monkey back to health; and in the process its body becomes inhabited by the 19th-century poet Sanjay. The monkey god Hanuman argues with the death god Yama for his survival. This big novel ranges all over the place through Indian history and 20th-century America. Chandra, an exciting and accomplished writer, has since written an excellent book of short stories, Love and Longing in Bombay, and the epic Sacred Games.

LITERARY EYES IN MIRRORS, SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2007

One work for children and one cross-over.

1. Returning, I had to cross before the looking-glass; my fascinated glance involuntarily explored the depth it revealed. All looked colder and darker in that visionary hollow than in reality; and the strange little figure there gazing at me, with a white face and arms specking the gloom and glittering eyes of fear moving where all else was still, had the effect of a real spirit.

2. Approaching the chimney her back was to [him] but she could see him in the glass. An indescribable thrill passed through her as she perceived the eyes of the reflected image were open, gazing wonderingly at her. Under the curious unexpectedness of the sight she became as if spellbound, almost powerless to turn her head and regard the original. However by an effort she did turn, when there he lay asleep the same as before.

3. In the black abyss there appeared a single Eye that slowly grew, until it filled nearly all the Mirror. ... The Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow like a cat’s, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened onto a pit, a window into nothing. Then the Eye began to rove, searching this way and that.

4. I went inside and found a bathroom with a chipped mirror and still my eyes were blue. My eyes were blue, and as I looked at the man, the man who was before me, I saw that his face was cruel and the eyes were blue and still, neither alive nor dead, strange in the brown face. He had the bluest eyes in the world. And this was how I met the most evil man in the world.

5. ... the mirror fragment fell sparkling to the floor and he saw a gleam of brightest blue. [An] eye was gazing at him out of the mirror. “Help us!” he yelled at it in mad desperation. “... Help us!” The eye blinked, and was gone.

ANSWERS

1. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, Vol. I, ch. II, 1847. The child Jane has been shut in the oppressive red-room as a punishment and as it gets darker, finds it hard to keep her eyes away from the great looking-glass. At first she fancies herself a spirit; she remembers Mr Reed had died in that room, and seeing a moving light, believes he has come back as a ghost and screams, finally losing consciousness. The servants also believe she has seen a ghost.

2. Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders, ch. XVIII, 1887. This strange meeting is between Fitzpiers and Grace; he has in fact momentarily awakened but gone straight back to sleep. The episode strengthens the bond between them.

3. J R R Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2, ch. vii, “The Mirror of Galadriel”, 1954-5. The Elf-lady Galadriel is allowing the visiting hobbits to see what they may in her magic mirror, stream-water in a silver bowl. Sam sees the despoilment and industrialisation of Hobbit-land; Frodo sees a Gandalf-like figure and a series of dramatic scenes, but the Eye of Sauron, questing for the three Rings, breaks in. This image was expanded in the recent film to a great eye in the sky.

4. Vikram Chandra, Love and Longing in Bombay, “Shanti”, 1997. This passage is from the last of the five stories in the book which are named after the traditional human pursuits of Vedic lore: Artha (wealth), Kama (desire, pleasure, love) and Dharma (faith, righteousness) but the fourth, Moksha (salvation) is replaced by Shakti (strength) and Shanti (peace). The stories are virtuosic and wide-ranging, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (Eurasia region) and were short-listed for the Guardian Fiction Prize. "All five stories are narrated by the callow Ranjit Sharma, who hears them from an older man, Subramaniam, in a nondescript bar. Subramaniam, in turn, adopts other narrative voices as he recounts the tales that he has heard," says Shashi Tharoor in a review in The New York Times, 1997. The last story is particularly complicated as a young man and a young woman tell each other stories on their rare meetings at a remote railway station. In the passage quoted, the narrator, forced in war to drive a tank over a young staring blue-eyed German, finds himself become blue-eyed and evil. Apologies for using Vikram Chandra two months running ...

5. J K Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, ch. 23, “Malfoy Manor”, 2007. Harry and his companions are imprisoned in the dungeon at Malfoy Manor and Hermione is being tortured upstairs. Seeing what he believes is the blue eye of Dumbledore in the mirror shard, Harry begs for help. Dumbledore is dead, but his eccentric brother Aberforth, who keeps the Hog's Head pub in Hogsmeade, is also linked to the broken mirror and also has blue eyes. He sends the house-elf Dobby to rescue them.

LITERARY SPIDERS, OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 2007

Quotations from two books for children this month.

1. Immediately, at the touch of this baleful potion, the girl’s hair dropped out, her nostrils and her ears went too, and her head shrank almost to nothing. Her whole body, likewise, became tiny. Her slender fingers were fastened to her sides, to serve as legs, and all the rest of her was belly; from that belly, she yet spins her thread, and as a spider is busy with her web as of old.

2. The Scots were now under the leadership of the Bruce (not to be confused with the Wallace), who, doubtful whether he had slain the Red Comyn or not, armed himself with an enormous spider and marched against the English, determined if possible to win back the Great Scone by beating the English three times running.

3. “I am not entirely happy about my diet of flies and bugs, but it’s the way I’m made. A spider has to pick up a living somehow or other, and I happen to be a trapper. I just naturally build a web and trap flies and other insects. My mother was a trapper before me. Her mother was a trapper before her. All our family have been trappers. Way back for thousands and thousands of years we spiders have been laying for flies and bugs.”

4. Ling Tien, evidently, had discovered a method by which he could turn severed hands into spiders ... Slowly the fingers would start to move by themselves - just little twitches first, then coiling motions; finally dark hairs would grow and Ling Tien would then take them out of the fluids and set them loose, as spiders, all round the neighbourhood.

5. ... the stars shone brightly onto one of the worst scenes he had ever clapped eyes upon. Spiders. Not tiny spiders like those surging over the leaves below. Spiders the size of carthorses, eight-eyed, eight-legged, black, hairy, gigantic.

ANSWERS

1. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book IV, c. AD 8, Mary M Innes translation, 1955. Minerva (Pallas), the goddess of weavers, flies into a jealous rage when the woman Arachne produces a perfect tapestry representing the doings of the gods. She tears the tapestry apart and strikes Arachne in the face with a wooden shuttle. Arachne hangs herself but Minerva, "in pity" it says but her words imply revenge, turns her into a spider so she will hang and weave forever. Ted Hughes covers the same story in his 1997 Whitbread winner Tales from Ovid. Hugh Lupton's stage telling of some of the stories from Metamorphoses is extremely moving.

2. W C Sellar and R J Yeatman, 1066 and All That, ch. 23, “Edward II: a Worthless King”, 1930. From the classic "Memorable History of England, comprising all the parts you can remember, including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates". The book was first serialised in Punch magazine, and according to Wikipedia, spoofs H. E. Marshall's Our Island Story which has recently become popular again. The spider reference here (it is shown brooding over the Battle of Bannockburn - or Flodden) is to the legend that Robert Bruce (Robert I of Scotland), while hiding in a cave or shed, was encouraged to carry on by observing a spider fail six times to extend its line, but succeed at the seventh try. He did indeed beat the English at Bannockburn in 1314 despite being heavily outnumbered. An inspirational poem "Bruce and the Spider" was written by the poet Bernard Barton (1784-1849).

3. E B White, Charlotte’s Web, ch. 5, “Charlotte”, 1952. In this well-loved children's book, the spider, Charlotte, weaves words into her web to save the life of her friend, the pig Wilbur. The book has been made into a cartoon and stage-play.

4. Kazuo Ishiguro, When We Were Orphans, ch. 7, 2000. In this very odd book, the narrator, while a child in Shanghai, is told by Akira, the son of the Japanese family next door, that their Chinese family servant Ling Tien has the nasty habit mentioned above. The boys work themselves up to steal a small bottle of fluid from the servant's room when he is away. Akira himself is portrayed as a very strange boy; the narrator has apparently grown up to become a successful private detective, with a mystery concerning his parents' disappearance in Shanghai. There are memorable and dreamlike passages, but overall I found the story unconvincing and far-fetched. Philip Hensher, reviewing the book in the Guardian, complained about Ishiguro's avoidance of phrasal verbs which makes everyone sound stilted.

5. J K Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, ch. 15 “Aragog”, 1998. You really do need Rowling's narrative power to carry you along - the quotations sound leaden out of context. The spiders were done very nastily in the film.

LITERARY LIONS, NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2007

For our final literary quiz, two works for adults, two for children, and a crossover.

1. And as she fled, her mantle she did fall
Which Lion vile with bloody mouth did stain.

2. “All the other animals in the forest naturally expect me to be brave, for the Lion is everywhere thought to be the King of the Beasts. I learned that if I roared very loudly, every living thing was frightened and got out of my way.”

3. The Lion made a Sudden Stop,
He let the Dainty Morsel drop,
And slunk reluctant to his Cage,
Snarling with Disappointed Rage.

4. There was one great big Lion called Wallace;
His nose was all covered with scars -
He lay in a somnolent posture
With the side of his face on the bars.

5. A mad chase began. Round and round the hilltop he led them, now hopelessly out of their reach, now letting them almost catch his tail, now diving between them, now tossing them in the air with his huge and beautifully velveted paws and catching them again, and now stopping unexpectedly so that all three of them rolled over together in a happy laughing heap of fur and arms and legs.

ANSWERS

Not a naturalistic lion amongst them, though I could have used Isak Dinesen's "Out of Africa" (and if Hemingway wrote about how he shot one, I don't want to know). One mythical one from Ovid mangled by Tudor mechanics, a talking one, two zoo lions eating little misbehaving boys and one representing Jesus Christ. A French children's author called Rene Guillot used to write books about the lives of African animals, and as far as I remember, they were fairly realistic, but are now out of print.

1. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, Sc I, Quince as Prologue, c. 1594. Snug is unnecessarily worried that the ladies of the Court will be frightened at his Lion guise and goes to great lengths to reassure them. The story (with fountains of blood supplied by Pyramus) is told in Ovid's Metamorphoses (Book IV), which in the Arthur Golding translation was a favourite source of Shakespeare's.

2. L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, ch. VI, “The Cowardly Lion”, 1900. The Cowardly Lion learns bravery as the book goes on. He is shown walking on all fours - he gets anthropomorphised in the film.

3. Hilaire Belloc, “Jim, who ran away from his nurse and was eaten by a lion” from Cautionary Tales, 1907, republished in 1940 by Puffin as Selected Cautionary Verses. This poem and the monologue following share the feature that no one is particularly upset when obnoxious little boys get eaten; the deftly-portrayed keepers are especially underwhelmed. This poem is the source of the phrase beloved of political columnists - "always keep a-hold of Nurse/For fear of finding something worse."

4. Marriott Edgar, “The Lion and Albert”, Albert, ‘Arold and Others, 1953. Written for Stanley Holloway for use in the Savoy Follies, 1932. The Oxford Book of Narrative Verse says that because of doubts about the poem’s acceptability, it was tried out at Northern Rugby League Annual Dinner and Dance at the Grand Hotel, Newcastle and its success was immediate. Marriott Edgar was a variety artist himself, and a half-brother of Edgar Wallace. A boy actually was mauled by a lion at London Zoo but the venue was changed to Blackpool so the diction could be Northern. The monologue still sells nicely on CD and is also available in book form.

5. C S Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, ch. 15, “Deeper Magic from Before the Dawn of Time”, 1950. Lion Aslan/Christ has been resurrected after gruelling descriptions of pain and humiliation, and joy is the order of the day as he frolics with the two girls, Susan and Lucy. Wikipedia says that "Aslan" is Turkish for Lion.

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LITERARY UNDERPANTS - MARCH 2008

Thanks to literary quiz champions Betsey and Geoffrey Parker for this quiz!

1. Their knickers are made of crêpe-de-chine, their shoes are made of python,
Their halls are lined with tiger rugs and their walls with heads of bison.

2. July 6th. - Decide definitely on joining Rose at Ste. Agathe, and write and tell her so. Die now cast, and Rubicon crossed - or rather will be, on achieving further side of Channel. Robert, on the whole, takes lenient view of entire project, and says he supposes that nothing else will satisfy me, and better not count on really hot weather promised by Rose but take good supply of woollen underwear. Mademoiselle is sympathetic, but theatrical, and exclaims:"C'est la Ste. Vierge qui a tout arrangé!" which sounds like a travel agency, and shocks me.

3. They lived in the Wood with a Kind Old Aunt,
And one said "Yes'm" and the other said "Shan't!"
Good Bear learnt his Twice Times Four -
But Bad Bear's knicketies were terrible tore.

4. A slight but well-defined glitter appeared in Nurse Wilks' eyes. She detected a tendency to hoity-toitiness in her young guest's manner, and hoity-toitiness was a thing to be checked.
'Girls,' she said,'are by no means perfect.'
'Ah!' breathed Frederick, in rapturous adhesion to the sentiment.
'Girls have their little faults. Girls are sometimes inclined to be vain. I know a little girl not a hundred miles from this room who was so proud of her new panties that she ran out in the street in them.'
'Nanna!' cried Miss Oliphant pinkly.
'Disgusting!' said Frederick.

5. America in its Underwear
struggles thru the night

ANSWERS

1. 'Bagpipe Music' from Poems (1937), Louis MacNeice

2. Diary of a Provincial Lady (1930), E.M.Delafield

3. Now We Are Six (1927), A.A.Milne

4. 'Portrait of a Disciplinarian', short story in the collection Meet Mr Mulliner (1927), P.G.Wodehouse

5. 'Underwear' from A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), Lawrence Ferlinghetti

LITERARY WIND IN POETRY, APRIL 2008

1.            ....how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind.
My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, - the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

2. Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!

3. This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet
Till day rose;

4. O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes:

5. O western wind, when wilt thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Christ! that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again.

ANSWERS

1. 'The Windhover,' Gerard Manley Hopkins.

2. King Lear, Act 3 Sc 2, William Shakespeare

3. 'Wind' from The Hawk in the Rain (1957), Ted Hughes

4. 'Ode to the West Wind,' Percy Bysshe Shelley

5. Anon. Medieval.

LITERARY SONG, MAY 2008

1. "Goodbye, Professor Godbole," she continued, suddenly agitated. "It's a shame we never heard you sing."

"I may sing now," he replied, and did.

His thin voice rose, and gave out one sound after another. At times there seemed rhythm, at times there was the illusion of a Western melody. But the ear, baffled repeatedly, soon lost any clue, and wandered in a maze of noises, none harsh or unpleasant, none intelligible. It was the song of an unknown bird.

2. "Sing, Findhorn," said Roland. "Please sing."

The unicorn stared up at Helen, and for the first time Roland looked into his eyes. What he saw he could not describe: it was almost too strong to bear.

"Findhorn: Findhorn. You must sing. Everything will be all right if you sing. No one will be able to hunt you. You'll be safe. Please. Sing."

3. Gabriel held up his hand for them to be silent. The song seemed to be in the old Irish tonality and the singer seemed uncertain both of his words and of his voice. The voice, made plaintive by distance and by the singer's hoarseness, faintly illuminated the cadence of the air with words expressing grief:

      "O, the rain falls on my heavy locks
      And the dew wets my skin,
      My babe lies cold..."

"O," exclaimed Mary Jane. "It's Bartell D'Arcy singing, and he wouldn't sing all night. O, I'll get him to sing a song before he goes."

4.   The poor soul sat sighing, by a sycamore tree,
            Sing all a green willow:
      Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee,
            Sing willow, willow, willow.
      The fresh streams ran by her, and murmur'd her moans,
            Sing willow, willow, willow.

5. The kid was swell. He was walking in the street, instead of on the sidewalk, but right next to the kerb. He was making out he was walking a very straight line, the way kids do, and the whole time he kept singing and humming. I got up closer so I could hear what he was singing. He was singing that song, "If a body catch a body coming through the rye". He had a pretty little voice, too.

ANSWERS

1. A Passage to India (1924) - E M Forster

2. Elidor (1965) - Alan Garner

3. "The Dead" from Dubliners (1914) James Joyce

4. Othello Act 4 Sc 3 - William Shakespeare

5. The Catcher in the Rye (1957) - J D Salinger

LITERARY RAIN, JUNE 2008

Another great and atmospheric quiz on a topical subject from Betsey and Geoffrey Parker.

1. And now, for the last two days, the rains on this lower course of the river had been incessant, so that the old men had shaken their heads and talked of sixty years ago, when the same sort of weather, happening about the equinox, brought on the great floods, which swept the bridge away, and reduced the town to great misery. But the younger generation, who had seen several small floods, thought lightly of these sombre recollections and forebodings; and Bob Jakin, naturally prone to take a hopeful view of his own luck, laughed at his mother when she regretted their having taken a house by the river-side.

2. He dashed for the next hut, but it was the same as ever (the maize and nothing else), just as if all human life were receding before him, as if Somebody had determined that from now on he was to be left alone - altogether alone. As he stood there the rain reached the clearing; it came out of the forest like thick white smoke and moved on. It was as if an enemy were laying a gas-cloud across a whole territory, carefully, to see that nobody escaped. The rain spread and stayed just long enough, as though the enemy had his stop-watch out and knew to a second the limit of the lungs' endurance.

3. And the rain continued to roar, and the roof resounded. For several seconds at a time lightning lit up a shining chaotic world. Fresh mud flowed off Tarzan's grave in a thin regular stream. Raindrops glittered as they struck the sodden ground. Then the thunder came, grating and close. Anand thought of a monstrous steam-roller breaking through the sky. The lightning was exciting but it made him feel peculiar. That, and the thunder, sent him back to the bedroom.

4. While Esther sleeps, and while Esther wakes, it is still wet weather down at the place in Lincolnshire. The rain is ever falling - drip, drip, drip - by day and night upon the broad flagged terrace-pavement, the Ghost's Walk. The weather is so very bad down in Lincolnshire that the liveliest imagination can scarcely apprehend its ever being fine again. Not that there is any superabundant life of imagination on the spot, for Sir Leicester is not here (and, truly, even if he were, would not do much for it in that particular), but is in Paris with my Lady; and solitude, with dusky wings, sits brooding on Chesney Wold.

5. July had been blown out like a candle by a biting wind that ushered in a leaden August sky. A sharp stinging drizzle fell, billowing into opaque grey sheets when the wind caught it. Along the Bournemouth sea-front the beach-huts turned blank wooden faces towards a greeny-grey, frothchained sea that leapt eagerly at the cement bulwark of the shore. The gulls had been tumbled inland over the town, and they now drifted above the house tops on taut wings, whining peevishly. it was the sort of weather calculated to try anyone's endurance. Considered as a group my family was not a very prepossessing sight that afternoon ...

ANSWERS

1. The Mill on the Floss (1860) - George Eliot

2. The Power and the Glory (1940) - Graham Greene

3. A House for Mr Biswas (1961) - V S Naipaul

4. Bleak House (1853) - Charles Dickens

5. My Family and Other Animals (1956) - Gerald Durrell

LITERARY BRIDGES, JULY 2008

From our wonderful guest quiz-setters Betsey and Geoffrey Parker: one from a work for children.

1. Once upon a time a coach, containing some Englishmen and some Frenchmen, was driving over the Alps. The horses ran away, and as they were dashing across a bridge the coach caught on the stonework, tottered, and nearly fell into the ravine below. The Frenchmen were frantic with terror: they screamed and gesticulated and flung themselves about, as Frenchmen would. The Englishmen sat quite calm. An hour later the coach drew up at an inn to change horses, and by that time the situations were exactly reversed. The Frenchmen had forgotten all about the danger, and were chattering gaily; the Englishmen had just begun to feel it, and one had a nervous breakdown and was obliged to go to bed.

2. Then he dropped in two at once, and leant over the bridge to see which of them would come out first;and one of them did; but as they were both the same size, he didn't know if it was the one which he wanted to win, or the other one.

3. We drove all the rest of the day and got to Samson's at dust-dark and then that bridge was gone, too. They hadn't never seen the river so high, and it's not done raining yet. There was old men that hadn't never seen nor heard of it being so in the memory of man. I am the chosen of the Lord, for who He loveth, so doeth He chastiseth. But I be durn if He don't take some curious ways to show it, seems like. But now I can get them teeth. That will be a comfort. It will.

4. A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man's hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck. It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his head and the slack fell to the level of his knees. Some loose boards laid upon the sleepers supporting the metals of the railway supplied a footing for him and his executioners - two private soldiers of the Federal army, directed by a sergeant who in civil life may have been a deputy sheriff.

5. No, he did not worry about Anselmo and the problem of the bridge was no more difficult than many other problems. He knew how to blow any sort of bridge that you could name and he had blown them of all sizes and constructions. There was enough explosive and all equipment in the two packs to blow this bridge properly even if it were twice as big as Anselmo reported it...

ANSWERS:

1. E M Forster, ‘Notes on the English Character’ from Abinger Harvest (1936).

2. A A Milne, The House at Pooh Corner (1928).

3. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930)

4. Ambrose Bierce ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ from Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891)

5. Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)

LITERARY FACIAL HAIR, AUGUST 2008

To cheer up this wet summer, a great deal of face fungus from the indefatigable Parkers, and even a bonus one! One for children, one cross-over; and No 4 has been changed from the well-known children's version to an adult variation.

1. The Duke shot back in his chair, and his moustache, foaming upward, as if a gale had struck it, broke like a wave on the stern and rockbound coast of the Dunstable nose.

2 ... whose villainous and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair. He was dressed in a greasy flannel gown, with his throat bare; and seemed to be dividing his attention between the frying pan and the clothes horse,...

3. 'When Catherine is about seventeen,' he said to himself, 'Lavinia will try to persuade her that some young man with a moustache is in love with her. It will be quite untrue; no young man, with a moustache or without, will ever be in love with Catherine.'

4. His face was as still as ever I'd seen it, still as a pond iced thickly over, yet his lips, that always looked so strangely red and naked between the black fringes of his beard, now curved a little. He smiled; he welcomed his bride home.

5."... Have all built their nests in my beard!"

BONUS:

6. But little by little he let himself be conquered by rusticity, and came to accept the fact that he had no calling as a dandy, especially since there was no one to appreciate his efforts. He stopped shaving, cut his hair only when it reached his shoulders and continued to bath once a day only because the habit was so ingrained in him.

ANSWERS

1. P.G. Wodehouse, Uncle Fred in the Springtime, Chapter 13

2. Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, chapter 8

3. Henry James, Washington Square, chapter 2

4. Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, "the Bloody Chamber" - the Perrault "Blue Beard" original, retold by Arthur Quiller-Couch, reads: "He had fine houses in town and country, retinues of servants, gold and silver plate in abundance, coffers heaped with jewels, costly carpets, embroidered furniture, cabinets full of curiosities, gilded coaches,teams of Arab horses of the purest breed. But unluckily he also had a blue beard ... "

5. Edward Lear, "There Was an Old Man With a Beard", Book of Nonsense

6. Isabel Allende, House of the Spirits, chapter two

LITERARY DRINKS, SEPTEMBER 2008

Thanks again to the Parkers for standing this varied round of drinks! There's one from a children's book.

1. Thus it chanced on that afternoon that Caroline's ears were three times tortured with the ringing of the bell, and the advent of uninvited guests: for Donne followed Malone, and Sweeting followed Donne; and more wine was ordered up from the cellar into the dining-room (for though old Helstone chid the inferior priesthood when he found them 'carousing', as he called it, in their own tents, yet at his hierarchical table he ever liked to treat them to a glass of his best), and through the closed doors Caroline heard their boyish laughter, and the vacant cackle of their voices.

2. ... she had never forgotten that, if you drink much from a bottle marked "poison," it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later. However, this bottle was not marked "poison"...

3.        There may be in the cup
A spider steep'd, and one may drink, depart,
And yet partake no venom (for his knowledge
Is not infected); but if one present
Th'abhorr'ed ingredient to his eye, make known
How he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides,
With violent hefts. I have drunk, and seen the spider.

4. 'Have another absinthe. Here, waiter! Another absinthe for this señor.' 'I feel like hell,' I said. 'Drink that,' said Bill. 'Drink it slow.' It was beginning to get dark. The fiesta was going on. I began to feel drunk but I did not feel any better. 'How do you feel?' 'I feel like hell.' 'Have another?' 'It won't do any good.' 'Try it. You can't tell; maybe this is the one that gets it. Hey, waiter! Another absinthe for this señor!'

5. O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

ANSWERS

1. Charlotte Bronte - Shirley (1849)

2. Lewis Carroll - Alice in Wonderland (1865)

3. William Shakespeare - The Winter's Tale Act 2 Sc 1

4. Ernest Hemingway - Fiesta (1927)

5. John Keats - 'Ode to a Nightingale' (1820)

LITERARY SLEEP, OCTOBER 2008

We are beholden again to the inimitable Parkers for this quiz which includes one quotation from a children's book.

1. The striking of the grandfather clock became a familiar sound to Tom, especially in the silence of those nights when everyone was asleep. He did not sleep. He would go to bed at the usual time, and then lie awake or half-awake for hour after hour. He had never suffered from sleeplessness before in his life, and wondered at it now; but a certain lightness and unease in his stomach should have given him an answer.

2. Sleep, that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great Nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast;

3. In the cell next door Mrs McElligot stormed at the sergeant, called him a bloody get, and then spent half the night bewailing her fate. But Dorothy had no feeling save vague relief at being in so clean and warm a place. She crept immediately on to the plank bed that was fixed like a shelf to the wall, too tired even to pull the blankets about her, and slept for ten hours without stirring.

4. Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still.

5. She fell softly into slumber, without a word having been spoken by any one during that half hour of inexpressible joy. And again the stillness was enforced by sign and whispered word, but with eyes that beamed out their bright thoughts of hope. Jem sat by the side of the bed, holding back the little curtain, and gazing as if he could never gaze his fill at the pale wasted face, so marbled and so chiselled in its wan outline.

ANSWERS

1. Philippa Pearce: Tom's Midnight Garden (1958)

2. William Shakespeare: Macbeth Act 2 Sc 2

3. George Orwell, A Clergyman's Daughter (1935)

4. William Wordsworth: "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802"

5. Elizabeth Gaskell: Mary Barton (1848)

LITERARY TEA, NOVEMBER 2008

Given the current financial world chaos and the jolly japes of Ross and Brand, I'm sure we could all do with a nice cup of tea, and those thoughtful Parkers have kindly provided a selection. One quotation from a children's book.

1. ‘Pour the tea,’ he told her.

‘Perhaps he is suggesting I make a profit on the money I have to charge for their tea?’ Prem was startled by her hostile, even threatening tone. He hung his head and twisted his hands behind his back. He was very much tempted to answer her: they had worked it out long ago and knew that she made a handsome profit on their tea. But if he told her so, she would be very angry with him, and Mr Khanna too would be angry.

‘Finest Darjeeling tea I serve to them!’ she shouted. ‘At what loss to myself every month God only knows!’

2. ‘Have some wine,’ X said in an encouraging tone.

Y looked all around the table, but there was nothing on it but tea.

‘I don’t see any wine,’ she remarked. ‘There isn’t any,’ said X.

‘Then it wasn’t very civil of you to offer it,’ said Y angrily.

3. ‘For everybody said so, all our friends,
They all were sure our feelings would relate
So closely! I myself can hardly understand.
We must leave it now to fate.
You will write, at any rate.
Perhaps it is not too late.
I shall sit here, serving tea to friends.’

4. Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. There are circumstances in which, whether you partake of the tea or not - some people of course never do - the situation is in itself delightful. Those that I have in mind in beginning to unfold this simple history offered an admirable setting to an innocent pastime. The implements of the little feast had been disposed upon the lawn of an old English country house in what I should call the perfect middle of a splendid summer afternoon.

5. After that we had tea, very informal, and Elspeth distinguished herself by actually prevailing on Albert to eat a cucumber sandwich; she’ll have him in the bushes in a minute, thinks I, and on that happy note our first visit concluded, with Elspeth going home on a cloud to Abergeldie.

ANSWERS

1. The Householder- Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1960)

2. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (1865)

3. ‘Portrait of a Lady’, from Prufrock and Other Observations - T.S. Eliot (1917)

4. The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James (1881)

5. Flashman in the Great Game - George MacDonald Fraser (1975)

LITERARY SNOW, DECEMBER 2008

This the final one of the wonderfully varied and entertaining quizzes provided by the Parkers, and our thanks to them for all the enjoyment and head-scratching. One children's extract as usual.

1. The autumn was cruel. On Guy Fawkes' Day, Mary gazed at the gloomy yellow light over the hill and said, 'It looks like snow.' 'Too early for snow yet,' said Amos; but it was snow. The snow fell in the night, and melted, leaving long white smears on the screes. Then it fell again, a heavy fall this time; and though they dug a great many sheep from the drifts, the ravens had a feast when it thawed.

2. As he strode along through the snow the sense of such meanings glowed in his brain and mingled with the bodily flush produced by his sharp tramp. At the end of the village he paused before the darkened front of the church. He stood there a moment, breathing quickly, and looking up and down the street, in which not another figure moved. The pitch of the Corbury road, below lawyer Varnum's spruces, was the favourite coasting-ground of Starkfield, and on clear evenings the church corner rang till late with the shouts of the coasters; but to-night not a sled darkened the whiteness of the long declivity.

3. Then,'Midnight!' said the old store clock. Its pendulum swung gleaming in the shadows as it counted twelve thin chimes into the silence, folded its hands together, and stared out through the dark window at the thick snow sifting through the light of the street lamp. Far away and muffled by the snow the town hall clock struck midnight with its deeper note. 'Where are we?' the mouse child asked his father. His voice was tiny in the stillness of the night. 'I don't know,' the father answered.

4. Snow lay deep in the streets of Winesburg. It had begun to snow about ten o'clock in the morning and a wind sprang up and blew the snow in clouds along Main Street. The frozen mud roads that led into town were fairly smooth and in places ice covered the mud. 'There will be good sleighing,' said Will Henderson, standing by the bar in Ed Griffith's saloon.

5. The snow began to drive thickly. I seized the handle to essay another trial; when a young man, without coat, and shouldering a pitchfork, appeared in the yard behind. He hailed me to follow him, and, after marching through a wash-house, and a paved area containing a coal-shed, pump, and pigeon cote, we at length arrived in the large, warm, cheerful apartment where I was formerly received.

ANSWERS

1. Bruce Chatwin - On the Black Hill (1982);

2. Edith Wharton - Ethan Frome (1911);

3. Russell Hoban - The Mouse and His Child (1967);

4. Sherwood Anderson - Winesburg, Ohio (1919);

5. Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights (1847)

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