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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, <