Having read quite widely on the First World War, I found much to reflect on in Svetlana Palmer and Sarah Wallis's collection of extracts from diaries and letters, written by those on opposing sides of the conflict, and accompanied by a useful connecting narrative from its authors. It makes for deeply moving reading, and shows,  if anyone ever doubted it, what an appalling waste of life and resources war is, and that regardless of who is blamed for the initiation of war, opposing military combatants, civilians, creatures and the earth itself suffer equally. 

One of the many insights offered by these personal writings are the preconceptions of The Other - and how they affect the writer's thinking and actions.

Vasily Mishnin, on the Russian front line sector of the Eastern Front north of Warsaw, writes in January 1915: 

The Germans are putting their trench in order, and we can see them taking their mess tins to fetch water... This is our enemy? They look like good, normal people, they all want to live and yet here we are, gathered together to take each other's lives away.

German officer Ernst Nopper, stationed in Poland in 1915, writes of a Polish fortress town that has fallen to the German advance against Russian troops:

Inside the fort I was particularly surprised by how clean the barracks are, everything is scrubbed and bleached ... we are wrong to accuse the Russians of being sloppy and untidy all the time. In one of the areas abandoned we found several paintings wrapped in newspaper. I was very surprised to find they were of a rather high quality. We should really ask ourselves why we think so little of the Russians. But it is true that culture hasn't really got through to the ordinary people here, unlike in Germany.

His next entries go on to illustrate, in addition to seeing the Slavic peoples as somehow lower in worth than Germans, the deeply anti-Semitic views which were widely held in Germany and which were to contribute to the rise of Nazism just a few short years later.

French officer Paul Tuffrau fights in the Battle of Verdun, which I recall learning at school in the 1960s, 'bled France white' - the campaign, which, like the Somme, was designed to draw German forces into two large divided fronts. On 25 December 1916, by which time the battle has been going on for 300 days, with 352,800 German casualties, and 348,300 French, he writes:

At 6pm I leave in the dark and the rain to visit the A-33 trench area, which cannot be reached in daytime. Beaudoin, the officer commanding, tells me that around three o'clock the Fritz, 250 or 300 metres away, sang them Christmas carols in French, beautifully.

And in February, after two weeks on leave:

... the men's faces are contorted by the cold and exhaustion. Red-rimmed eyes, red noses, pale skin, blue ears, beards hung with icicles. Sweat freezes right away and looks like snow on the horses' backs and on the men's overcoats. Our shoes cannot grip on the frozen earth as we march.

Many confided their innermost thoughts to their diaries, which they took care to keep hidden, for obvious reasons.

Paul Tuffrau records a conversation with General Mangin, second in command at Verdun, when the former attempts, unsuccessfully, to secure leave for his men, who unlike the British, are only allowed one day of rest after each 24 days on the front line:

Then, with a brief salute, he went back into his well-heated private office where it's easy to avoid the reality and talk of the greater good. As for me, I was stunned by his extraordinary refusal to acknowledge the courage of the men ... That night, after hearing this 'heroic' pep-talk, I led my men along the tracks that were horribly muddy and slippery. Some of them were crying with exhaustion and rage.

Turkish officer Mehmed Fasih is stationed at Gallipoli, and writes, in November 1915:

A great chasm exists between the fellows who do all the fighting and those who merely talk about heroism and victory ... what a tragedy it will be if all men who are still fighting here have to die like their predecessors.  Just so that a handful of cowards can enjoy a taste of fame.

At 21 years of age, he writes that his hair and beard have grown grey already, and that his moustache is white.

The chapter In The Bush shows how the war extended, among other places, to Africa, where there was a renewed scramble by the European powers with already established colonies for territorial gains, and  subsequent huge damage to the people of the African nations caught up in the conflict. African porters and labourers were used by both sides, and an estimated 100,000 to 120,000 employed by the Germans and as many as 250,000 recruits on the British side perished from malnutrition, disease and accidents. A further 300,000 native East Africans died as a result of famine caused by war recruitment and requisitioning.  German settler Dr Ludwig Deppe, who provided medical support to the German forces, wrote, a year after the end of the war:

Behind us we have left destroyed fields, ransacked magazines, and, for the immediate future, starvation. We were no longer the agents of culture; our track was marked by death, plundering and evacuated villages.

The chapter on The War at Sea contains an account by Johannes Spiess, Watch Officer on U-boat U-9, of his, and the submarine's, first patrol mission in the North Sea, six weeks into the war, and the jubilation of the crew when they sunk three British light cruisers, two of which, HMS Cressy and Hogue, had gone to the rescue of the first, HMS Aboukir. Although I'm sure a British crew would have done more or less the same, (though earlier Royal Navy officers, and I'm referencing Patrick O'Brian's fictional Captain Jack Aubrey, would surely have regarded it as deeply unethical to attack a ship without any warning, from a hidden position) I found it quite shocking to read this, as the Chief Yeoman of Signals on the Aboukir, Alfred Assiter, is named on our local War Memorial, and less than a month later, the U-9 would sink HMS Hawke, on which two more men from my town perished. As a non-combatant, and one who, unlike my older relatives, has been fortunate enough not to have lived through a war, it is naturally in those moments when I make a personal connection that I feel the horror of war most keenly. I understand that there has been a big reaction to Peter Jackson's We Will Remember Them among young people, who have suddenly seen the soldiers as resembling those living now rather than flickering distant black and white history. 

Particularly moving are the diaries featured of two children - Yves Congar from Sedan, a town in north-eastern France, and Piete Kuhr from the East Prussian town of Schneidemuhl.

Yves' father is one of a number of men taken hostage to ensure the compliance of the town's population, and sent to Germany to work. Yves himself narrowly escapes detention, at 14, after having being reported calling the occupying Germans the 'Boche'.

Piete, initially patriotic, becomes disillusioned as time goes by, and writes, in February 1918:

I don't want any more soldiers to die. Millions are dead - and for what? For whose benefit? We must just make sure that there is never another war in the future. We must never again fall for the nonsense peddled by the older generation.

So, just a few extracts picked out from a superb anthology which I can highly recommend to those readers who, like myself, are not so much students of military history, but of humanity in times of war.

In our house are many bookshelves, and books waiting to be read, and included in these are ones that have waited patiently for many years. One of these was Land of My Fathers, the passionate and partisan overview by the late Gwynfor Evans of 2,000 years of Welsh history. This edition, published in 1974, holds special significance for our family, as my late father-in-law, who worked as a printer at Gwasg John Penry in Swansea, actually typeset both it and its original version in Welsh (Aros Mae). Dycu was a fluent Welsh-speaker who occasionally quoted Welsh poetry to me, (with translation) hoping to convey the beauty and lyricism on his language to me.

Gwynfor Evans was in turn Vice-President, President and Honorary President of Plaid Cymru, the Welsh national party, and the establishment of the Welsh speaking TV channel S4C is attributed to his threat to go on hunger-strike, forcing Margaret Thatcher to make good on the Conservatives’ manifesto promise which they were keen to renege on.

I married a Welshman in 1980, and spent many happy times in the years since visiting family and friends in South Wales, where I have always been received with the warmest hospitality.  As a reader, over the years, I’ve read short stories, novels, poems about Wales, the Mabinogion, some 20th century history, seen plays, enjoyed seeing the wonderful Max Boyce live, listening to Welsh music, etc, but Evans’ book has been a real eye-opener for me about the illustrious and unique spiritual, cultural and social history of Wales, its people and its language. I have felt both deeply sad and very angry sometimes at learning of the damage done to them by what Evans terms (and I must say, I can only agree) English imperialism. I have also been moved by the beauty of the poetry quoted.The book consists of 453 pages, and is written accessibly for the lay reader - Evans was not an academic, but a lawyer and MP, so he quotes from Welsh historians whose work has informed him.  There’s a great deal of ground covered, and I feel stimulated to go on to read more deeply and widely.  I am also hoping to enrol to learn (a long-held ambition) the Welsh language - . It has survived against all odds in Wales, given the onslaught of English policies, and since devolution, efforts have increased to support it, but it sadly has a long way to go to come anywhere near the level in the mid 19th Century (before the advent of the Welsh Not), when 90% of the population was Welsh-speaking. 

When we first published my book Southborough War Memorial through Odd Dog Press we had a modest print run, and when this was sold out, there didn’t seem to be a case for a further re-print, though we did subsequently produce a Kindle version. Fortunately, with the advent of print on demand, we are able to publish a revised version, with some extra material I’ve been sent by relatives since the first edition in 2009. I’m particularly pleased to include a photograph of George Furey, a Newfoundlander whose tremendous act of courage went largely unrecognised, apart from by those who witnessed it or whose lives he saved in December 1942.

A book which lists as much detail as I could find in my research on the two hundred and fifty-five listed on the local war memorial in our small town must, by its nature, be a niche offering, and yet, if you read through it, you would, in an oblique way, be absorbing a universal story - of the effects of war on any community. There were those who died of battle wounds, certainly, but also others who died in accidents while training or on active service, of influenza, or of drowning. Many left families behind to struggle with grief and poverty, some hadn’t had time to outgrow their teens, and there were those who died after the war’s end as a result of their experiences.

I have a page on my website for those not commemorated, and for those wounded. Of course, the wounds of war are not always visible, and we know that there were many who were irrevocably affected by war trauma, tucked away in mental hospitals, out of sight, to end their days.

This book is a small contribution to recording the effects of war; it was a labour of love that brought it to fruition, and I am personally happy it is no longer out of print. I was recently contacted by the grandson of a First World War casualty, whose descendants are planning to gather at his grave on the one hundredth anniversary of his death.  My hope is that public commemorations taking place this year of deaths which occurred a century ago will, for many of us, serve not as jingoistic celebrations of Britain’s long-past empire, but for the opportunity to reflect on those suffering in wars both in 1918, 2018, and every season in between.

I believe there is a Chinese proverb that goes something like ‘May you not have sons in times of war’. Indeed. Though today of course this may extend to daughters.

The father of Harold Dowdell (commemorated on Southborough War Memorial and on the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme) wrote in his diary on hearing of his son’s death in 1916:

Echoes and shadows in the home. I am not stunned but overwhelmed. My dear brave loving cheerful, thoughtful boy.

and two years later, when he lost a second son, Ernie, at Arras in April 1918:

With aching heart I reached home in afternoon. My desolate home.

Click here for online ordering.

I’ve voted Labour all my life, except for a period after Tony Blair led us into war on Iraq, and even then, could not have voted Conservative. We watched the news as a family when I was young, and I have a clear memory of the Labour politicians of my youth: Harold Wilson, Barbara Castle, Dennis Healey (I bumped into him once on Charing Cross Road and he gave me a lovely twinkly smile from beneath those bushy eyebrows). They were the bright young things when Clem Attlee was Prime Minister, and although I knew his name, I was sadly unaware of the extent of this man’s huge contribution to the quality of life for British people over the last 70 years. After reading Francis Beckett’s beautifully written and accessible biography of the man, I feel better informed.

Clem Attlee was a small, quiet man, from a middle-class background. He was educated at Haileybury, a boarding school, and Oxford,  following his father into a law practice. Had it not been for some voluntary work  he undertook in the East End of London, this ex-Major, who saw active service in the First World War (he was the last but one soldier to leave Gallipoli when it was evacuated), might have lived an altogether different life.

One evening in 1906, Attlee went along with his brother on a visit to a youth club in Durham Road, Stepney. Haileybury House had been built by old boys of their former school who had decided, in 1890, to do something to help clergy active in the working-class areas of the big cities. One of the growing influences leading to this work was a pamphlet published by the Revd Andrew Mearns in 1883 - The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Inquiry into the Condition of the Abject Poor.

A shy young man, Attlee found the evening uncomfortable, but he learned enough to want to come again - the start of a process which opened his eyes to the appalling conditions suffered by those less fortunate than the prosperous Edwardian middle and upper classes, and the real meaning of poverty. His involvement increased from that night on - he felt for the first time in his life he was doing something with a purpose. He realised, as Andrew Mearns had written, that only large-scale action by the state could have any serious impact - unless society was organised so as to eliminate it, the wretchedness he saw around him would continue for ever.

By 1907, Attlee was a socialist, and he began his political career as a member of the Stepney branch of the Independent Labour Party. He very quickly took on the onerous and painstaking duties of branch secretary, giving his time and skills unstintingly. His closeness and work with the ordinary East End people and orderly upward progress through the rank and file of the local Labour group gave him an invaluable insight into their real problems, aims and ambitions. As Beckett relates:

'He took on all the humble, time-consuming jobs which have to be done, and which ambitious politicians generally consider are for lesser mortals, because, like Jim Callaghan, Clem Attlee liked all that. He cut up loaves to feed dockers'  children during the 1911 dock strike, and stood at the bottom of Petticoat Lane with his brother Tom holding collecting boxes during the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union strike in 1913. He carried the Stepney Independent Labour Party branch banner on demonstrations through Central London. He went to court to plead mitigation when a half-starving boy was caught thieving.'

Beckett’s book outlines the life of a man who dedicated himself to working, for 16 hours a day for 45 years or so, for the good of the many, not the few. He became Mayor of Stepney, then its MP in 1922, a junior minister in Labour governments in the 20s and 30s, and party leader in 1935.

Attlee's commitment to realising his ambition of bringing about fundamental changes for the working-classes achieved, with his fellow Labour party workers, the radical creation of what we benefit from today. Most people of my generation (born in the 1950s) and those since have no knowledge or experience of what life was like before the welfare state - we’ve taken it for granted.

He was in many ways, a very unusual man. He led a quiet and modest home life, dedicated to his wife and children, never ‘taking work home’ to his family. He liked mending things in his spare time. He never read the papers or watched television. He worked steadily towards his aims, not swayed by the opinion of others. He was not a pacifist, though his older brother Tom was a conscientious objector, but  had been appalled by the waste of life he witnessed in the Great War, and was a passionate supporter of the League of Nations and later the United Nations. His early experience of social work contributed to his writing The Social Worker,and  teaching the subject at the LSE. He had very definite views about charity: he thought that if a rich man wanted to help the poor, he should pay his taxes willingly, not dole out money at whim. He wrote:

Charity ‘tends to make the charitable think that he has done his duty by giving away some trifling sum, his conscience is put to sleep and he takes no trouble to consider the social problem any further’. 

Attlee served in Churchill's coalition government as Deputy Prime Minister during the Second World War, effectively running the country while Churchill concentrated on the business of fighting the war. Attlee was a staunch patriot, but once the war was over, he had an iron resolve to ensure that, unlike the aftermath of the First World War, when so many were thrown onto the streets, this time the opportunity to effect real change in the social welfare of the majority of the British people would not be lost.  After the war, Attlee led the most influential reforming government of the last century, implementing the recommendations of the Beveridge Report, establishing the NHS and nationalising a fifth of the UK economy including the coal mining and steel industries.

There are many similarities between Clem Attlee and Jeremy Corbyn - both suffered/suffer at the hands of the media - in Attlee's case, the rich owners of large-circulation newspapers. Both had to contend with members of their own party complaining that they weren't  leadership material, and regularly plotting to replace them. The more things change, the more they stay the same, as the saying goes!

I believe that if Clem Attlee was alive today, he would be horrified at the way his life's work has been steadily undermined in the intervening years, a process begun during the Margaret Thatcher years, of course, and now being greatly accelerated.

If you need just one out of many reference points from a welter of current revelations about how the welfare state and NHS are being relentlessly deconstructed, please read this article about the Naylor report, about which many of us had been ignorant until this week!

www.independent.co.uk/news/health/naylor-report-tory-nhs-privatisation-healthcare-flog-off-conservatives-theresa-may-election-2017-a7766326.html    

​If you have more time available, and I can promise you, it will be very worthwhile reading it, I highly recommend you read Francis Beckett's book. Towards the end of it, there is a little story of an incident, near the end of Attlee's life, which illustrates his modesty and humility. In 1912, the London School of Economics initiated took over a small School of Sociology, and Attlee was appointed its very first lecturer. In 1962:

'The LSE's Social Administration Department, where he had once taught, sent round a standard invitation to all of its former staff to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. The organisers thought that the early staff members had died, but just as the platform was settling down in the Shaw Library, someone noticed a small, elderly man arriving inconspicuously and taking a seat at the back. Bernard Crick remembers: 'One of the platform party ran to the back in embarrassment to apologise and try to persuade him to come up to the front. He refused, or rather demurred. The audience, as he was recognised, rose to its feet and applauded. Only then would he join the platform. Afterwards they asked when his car was coming. "No car, came from Kings Cross on the 68 bus. A very reliable route." They had great difficulty persuading him to take a lift back.'

When our son was small we invested in a National Trust annual family pass  - it enabled us, at a time when funds were very modest, to take him regularly to Bodiam Castle, Scotney Castle, and Bateman’s (Rudyard Kipling’s House), all (almost) on our doorstep.  These days I’m the owner of an English Heritage pass, which means wherever I go I keep a weather-eye open for that nice brown castellated square sign!

Last week on a work trip I found myself early for an appointment in Adwick le Street, South Yorkshire, and observing lunchtime was nigh, in the happy position of spying one such serendipitous find: Brodsworth Hall - just three miles from my destination. I had a quick bit of snap (delicious leek tart and salad) in its tea rooms, then whizzed off round the house.

This is one of those properties which have not been refurbished and refurnished with items from elsewhere, but left largely as it was when its last owner, Sylvia Grant-Dalton, died there in 1988. In some ways it reminded me of Erddig, which I visited as a child, with its peeling wallpaper, and, in some areas like the kitchen, a charming unreconstructed mix of old and new. Brodsworth Hall, a grand Victorian family house, was built by Charles Thellusson, and the same family lived there for over 120 years. An earlier house, built in the 17th  century,  had been demolished and the site moved from beside the nearby church of St Michael and All Angels.

One of the guides told me that the Thellussons had come from French Huguenot ancestry, making their fortune in the 18th century originally, from banking, among other things, and sugar plantations in Montserrat. Might the Jamaican mahogany doors on the ground floor, recycled from the old house, have come from another plantation? I wonder how many great English country houses owe their grandeur to wealth partly gained from slave-owning?

It amuses me when people speak reverently of ‘old families’ (like for example the Brudenells, who are said to have been established as aristocrats before the Norman Conquest). Aren’t we all from old families, even if our ancestors haven’t lived in the same house for hundreds of years?

I didn’t have time to see the wonderful formal gardens at Brodsworth, but I was powerless to resist the room full of second-hand books for sale in aid of English Heritage’s work. I was delighted to find two good’uns:

Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays (particularly welcome as I was so disappointed with the National Theatre’s recent version of Everyman, re-modelled by Carol Ann Duffy, and am keen to read the original), and The Wreck of the Abergavenny - The Wordsworths and Catastrophe by my kinswoman Alethea Hayter*. Sadly I never had the pleasure of meeting her, though her brother Sir William Hayter was my godfather, so I’m very much looking forward to reading it.
 
Amazing what you can find when you’ve got your eyes open!

​*
Obituary of Alethea Hayter 
Click on Family photo under Childhood on this page - Alethea and William Hayter are 2nd and 3rd from the left in the back row

My son is an artist and an art teacher, and one of his favourite artists is Pieter Brueghel  the Elder. We both love the painting entitled Children’s Games, and much enjoy identifying the different activities.

When I worked at a large girls’ school which boasted an excellent library, I was known by the librarians for checking out the weighty tomes which, more often than not, no pupil or indeed teacher had ever borrowed. One such book was the acclaimed study by Iona & Peter Opie, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, which took me weeks to plough through, but not without reward!  One of the things that interested me was their conclusion that the learning of  games in the main by-passes adults: it is mostly children who communicate and pass them on to other children.

When I was a girl, it was fashionable to hold seances, and I remember the time I set up a circle of letters round a glass in my older sister’s bedroom (most of the family were out), and I and two cousins began to summon the spirits. As the glass started to move we rose as one and fled screaming from the room! Later in life I met a 1960s alumna of above school who recalled the time when a seance had been organised in one of the dormitories.

“Is there anybody there?” was asked.

At this, the glass began to move, and after affirming that there was, spelt out the word F-I-R-E. Seconds later, the school fire-bell went off, and it transpired that at that moment a fire had been discovered in the Domestic Science block, formerly the great house’s stables. Needless to say, the girls were terrified, and the story spread round the school rapidly. The Bishop of Dover was summoned by the Headmistress and spoke at Assembly the following Sunday on the evils of tampering with the dark arts of the Ungodly.

Reading Pepys’ Diary last night, I was delighted to come across a mention of a lunch-time game we played at Tunbridge Wells Grammar School in the late 1960s/early 1970s, which was clearly being played by children at least 400 years earlier. I recall six of us standing around another girl, who lay on a table in the empty art room. We went round the circle, ceremoniously uttering in turn the words:

“She looks pale.” This was followed, one line at a time, and each reciting by rote, by the following:

“She is pale.”

“She looks ill.”

“She is ill.”

“She looks dead.”

“She is dead.”

And with this, we each slipped one forefinger under the prone girl and, together, lifted her several feet in the air with seemingly no effort at all, as if she was weightless.  We had no idea how it worked, but it did work, and it afforded us great satisfaction!

So when I came across Pepys’ entry for 31 July 1665, I called out to my husband: “Listen to this!” (he had also, I knew, played the game at school):

This evening with Mr Brisband speaking of inchantments and spells, I telling him some of my Charmes, he told me this of his own knowledge at Bourdeaux in France. The words these:

Voicy un Corps mort
Royde comme un Baston
Froid comme Marbre
Leger comme un Esprit
Levons te au nom de Jesus Christ.

He saw four little Girles, very young ones, all kneeling, each of them upon one knee; and one begin the first line, whispering in the care of the next, and the second to the third, and the third to the fourth, and she to the first. Then the first begun the second line, and so round quite through. And putting each one finger only to a boy that lay flat upon his back on the ground, as if he was dead. At the end of the words they did with their four fingers raise this boy as high as they could reach. And he being there and wondering at it (as also being afeared to see it - for they would have had him to have bore a part in saying the words in the room of one of the little girls, that was so young that they could hardly make her learn to repeat the words), did, for fear there might be some sleight used in it by the boy, or that the boy might be light, called the cook of the house, as Sir G. Carteret’s Cooke, who is very big, and they did raise him in just the same manner.
 
Fascinating, eh? Love to hear from any of you with your experiences and stories about children’s games - comments welcome!

Some years back an elderly lady who was moving into sheltered accommodation made me a present of three lovely gifts: a Himalayan blackberry briar from her garden, a vintage Creda Debonair spin-dryer, and a complete set of the Latham/Matthews version of The Diary of Samuel Pepys in hardback (ten volumes including Companion and Index).

My bedtime routine includes writing a diary, followed by a nightly dip into Mr Pepys’s - I’m currently up to July 1665,with the Plague building to a crescendo.

I’ve a few things in common with Samuel, I find. I hope, for instance, that I might be distantly related to his clerk, Mr Thomas Hayter, whose character, the Companion informs me “seems to declare itself in his neat and regular handwriting”. I lived for some years in both Islington and Hackney,  Pepys’s favourite summer jaunt , and may have cycled past some of his childhood haunts in Kingsland and Newington. We were both born under the sign of Pisces, love London, art, music, reading, and derive great pleasure from the execution of an administrative task well done! Were he alive today, I think Samuel would have been tickled to know that George Frederick Handel, another devoted Londoner, was born on his 52nd birthday. I hope he would also relish, as I do, the sea-stories of Patrick O’Brian featuring Captain Jack Aubrey & Stephen Maturin.

One of my birthday treats this year was a visit to the National Maritime Museum to see their exhibition: Samuel Pepys: Plague, Fire, Revolution. I love the NMM in its beautiful setting, with the Royal Observatory above on the hill. It never fails to touch me when I walk past the model of the Rawalpindi on the way in, and remember the fate of those who died in her in World War 2, including  a man from the town where I live.

I was a little bemused initially by the half-light in the exhibition rooms (emulating 17th century light levels ?), but it was great to see the many artefacts and portraits on display, including the John Hayls portrait of Pepys. I loved the large slipware plate which commemorated the Boscobel oak in which Charles II hid after his defeat at the Battle of Worcester in 1651 (am I mistaken in recalling that the tomb of his companion on that day, Richard Penderel, was located in St Giles’ Churchyard off London’s Denmark Street? Last time I went there I found the lettering so eroded, it could no longer be read).

The engraving of a man being prepared for the surgical removal of a kidney stone was twingingly graphic, the medical instruments displayed even more so! The stark digital presentation of the numbers who died during the time of Plague showed  how shocking the mounting death levels must have been, peaking, in August and September 1665, in  over 7,000 per week in London alone. I was prompted, on my return home, to download the Kindle version of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year for further reading!

Pepys’ diary, together with documenting the great dramas of life, recording historic events and encounters with the great and the good, also brings home the truth that people from earlier centuries shared similar concerns with our own: worries about job prospects, upsetting the boss, financial insecurity, family squabbles, aging parents, marital tiffs, overspending, aches and pains, and (for we churchgoers) the occasional boring sermon, etc! There was a reproduction in the exhibition of a large group portrait showing a visit to Christ’s Hospital of the King and courtiers, with Pepys (a Governor of the School) perusing a map. It included  some charming detail depicting schoolchildren doing the things children  do - and being ticked off in the same way they presumably have been since time immemorial!

Pepys dearly loved having family and friends over for a meal and a good time, and the day after our visit we enjoyed a jolly get-together. We were very merry, in true Pepys fashion, and, amazingly in this smartphone age, we realised, once everyone had gone, that no-one had taken the now almost obligatory photo for Facebook, so only fond memories and my diary must stand as a record of the occasion. I feel glad for that too!

The exhibition has left me determined to take a trip some time to Magdalene College, Cambridge to see Pepys’s library, and another to the Historic Dockyard at Chatham. In the meantime, for those of you who might like to see the Exhibition at Greenwich, it closes at the end of this week on 28 March - so hurry if you want to catch it!

There's a marvellous passage in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's A life in Letters (Penguin Classics), in a letter to his father, dated 17 October 1777, about Stein, a man who makes pianos:

'However I attack the keys, the tone is always even. It's true, he won't part with a pianoforte like this for under 300 florins, but the effort and labour that he expends on it can't be paid for. A particular feature of his instruments is their escape action. Not one maker in a hundred bothers with this. But without escape action it's impossible for a pianoforte not to produce a clattering sound or to go on sounding after the note has been struck; when you strike the keys, his hammers fall back again the moment they hit the strings, whether you hold down the keys or release them. He told me that only when he's finished making a piano like this does he sit down and try out all the passagework, runs and leaps, and, using a shave, works away at the instrument until it can do everything. For he works only to serve the music, not just for his own profit, otherwise he'd be finished at once.

He often says that if he weren't such a great music lover and didn't have some slight skill on the instrument, he'd long since have run out of patience with his work; but he loves an instrument that never lets the player down and that will last.'

When I read this letter I made a note at the back of the book (reprehensible habit, my husband has chided, writing in books): 'P 186 Stein - like my Martin, a maker of good things!'

I have in the past accused my husband of being a perfectionist, but in truth, it is, more than that, an essential part of his being that he loves to make things as good as he can get them, while acknowledging that there is a point at which he is happy to sit back and say to himself - that's good enough.

He trained as an actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but eventually, like so many actors (they say only 3.5% of actors work are lucky enough to be in full-time work), that work began to dry up.  Over the years we have been together, I have seen him work at all kinds of things with an increasing capacity for stamina and perseverance, often with no more instruction than the careful, thoughtful study of publications like The Reader's Digest Complete DIY Manual or Geoff Hamilton's Organic Gardening! 

In our first home he built shelving and cupboards. In the next he replaced a whole floor of wood-wormed planks, built kitchen units, and dug out a concrete bomb-shelter that had been buried in our Hackney kitchen. When we moved to Sussex, he cleared, designed and laid out two gardens, one with a huge vegetable patch, where he grew brassicas, legumes, roots, sweet-corn, squashes. In our current home he has renovated virtually the whole house, and recently re-pointed the gable end of the external brickwork, laid some beautiful brick paths and low walls. And when I look at our son, now expecting his own child, I see someone who shows the tangible benefits of having received constant good fathering.

For the last few years I have also seen my husband's energies turned to something flowering later in life: writing. Again, the same dogged determination and love of creating, polishing and getting something as good as possible, is being applied to the art of writing what he likes to think of ripping yarns. He doesn't aspire to be a great writer, though he loves to read them (Charles Portis is a current joy!) - but there's nothing more gratifying to him than a new review or communication from a reader who has throroughly enjoyed one of his books.

Lacking interest from the established publishing world, and even most book-sellers, we have published Niedermayer & Hart and Roadrage under our own imprint, Odd Dog Press. Consequently, even with the help of the internet, no mass-marketing means that it is a struggle, in the face of an ever-growing book glut, to encourage readers to nudge the books onto their book-pile.

But here's where the perseverance comes in - Martin is writing the sequel to Niedermayer & Hart, and labouring hard at making it something that the former's fans will enjoy reading. Working to serve the writing.

And in the meantime, also finding time to perfect his recipe for onion bhajis (see picture)!

I usually read a number of books at one time, although currently ‘reading-lite’ (for me!), having only two on the go: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, and AE Housman’s poetry collection A Shropshire Lad. I like to mix up the book buffet, interspersing big guns with thinner volumes, fiction with non-fiction, poetry, the odd graphic novel. I like popular fiction as well as the literary stuff, but there are limits - sorry to her fans, but you won’t find me reading Barbara Cartland....

There’s so much out there! Never mind the steady information stream from Twitter, Facebook, BBC website, daily papers etc etc. They say that a Sunday newspaper alone, with all of its supplements, amounts to what would have been the lifetime input for the average medieval person (had more than a handful been able to read!).

The website par excellence, of course, for keen readers, must surely be Goodreads, and I’ve already had a lot of fun adding my 1300+ reads to my page. I’ve had to withdraw from the conversation threads though - looking at these was taking up too much of my precious reading time!

I drive to work, and have my packed lunch round the table with colleagues, so it seems a bit rude to get a book out. My sister, however, who has 40 minutes each way on the train Monday-Friday, gets through a lot more books than me. She’s currently enjoying Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, having recently returned from holiday in Colombia.

As a confirmed bibliophile, and nosey with it,  one of life’s pleasures is sneaking a look over people’s shoulders to see what they’re reading, so e-readers can frustrate this innocent pastime for me, though there is always the cryptic-crossword-style game of trying to guess, from the page on view, what the book might be!

I thought I’d ask people I met this last week what they’re reading, which turned out to be a wide selection. Here’s a dozen of them (six by the fairer sex - hoorah!):

The Talented Mr Ripley    Patricia Highsmith
 Corvus   Esther Woolfson
 Elizabeth is Missing   Emma Healey
 Germany: Memories of a Nation   Neil MacGregor
 Americanah   Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
 How Music Works    David Byrne
 Le Chapeau de Mitterand   Antoine Laurain
 Rubicon  Tom Holland
 The Diary of Anne Frank’(in Spanish)
 The Private Eye Annual of 2014   Ian Hislop
 The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying   Marie Kondo
 The Bone Clocks   David Mitchell

But  if I thought I read a lot of books at once, the rosette must surely go to a running friend, whose current reads I enquired upon (breathlessly) the other evening on our 4 mile mostly uphill jaunt round Tunbridge Wells. Here they are - be impressed!!

Hunters of Dune   Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson
Lila   Marilynne Robinson
Who runs this place?   Anthony Sampson
Greek Political Oratory  Penguin Classics
Stardust  Neil Gaiman (on Kindle)

and has recently finished:

The Peripheral    William Gibson
Liberty    Shami Chakrabati
The Trial of Henry Kissinger   Christopher Hitchens

so no David Baldacci or John Grisham there then ...!

I’ll finish with a plug for my husband’s two books, Niedermayer & Hart, a horror thriller, and psychological thriller Roadrage  - both of which he is not ashamed to admit are popular fiction. I really enjoyed reading them, they are both good yarns with well-drawn characters; in spite of my long-term doula/midwife duties before their births (listening to ideas, encouraging, researching and proof-reading) I still found them thrilling, moving and hard to put down, which is a kind of small amazing miracle in itself!  I won’t go on - you can find reviews (the genuine article!) on Goodreads, Amazon and Martin’s website and decide for yourself, but he has a Kindle offer on over the next week (only available on Amazon UK from 8 am Monday 26 January until 2 February) for Niedermayer & Hart, which might be of interest.

If you haven’t heard of an author but the reviews are good, I guess 99p is an acceptable outlay!

Martin’s website: www.mj-johnson.com