Guest review by Penny Dolan: THE PLOT by Madeleine Bunting

 

"She sets this personal acre within the wider movements affecting the British countryside over the centuries, bringing in the topography, myths, history and custom, and expanding the vision out beyond the Hambleton Hills."

Penny Dolan works as a children’s storyteller and writer. Her last novel for older children, A Boy Called Mouse, was nominated for the Young Quills Historical Fiction Award, and she is currently completing a companion book. She posts on The History Girls, on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure and can be found on Twitter @PennyDolan1.

A bookish friend had praised The Plot by Guardian writer Madeleine Bunting, so when the paperback lay there, face up on the Waterstones counter, what could I do?

I was already interested in the topic: an acre of land on the edge of the Hambleton Hills in North Yorkshire, where the sculptor John Bunting lived and worked from the Fifties. His ‘plot’ was up a rough track, some distance from the cold cottage where his artist wife looked after their six young children. John had, aged sixteen, seen the view from the ridge, and in his twenties, came back to make his live his life in that spot. Once I had come across a similar breathtaking view, from the top of Sutton Bank, a winding hill with a 1:4 incline. I stared, from the car park at the top, out over the Vale of York and right across to the hazy summit of Pen y Ghent, and saw why this was called ‘God’s own county.’

Madeleine Bunting, John’s daughter, wrote her memoir as a way of coming to terms with her father. To me, this was not a book like Helen McDonald’s H is for Hawk, wrung out of deep grief. Instead, Bunting’s book felt brisker, written in anger, puzzlement and sadness, as she tries to understand her father and his love for his remote acre. Named Scotch Corner, the plot is marked on OS Navigator 100.

John Bunting’s passion, even at Ampleforth, his prestigious Catholic school, was carving in wood and stone. He visited the workshop of the Robert Thompson, the ‘Mouseman of Kilburn’ just as, later, he sought out sculptors like Henry Moore, Eric Gill and Brancusi. Returning to the seclusion of the Hambleton Hills and North Yorks Moors, John made a thin living through various commissions and part-time teaching at Ampleforth, where Anthony Gormley was among his students.

What marked Bunting out was that he was one of the young men who ‘escaped’ WWII, but not from its shadow nor its fallen heroes. Returning to Scotch Corner, he built a small ‘memorial’ chapel, as well as an everyday stone hut. Madeleine recalls his carved angel heads atop the doorway, and two crucifix and images of the Virgin and Child inside.

In particular, she describes sitting on the cold floor during mass, squashed between her siblings, because the chapel’s aisle was filled by her father’s life-size sculpture of a fallen soldier. Who was the soldier and why did this lost hero matter so much to John Bunting? And the other admired names she found in his notes? How did they and their reputations, over time, fare?

Gradually, Madeleine Bunting examines her father’s life, and the selfishness of his ’man among men’ attitude. After a day working in the hut, he spent evenings in the village pub, leaving his artist wife with six children in a cold, primitive cottage in the village. ‘It seemed that his belief in the dignity of physical labour meant that my mother’s should never end,’ adds the author. A not unfamiliar situation.

However, The Plot is far more than a single story, and stronger for it. In and among the author’s pursuit of her family story, she writes about the geography and history of that whole area, describing it as ‘a landscape known in reality and in imagination and in memory.’

She sets this personal acre within the wider movements affecting the British countryside over the centuries, bringing in topography, myths, history and custom, and expanding the vision out beyond the Hambleton Hills.

She writes about early flint-workers travelling the ridge; the people who marked the land with barrows; the foreign king who ‘wasted’ the North and made it uninhabitable for three generations; the incoming monks who gave order, wool and beautiful buildings to the area, and of the Scots drovers, bringing flocks of cattle to the markets of the south. She writes of the rise of Romanticism and the individualistic ‘view’ of the landscape; the arrival of sightseers, the railways bringing hunting parties, and the ugly sitka spruce plantations across the North Yorkshire moors. Separately, these histories might seem familiar but her overview is both thoughtful and interesting.

In her last chapters, Bunting considers the area of Hambleton in recent decades. She not only writes about the economic importance of grouse-shooting but also the tinder-box monoculture of the moors. She speaks of machines and pesticides, of the crisis in modern farming and in wider agricultural planning;. In particular, she draws attention to the nostalgia for rural life that has created holiday cottages, second homes and emptied out farms and village communities. Even, she says, her father who came here, in search of old, orderly society, might have seen the idyll disappearing as he carved.

This is, as my friend might have suggested, a very wise, worthwhile and intelligent book.

Afterword

A small but interesting point for food enthusiasts. While she was researching her book, Madeleine Bunting made friends with and relied on Fred Banks, a local farmer and self-taught historian. In the last chapters, Fred and his son Tom decide they cannot make a living from their farm and are thinking about buying a pub instead.

Now, in 2024, The Black Swan at Oldstead is a Michelin starred restaurant, and the main chef is better known as Tommy Banks, of  Roots cookbook fame.

The Plot is published by Granta.

See more of Penny's choices:

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Horse by Geraldine Brooks

The Secrets of Wishtide by Kate Saunders

The Cold Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty

Seven Miles of Steel Thistles by Katherine Langrish

SPECIAL FEATURE: Q & A with guest Sheena Wilkinson on her first novel for adults, MRS HART'S MARRIAGE BUREAU

 

Well-established as one of Ireland’s most acclaimed writers for young people, Sheena Wilkinson has won many prizes for her work, including five Children’s Books Ireland awards. Her first novel for adults, Mrs Hart’s Marriage Bureau, is just out from HarperCollins Ireland. Sheena lives in County Derry, on the shores of Lough Neagh, and when she’s not writing she is usually walking her dogs or singing.

Mrs Hart’s Marriage Bureau:  April McVey hasn’t a romantic bone in her body. So what makes her believe she’ll be the perfect assistant for Mrs Hart’s Marriage Bureau? Matchmaker Martha hopes the lively Irish girl will be a breath of fresh air for the business which has been her passion since her husband died at Passchendaele, but which is struggling to keep up with the turbulence of the 1930s. When lonely widower Fabian falls for April, Martha’s matchmaking skills are put to their greatest test. Is April as immune to romance as she claims? Is Martha’s interest in Fabian purely professional? Will there be enough happy endings to go round? Mrs Hart’s Marriage Bureau is an uplifting romance about friendship, loneliness, and the unexpected places where we find fulfilment.

Celia: Having moved, as you have, from Young Adult to Adult fiction, I'd love to know - what precipitated the move?

Sheena: I’ve always intended to write for different audiences, and always wrote short historical fiction for adults alongside my children’s books. My most recent children’s books, a historical trilogy, seemed to be appreciated more by adults so I suppose it was a logical step. Some of my favourite writers, like K.M. Peyton and Noel Streatfeild – and indeed all three of you! – write for children and adults, so it never seemed odd.

Linda:   How and why did you decide to set the novel in a fictitious Yorkshire town rather than in your native Northern Ireland?

Sheena:  I always wanted an Irish main character, and much of the book’s heart and humour lies in the culture shock experienced by both April, my Northern Irish heroine, and the English people she works with. After three novels based on Irish history, I was keen to escape from religion, cultural identity and politics, and that just wouldn’t have been possible in an Irish or Northern Irish marriage bureau! So it was a very pragmatic decision. I love inventing towns, and Easterbridge, a small Yorkshire town, feels very real to me. I hope it convinces the reader! I did live in the north of England for six years and of course much of my cultural background is English. I wouldn’t set a book in a country I didn’t know well.

Adele: You have a gift of bringing the physical details of both place and people to life in a way which reminded me sometimes of one of my favourite writers, Dorothy Whipple. Were you influenced at all by the women writers of the 30s. Or by any other writers?

Sheena: That’s really observant of you, Adele, because not only is Dorothy Whipple one of my favourite writers, but I discovered her during the first lockdown, which is when I started to write Mrs Hart. In both cases, I wanted something essentially positive and escapist, but not too light. I was amazed that I hadn’t read Whipple before. I love how she brings you straight into the middle of a household and, with just a few details, makes you feel you know these people intimately. It’s honestly the greatest compliment that you found even a tiny spark of comparison! When I’m writing, I like to read novels written at the time I’m writing about, so yes, Whipple, E.M. Delafield, Noel Streatfield, Dorothy L. Sayers, as well as slightly later writers such as Barbara Pym are all favourites.

Adele:  I was surprised by the turn of events, (no spoilers) and thought the use of the double point of view worked so well. Did you ever consider a first person narrative? Do you have strong views about the First Person/Third Person debate?

Sheena:  I’ve written in both first and third, but on the whole I prefer third – I tend to write very close third, and I find it can do everything that first does, in terms of intimacy but without the self-consciousness of first. There are three POV characters, April, Martha and Fabian, with the women taking on most of the story, but I did want to include a male point of view too. It was really interesting to present the same characters from both inside and outside.

And I’m glad that you were surprised by the turn of events! I’ll say more about that below!

Linda:  In an interview you said that you see the book as 'feelgood feminism' (great term). Were there any points at which the political background threatened to darken the novel more than you intended?

Sheena: Yes! That was probably the biggest issue I had – I really wanted to maintain an uplifting tone, with warmth and a sense of community and, above all, hope, but I also wanted to explore some of the darker realities of the 1930s, in particular the rise of fascism, refugees and gender politics. Two things helped me. One was my experience of writing more overtly political novels – Name upon Name, Star by Star and Hope against Hope – but trying not to let the politics take over because the books were for a younger audience. The other was exploring how Call the Midwife, of which I am a big fan, negotiates that juxtaposition of serious social realism with sweetness and fun, without awkward tonal shifts. Because life actually is bittersweet.

Linda:  Basing the story around a marriage bureau is a clever idea, and April is a delightful character! Did you plan from the beginning how the story would end for her, or did that grow out of the writing? (I know ... difficult to answer that without spoilers ... )

Sheena:  It’s a hard question to answer, possibly because of spoilers, but essentially, yes, I always knew precisely the form of fulfilment that April would find for herself. It was also important for me to write about a variety of characters, main and secondary, for whom marriage was not the best outcome. After decades of singleness, I was married myself last year, aged 53, to a widower I’d known as a friend for almost thirty years. I don’t think I would have been attracted to this subject otherwise. I was the – I won’t say victim, but certainly object – of some very ham-fisted matchmaking efforts over the years, and I must admit I had great fun matching characters and futures!

Sheena with her husband Seamus

Celia:  I noticed that, through Felicity, you had some observations to make about people's perception of Children's writers. Did you find any significant differences in writing for different audiences?

Sheena:  I’ve definitely found it easier to write for adults – for the first time in a long time I’m writing for the reader I am now, rather than the reader I used to be. I feel there’s more space to explore the characters’ inner lives, and I suppose more freedom. But I always tried to write with depth and precision, and care for language, so in that sense it’s not very different. I had quite a lot of fun making one of my characters a 1930s children’s author. She complains about not being taken seriously as a ‘proper’ writer, and I have to say some of that did come from the heart!

Celia: Do you think you will return to Children's / YA fiction any time soon?

Sheena:  At the moment, my heart is definitely with writing for adults. I have so many ideas I’d like to explore. If I do write for children again, it would definitely be historical – that’s my favourite genre. I’ve never written a girls’ school story, which was the subject of my PhD thesis, so that’s something I might consider – but I’m 54, and to be honest I’m not really reading children’s books these days, so I think other people are better suited to writing them.

Adele:  Will there be a sequel? I would love one….

Sheena:  So would I! The publishers, HarperCollins Ireland, mentioned a sequel quite early in our relationship, though I don’t yet have a contract for one. I had planned not to write one without a contract, but like you – and I’m very happy to say, many readers – I was very keen to find out what happened next, and couldn’t resist starting …  It’s set in 1936, with old and new characters.

Thanks so much, Sheena, for answering our questions - we hope a great many readers will enjoy your novel as much as we did!

Lough Neagh

Mrs Hart's Marriage Bureau is published by Harper Collins Ireland.

Guest post by Cindy Jefferies: THE SOIL NEVER SLEEPS by Adam Horovitz

"A lyrical, humane collection of poetry, as sparkling as an upland stream and as far reaching as the branches of a great oak." 

First published in 2001 for children, Cindy Jefferies found success with her Fame School series with Usborne Books. They obtained 22 foreign rights deals and are still in print in the UK. Latterly writing fiction for adults as Cynthia Jefferies, her first title The Outrageous Fortune of Abel Morgan was published in November 2018. The Honourable Life of Thomas Chayne is out in November 2019 and is set during the English Civil Wars.

Towards the end of 2013, Adam Horovitz, poet son of poet parents, was invited by the chair of the Pasture-fed Livestock Association to consider a project. Would he like to write about pasture farming, and visit some of the farms that follow this practice?

A life-long vegetarian, he might have dismissed the idea, but he chose to engage. Knowing little of man’s relationship with landscape and animals he threw himself into his learning. And so, through four seasons and four farms, expanding to six farms with the second edition, he lodged with willing farmers, and got his hands and boots dirty. It must at times have seemed an odd way to be a poet in residence.

In Yorkshire during the winter

counting distant cattle
                     by stripe after stripe

             as clouds shift into sheep
& back to cloud

                     a distant peregrine pricks

                     at the great stone scab of Malham Cove

And in Kent during the summer

Crickets and bees drown out the rush of cars
as we wade through a Van Gogh sunset canvas

There’s a little sadness here, but humour too, struggle and a deep appreciation of the people, animals and land in all their variety. If you have ever been involved with farming you will likely meet a part of yourself here, even though this is a very particular, hands off way of caring for the land. If you have ever simply walked across grassland, or idly watched a field of animals you will learn more here, and you may, next time you see grazing animals, look at what they are eating. Listen for the noise they make, tearing or nibbling at the grass. If they are lucky, they will be consuming a huge variety of flowers and herbs.

This is a lyrical, humane collection of poetry, as sparkling as an upland stream and as far reaching as the branches of a great oak. Out in all weathers, seeing the beginning and end of life, feeling the rhythm of the seasons with their joys and challenges, this poet has created something quite wonderful. He wears his learning with both humility and enthusiasm, a difficult trick to pull off.

It may well be that soon there will be fewer animals being raised as food, for our health’s sake, and for the sake of our world. What few remain will, perhaps most likely, be kept in this way, treading the earth lightly. Maybe this is one reason why I return again and again to the title poem, The Soil Never Sleeps, for as Horovitz says,

The soil never sleeps.
Never slips into ideology or nostalgia.
It is place and purpose,
The perfection of decay.
A story that shifts
From mouth to mouth.
A crucible for rebirth.
A rooftop on another world.”

The Soil Never Sleeps is published by Palewell Press. 

Guest review by Victor Watson: SOUTH RIDING by Winifred Holtby

"I read this book with a sense of homecoming. This is where I began as a serious novel-reader, with Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, and Hardy." 

Victor Watson began to write children's fiction after a long career as a teacher, both in schools and at Homerton College, Cambridge. He was involved in the setting up of Seven Stories, the National Centre for Children's Books in Newcastle.

He has edited many critical works on children's fiction, including the Cambridge Guide to Children's Books in English (CUP 2001) He is the author of the Paradise Barn quartet and his latest novel is called Operation Blackout. All his fiction is published by Catnip Press. See more at Victor's dedicated website for the Paradise Barn books.

I’d known about South Riding since my undergraduate days, but I didn’t get round to reading it until earlier this year, when I spotted a compact 1949 hardback edition in a charity shop. I bought it – and was immediately hooked. The story unfolds in such a measured and unhurried way that I was able to savour the reading of it over many days. It has a wide cast of characters from all levels of society, the landscape is vividly evoked, and the narrative voice is both compassionate and uncompromising. The dialogue is good too.

On the dustwrapper the author is quoted: ‘there is one fundamental truth about human nature – we are not only single individuals, each face to face with eternity and our separate spritis; we are members one of another.’ It’s one thing to say that, and quite another matter to demonstrate it. But that ‘membership one of another’ is what South Riding creates and acts out – in a rural community, set in the fictional South Riding of Yorkshire, during the depression of the 1930s. Many stories form part of the bigger story, all told with a direct and un-showy realism, effortlessly intertwined in an entirely convincing world. Here, there is no artificial thematic tidiness: people’s lives are muddled and imperfect, randomly affected by their siblings, their love affairs, their weaknesses, their neighbours, their rivals, their own hidden motivation. And – since this is also a novel about local government – the characters’ lives are also shaped by decisions made in council meetings and planning committees about housing conditions and scholarships.

The characterisation is brilliant, from the scheming Alderman Snaith to poor Lily Sawdon dying of cancer; the clever working-class Lydia Holly, whose future life will be shaped by whether or not her social and family situation will allow her to take up the scholarship she’s been awarded; the unhappy Robert Carne, whose daughter is lonely and miserable and whose wife is in a mental home, and whose life-values are as threatened and uncertain as his estate is crumbling. The main character is Miss Sarah Burton who, in chapter 2, is appointed headmistress of Kiplington Girls’ High School, and who encounters setbacks, faces all manner of frustrations, and experiences a bitter and triumphant love. She almost gives up on her conviction that an unmarried woman in her forties can have a fulfilled and fulfilling professional life within and for the sake of the community. But not quite. ‘I was born to be a spinster,’ she tells herself, ‘and by God, I’m going to spin.’

I read this book with a sense of homecoming. This is where I began as a serious novel-reader, with Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, and Hardy. It has a hugeness of scope and conception, inviting comparisons with George Eliot’s Middlemarch. It reminded me how far most modern fiction has moved from such imaginative spaciousness. I estimate that South Riding is about 176,000 words long – but it had to be a long novel because it seeks to convey a comprehensive understanding of an entire community. It is a socialist view, as you would expect from an author who was for most of her life a close friend of Vera Brittain. I felt as I read it a determined writerly thrust, a brilliant craftswoman’s purposeful and unhurried faith in her narrative vision, and her belief that – in spite of muddles and failures, setbacks and bad fortune, wickedness and greed – communities are capable of edging imperfectly and cautiously forward to improve the lives of individuals.

That’s what Winifred Holtby believed herself to be, a craftswoman. ‘I have no illusions about my work,’ she wrote. ‘I am primarily a useful, versatile, sensible and fairly careful artisan.’ Perhaps – but South Riding is an intelligent and absorbing novel, in its values, in its style, and in its conception. I loved it.

And it’s written in proper sentences!

South Riding is published by Virago.

Independent Bookseller Feature No.3: The Book Corner, Halifax. UNDER THE ROCK and THE GALLOWS POLE by Benjamin Myers

We opened The Book Corner in September 2017 with Bookworms, our dedicated children’s bookshop, next door. We are proud to have brought an independent bookshop back to Halifax and are located in the recently renovated Grade I listed Piece Hall, the only example in this country of the great eighteenth century northern cloth halls.

The shop is owned by Kate Claughan who also owns The Bookcase in Hebden Bridge. The team are avid readers and all-round book champions, passionate about delivering events that offer something extra for the local community whether it be a local author book signing, a poetry collection launch, a spoken word open-mic night, a regular YA book club or a good old-fashioned story-time for younger readers.

We are also delighted to partner Square Chapel Arts Centre supporting their various events for authors and poets including Hollie McNish, Roger McGough, Willy Russell and Stuart Maconie.

We have chosen to review two books by local author Benjamin Myers. Ben is an author, journalist and poet who has written seven books as well as many poems and short stories. His novel The Gallows Pole has just won the 2018 Walter Scott Prize and is our best-selling fiction title. Ben recently collaborated with ‘Yorkshire’s very own Wainwright’ and cartographer, Christopher Goddard, to create a Cragg Vale Coiners map, a sweeping walker’s guide to the locations featured in the novel. It is well worth a trek through the blustery bogs and banks to experience the incredible Calder Valley but always with a hip flask close at hand.

The Gallows Pole is a visceral re-telling of the Cragg Vale Coiners’ efforts to ‘clip’ the late 18th century England’s economy into devastation. Myers delivers a windswept tale of 1769 Northern England, diving head first into the murky world of pseudo King David Hartley and his gang of land-workers as they bully and spit their enterprising scheme across the Calder Valley. No man will stand in their way, but can they avoid the hangman’s noose? Deeply resonant for the modern reader, this is a vivid portrait of the working man and his uprising against the rich establishment. Myers has woven an unforgettable tale filled with landscape, poetry and Yorkshire vernacular that has you grasped by the throat long after the final page has been turned. A worthy winner of the 2018 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

Under the Rock is the most beautifully written non fiction book. Reading it takes you on a journey into the West Yorkshire village of Mytholmroyd which is situated in the steep sided Calder valley. Scout Rock, is present as a constant companion. The author lives below it; his relationship to the rock is examined throughout the book. The rock has also affected others who live in the valley, most famously Ted Hughes. The observations on nature are glorious whilst not flinching from describing the raw and gritty side. The book is split into parts: Wood, Earth, Water, Rock. At the end of each part are poems which make you feel as if you accompanied the author on his walks around the valley. There is an extremely powerful sense of place. I was fully immersed in the landscape, the water, the woods, the rock. Lyrical, powerful, engaging, moving and fascinating. Highly recommended.

The Gallows Pole is published by Bluemoose Books and Under the Rock by Elliott & Thomson.

Review by Katie Ashwood and Louise Beere.