Remembering MARY HOOPER, 1945 - 2026, a tribute by Celia Rees and Jean Ure

 

Celia: Here at Writers Review we were deeply saddened to hear of the death of our good friend, Mary Hooper. Mary’s death on 24th May this year was a shock to us all. She was not just a literary colleague but a friend, always there to celebrate, when celebrations were in order and commiserate when they were not. I had known her for over thirty years. She was an early member of the Scattered Authors’ Society, which is where I first met her. She was a regular participant in SAS get togethers and lunches in London with fellow authors Linda Newbery, Adèle Geras, Jean Ure, Anne Cassidy and Sally Prue. Mary was always excellent company and only ceased attending after her diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease made travel difficult for her.

She and I both wrote historical fiction for Bloomsbury Children’s Books and were often paired together for events. Mary was very good company, ebulliently funny and always very supportive, on the platform and off it. We did some memorable events together all over the country. Mary was just the same, large audience or small, her warm, engaging personality came over, as did her knowledge of her subject, which was second to none.

Fallen Grace, nominated for the Carnegie Medal

She was a prolific writer, with over a hundred titles for children and young adults. Her main focus was writing for teenage girls. That focus continued when she moved, extremely successfully, into historical fiction and this is what I know her for best. She won multiple awards and was nominated for the Carnegie Medal. Her research was always meticulous but her real talent was to make her characters come alive on the page. She was fascinated by women’s past lives and her range was wide, from the 17th Century to the First World War. Her most acclaimed novel and one of our personal favourites, Newes From The Dead, was based on an obscure historical footnote, the true story of Anne Green, a woman who was hanged at Oxford Assizes and who came back from the dead on an Oxford University dissecting table. Mary took this snippet of historical fact and spun it into an extraordinary story of survival and resilience.

Newes from the Dead, based on a historical incident

Although she set her historical fiction in different periods, all her novels are in different ways celebrations of the lives of ordinary girls and women, the people that history too often ignores and forgets. Whether they are servant girls or shopkeepers, Mary made sure that the lives of her heroines were discovered. I know as a fellow writer of historical fiction how much work and research uncovering those lives takes and how much deep understanding and empathy it takes to make these girls and women live for modern young readers. The world of children’s and young adult fiction is the poorer for her passing. She will be mourned and missed by her fellow writers and I have lost an old and valued friend.

Jean: Mary was one of my oldest writing chums – oldest, that is, in the sense that we went back a long way, sharing moments of triumph and moments of authorial outrage (mostly to do with editorial and/or publishing iniquities). I look back fondly to all those happy, gossipy lunches we had with old friends such as Adele Geras, Celia Rees, Linda Newbery and Anne Cassidy, all of us happily moaning about said iniquities.

Mary was very down to earth – even, occasionally, dismissive when it came to her own writing. “Oh,” she once airily said, when I was complaining that I didn’t know how to wind up one of my books, “I just pile all my characters into a boat and have it capsize, or kill them off in a cash crash.”

In fact she used to do a lot of research for the historical novels, such as Newes from the Dead, having belatedly taken a history degree to make up for having, as she said, spent her schooldays giggling and talking “far too much” to concentrate on learning anything.

She was a lively and amusing correspondent – I could always rely on her to lighten the mood and give me something to laugh about.

She is a sad loss and I shall miss her terribly.

Poppy, winner of the Young Quills Historical Association Award

See also Mary's Guardian obituary by her daughter Rowan.

Guest review by Laura Parker: THE TATTOOED HILLS - JOURNEYS TO CHALK FIGURES, by Jon Woolcott

 

"Like all the best travelogues about Britain, this also reveals something of ourselves. The story of the chalk figures is a tale of human nature ..."

Laura Parker is the author of Stone on Stone, a journey along Britain’s drystone walls, due to be published in April 2027. She writes features and reviews for Country Life magazine, covering nature, art and the history of the countryside. She has also been published in Little Toller’s online nature collection The Clearing, and arts/nature/culture journal Caught by the River, as well as in Scottish Field and Scottish daily The Courier. Find out more on Laura’s website.

Countryside writers often find a natural feature to hang their words upon: rivers, paths, trees, coastlines. For Jon Woolcott it is geoglyphs: the white horses and giant figures cut into the hillside of southern England. This mostly limits him to the chalk downs that run through Dorset, Wiltshire and East Sussex – Jon admits to being ‘south-minded’ – but there is no shortage of material for a writer who loves to dig in for stories.

In a chapter about the Long Man of Wilmington, for example, he manages to fit in entertaining vignettes variously about William Blake, young men on the grand tour, Benjamin Britten, photographer Lee Miller, the Dissolution of the Monasteries, a weird far-right sect called Woden’s Folk, and Noughties TV stars Trinny and Susannah. This may sound a bit too eclectic for some, but it will appeal to magpie-minded readers who enjoy the company of someone able stitch the fun bits of history skilfully together.

He writes that many hill figures ‘emerge unsteadily from history, badly documented’, and this gives plenty of scope to explore the changing ways we have tried to interpret the past as he introduces Victorian antiquarians, archaeologists and opinionated clergymen.

The Cerne Abbas Giant, for example, the erect exhibitionist etched into a river valley north of Dorchester, has provoked much speculation. Is he a Romano-British Hercules? Or inspired by Oliver Cromwell and only etched out of the turf in the 17th century? Archaeologists using a novel dating technique have now discovered the giant was Saxon. At times revered, at others covered up in embarrassment, the 55-metre high figure has seen some modifications, such as when the National Trust inadvertently created a member increase during a restoration programme.

Woolcott makes most of his visits on foot, with all the frustrations of not being able to find the figures or see them clearly, and it would be surprising if the book did not inspire some readers to pull on their boots and figure-hunt for themselves.

In the book’s portraits of each figure, the timespan can readily shift from ancient days to the era that young people would call history but some of us just think of as fond memories. There are many rewarding diversions into popular culture, including his memories of growing up beneath the image of a giant Panda face, created by students, that appeared overnight near Salisbury. This figure – no longer visible – summons up the absurdities of the 1960s, but also shows how these figures have come and gone. Unlike standing stones, they are largely temporary. Examples of disappearances include the Red Horse of Tysoe in Warwickshire, initially lost to the enclosure movement and finally planted over in the 1950s, and the Black Horse of Bush Howe in Cumbria. Those that have endured have done so for an interesting variety of reasons; from deference (military badges, or the mounted figure of George III riding away from Weymouth) to expedience (the Westbury White Horse was concreted over by a penny-pinching council in the 1950s for easier maintenance). Chalk figures can fade or become overgrown. Often they survive thanks to the care and rechalking organised by the local community, which makes the longevity of the free-running Uffington white horse even more remarkable. This is one of the oldest and most enigmatic of chalk figures, dating back to the late Bronze Age. It, ‘more than any, haunts imaginations.’ The horse’s curiously modernist design appealed to artists such as Eric Ravilious and music idols such as XTC, with the cover of their album English Settlement, and Kate Bush, who made her Terry Gilliam-directed Cloudbusting video there.

Like all the best travelogues about Britain, this also reveals something of ourselves. The story of the chalk figures is a tale of human nature: how we create infeasible works of art, tell old stories and embroider new ones, disbelieve ancestors, celebrate the land, and look after things that are important to us, even if we don’t understand why.

The Tattoed Hills is published by Aurum.

More of Laura's choices:

Land Beneath the Waves by Nic Wilson

The Place of Tides by James Rebanks

Guest review by Graeme Fife: THE WOMEN by Kristin Hannah

 

‘People made us think we had done something wrong, the women especially.’

Graeme Fife is a regular reviewer here. He has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history and fiction. His novel of the French Revolution, No Common Assassin, tells the story of Charlotte Corday. His new novel, Memory's Ransom, a compelling wartime story, is published by Conrad Press.

On the train home from Norfolk recently, I observed a man reading a book whose title, about spies, intrigued me; also a woman reading this book. I noted both and bought them. The spies thing was a dud and I gave it to the charity bookshop. The Hannah, however, captivated me. Its subject is the women who volunteered as nurses to work in the evacuation hospitals in Vietnam during that other misguided conflict. The experiences she describes – all derived from very broad research, cited at the back of the book - are breathtaking, terrible, near unimaginable.

Whilst this is cast as a novel and therefore at its core an imagined story with relationships lost, broken, betrayed, held to, its fiction follows the best example of show not tell: auditory, visual and emotional encounter, sensory in all aspects – you can smell it, too, the hospital, the clothes they wear, their kitbags - fill out a narrative of soul-searching depth. I cried.

To be remembered, also – and Hannah sheds vital light on this – back in America, a society forever torn by its own inner conflicts, was further assaulted by a new age of self-expression, hippies growing their hair and dropping out…anti-war protest marches, the Gay Liberation movement, Civil Rights…

The chaos and urgency of a Big Push in the hospital when casualties flooded in, brought by Dust-Offs, helicopters, the injuries, the incessant calls of work work work, with little respite, the agonies of death, a nurse holding a dying man’s hand…

The central character, at first a barely trained nurse, is flung into action with a terse ‘you can do this’ from a surgeon who doesn’t want dither, he wants determination, and help right now and the novel draws in stark detail the process through which a tiro becomes an expert often through the sheer propulsion of expectation. There is no time for hesitation, never any time, for, just as on the battlefield some kilometres away, the bullets fly without delay from the pressure on a trigger, so the injury, very often mortal, nevertheless has to be seen to immediately. As a catalogue of how the human heart and moral power are strengthened by this intensely stressful experience, I have read few novels which do it more poignantly. As Hannah shows: torment can lead to compassion, a strength we may not have known lay inside us.

There are lies, misunderstandings, misreports of death and the anguish of love found and snatched away by the imperatives of war and its terrible repercussions – not only on the soldiers of the army, navy and air force, but on the civilians, women and children, the horror of Agent Orange and indiscriminate bombing … the cruelties perpetrated by men dehumanised by conflict.

There is, too, and powerfully exposed, the generation gap and the mutual incomprehension. Thus the father to his volunteer nurse daughter: ‘Your generation, the need to talk, talk, talk…’

Gone the days of put up and shut up. Hannah makes no judgement – that is for the reader. She does lapse occasionally and when a mother makes an emergency call to see her son in hospital, do we really need to know exactly what she is wearing? But it’s s small flaw. Everyone wants a best seller and one thing which is evident in best sellers is the writer’s obsession with detail, detail, detail. Hannah avoids that. She knows her own heart and that emotional sensibility is evident on every page, without show or personal reflection and intervention. She sees, she hears, she brings it all to life, even life teetering on the edge of death.

I have asked American friends about this and their reaction varies, depending on what neighbourhood they live in, but Hannah brings to the surface the way in which returning veterans were reviled, even spat at, called unpatriotic. But veterans were only ever seen as the men. Groups of veterans gathering in therapeutic sessions to talk about the way their psyche unravelled on their return home - nightmares, broken relationships, alienation – were male clubs, women disbarred. As the returning nurse says to one Marine: ‘If you didn’t see a woman in Vietnam, you were lucky because it means you didn’t end up in hospital.’

The Women is published by Macmillan

Guest review by Sue Purkiss: RAISING HARE, by Chloe Dalton

"The writing shines with a crisp clarity ..."

Sue Purkiss has enjoyed parallel careers in teaching and writing. Starting as an English teacher in secondary schools, she went on to work with children who were out of school for medical reasons, and with young offenders. She also spent five years working as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Bristol and Exeter Universities, and has taught creative writing in the community for more than twelve years.

Her books until now have been for children. They include historical fiction (Jack Fortune, Warrior King and Emily’s Surprising Voyage, which was long-listed for the Carnegie), and a contemporary novel, The Willow Man, as well as several retellings and a life of Shakespeare. This year will see the publication of her first adult novel, An Ordinary War, by Writers Review Publishing.

She lives in Somerset, whose magical landscapes provide the settings and inspiration for several of her stories. 

I'm not sure if there is such a thing as typical nature writer - but if there is, Chloe Dalton is definitely not it. Up until the 2020 pandemic, hers was an emphatically urban lifestyle. For over ten years she worked in the UK Parliament and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office - notably with William Hague - and her day job is still in this field. And I think that's important, because it explains a lot about the way she writes and the way she approaches and observes nature.

The story begins with an evocation of a bitterly cold day in the January of 2020. The writing shines with a crisp clarity which is the hallmark of Chloe's prose: "The trees were frosted white with windblown snowflakes, while icy cobwebs hung in the hedgerows like frozen cat's cradles. A lone kestrel brooded on the garden fence, spectral in the dim light." During the weeks that followed, a hare gives birth. And later, after the beginning of the pandemic, when Chloe has retreated to her house in the countryside, she hears a dog barking. This is unusual. She goes out to investigate - and comes across a tiny leveret lying on the grassy strip that runs down the middle of the track which she is following. She hesitates. Although in her current life she has nothing to do with animals, as a child she was used to her mother rescuing and caring for all kinds of creatures, and her sister has a small farm - so she knows enough to understand that she may do the leveret more harm by handling it than by leaving it alone. So she leaves it and goes home. After a few hours, she returns, hoping it will have found its way back into the undergrowth and been reunited with its mother.

But it's still there. And she sees that if she leaves it, there can be little hope for it. If its mother has not already found it, it's unlikely now that she will. It couldn't be more vulnerable: before long it will inevitably be predated. So she takes it home.

But now, what is she to do with it? The friend who is staying with her gently points out that this will surely end in tears: what will happen when Chloe goes back to London?

But Chloe doesn't take her friend's advice. Perhaps it's a reaction to the way the pandemic is robbing everyone of agency in their own lives - anyway, she decides that this small life is one she will try to save.

And she does. But she does it in her own way, which is firmly grounded in the understanding that this is a wild creature, and while she will do her best to enable it to live, she has no intention of trying to make it into a pet. She never names it, she doesn't put it in a cage, even for its own safety: it is wild and it will remain so - it will be free, even if this means it will put itself in danger.

But something extraordinary happens. The hare chooses to stay with her. Not all of the time; sometimes it disappears for weeks on end. But it clearly sees her home as a place of safety. When, eventually, she decided to write about the experience, the hare is often lying beside her, completely at ease in her company. And the experience changes her. She becomes so much more aware of nature, and how everything locks together: instead of seeing a green field, she notices all the different varieties of plants at her feet. When the local farmer harvests potatoes wth a machine, she sees the resulting carnage - dead wildlife, including many hares - and has a visceral sense of their fear and panic as the machine approaches. But she also sees that farmers are leaving wider margins for wildlife, and how these are resulting in a greater diversity of species - this book isn't about despair, it's about finding hope, and reconnecting with the natural world - which is not just an empty phrase, but which is in the end essential if we, and the planet, are to survive.

At the beginning, I suggested that Chloe Dalton is not a typical nature writer (if there is such a thing). Many books about nature foreground the writer's internal life. Many writers explain - often very movingly - how connecting with nature has helped to heal their inner turmoil, the damage which life has inflicted on them. That's not the aim of this book. Chloe does refer to her urban life, to her day job - and she does say how her experience with the hare has modified her attitude to that life. But she doesn't reject that side of her life - and her purpose doesn't seem to be predominantly to explore her own motivation: it's to observe, and understand, the nature of this creature. She fully understands that it's not her pet - it's its own creature, it's 'other', it's wild, and all the more to be respected and admired because of that.

She writes absolutely beautifully. Her prose is clear, precise, luminous. I came across an interesting quote from her in an interview about a piece of advice about writing that her father once gave her. It is, I think, excellent advice about writing in general, and it's advice that she has certainly followed.

'My first real job was as a researcher to a Member of Parliament. In my first week, my father came across me sitting at home, early in the morning, worrying over the text of something I’d drafted. When I asked for help, he pulled up a chair next to me, took my pencil, and after a few moments, drew a steady line through every superfluous word on the page. He told me that in Parliament I would write for people who didn’t have much time to read, and that I should learn to convey my point as briefly as possible. I’ve come across various iterations of that advice in the years since. ‘Know how complicated it is and then state it simply’, Hemingway wrote. But my father taught this to me first, and I’ve never forgotten it.'

I want to end this as Chloe Dalton ends her very beautiful book. She is contemplating the fact that one day the hare will not return, and she says:

'I tell myself not to count the years ahead in which she might never again come, but rather cherish the days she has given me of her own free will, when she lowered her species' instinctive guard against humans, and shared the beauty and mystery of her presence in silent and graceful companionship. I will remember her leaving, but will know that before she did, she always, first, looked back.'

Raising Hare is published by Canongate.

Sue's first novel for adults, An Ordinary War, will be published by Writers Review Publishing in July. 

More of Sue's choices:

Sightlines by Kathleen Jamie

Any Human Heart by William Boyd

The Women of Troy by Pat Barker

WILD DARK SHORE by Charlotte McConaghy, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"One of my books of the year - completely gripping, moving, expertly-paced, with characters that grow on the reader."

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. Having published widely for young readers, with titles including the Costa category winner Set in Stone, she is now writing adult fiction. Her most recent novel, The One True Thing, was one of the launch titles for Writers Review Publishing last April; it will be followed by The Hide this autumn. 

This is one of my books of the year - completely gripping, moving, expertly-paced, with characters that grow on the reader, and the effects of climate change on landscape and wildlife at its core.

The setting is a remote island, Shearwater, based on Macquarie Island between Tasmania and Antarctica. A research team has been forced to abandon its project because of rising sea levels; central to this work is a subterranean seedbank designed to last far into the future, but now threatened with flooding. Various disasters, slowly revealed, have left the Salt family - father Dom, teenagers Raff and Fen and nine-year-old Orly - as the sole inhabitants of an old lighthouse until a shipwreck survivor, Rowan, is rescued from the sea. Deliberate sabotage of the communication equipment has left the islanders unable to summon help from the mainland; they can only wait for the evacuation ship to arrive in six weeks' time.

At first it's uncertain that Rowan will survive. Nursed by the family, she does, but both she and they are hiding secrets. Why did she set out for the island? What is Dominic hiding in the underground vault? How did his wife die, and what has disturbed Fen so much that she can't sleep indoors?

The seedbank gives a focus on all that's threatened and is a powerful metaphor for the intensive crop farming we already depend on. Time and space make it impossible to save all the seeds - but which should be prioritised? Those already known to be food crops? Those that are fire-resistant? Those whose qualities are as yet unknown? Rowan sees the terrible dilemma this poses: "how to let go of plants and trees and flowers and shrubs, how to let go of the most exquisite, the most unusual, how to let biodiversity die in favour of what humans can eat. Not only do I feel this weight, I see the future laid out before me. A vast stretch of crops and nothing else, nothing wild or natural, and even these neatly planted rows threatened on all sides by flame and flood. All of earth, a wasteland."

There are plenty of thrills, twists and revelations, but what made this such a compelling book for me is its focus on landscape, weather and climate adaptation.  The black sands where the seals breed, watched over by Fen, are disappearing under rising tides; Rowan has experienced the devastating loss by fire of a house and land she had come to love. But there are glorious moments too, including an episode where these characters achieve the seemingly-impossible rescue of a beached humpbacked whale and her calf.

Strong characterisation and a range of viewpoints bring us close to each character in turn: to Dom, who cares passionately for his children and believes himself to be haunted by his dead wife; to the teenagers, who've known little else but solitary island life; to nine-year-old Orly, drawn to Rowan as a substitute mother; to Rowan herself, who at first sees the future only as bleak: 'everything will be drowned, burned or starved' as the climate becomes increasingly inhospitable. Later, through her involvement with the family, she (with the reader) begins to see possibilities for them all when they leave Shearwater. But nothing is certain in this dangerous, changing world. The sinuous plot keeps us hooked to the end of this story with heart and soul as well as thrills. 

Wild Dark Shore is published by Canongate.

More cli-fi:

Q&A with Jane Rogers about her short story collection, Fire-Ready

Q&A with Alison Layland about After the Clearances

Riverflow by Alison Layland

The High House by Jessie Greengrass

The Overstory by Richard Powers, reviewed by Tracey Mathias

Guest feature by Jon Appleton: 'This is the Time We Have' - my decade with Ann Patchett

 

"I’ve reviewed Ann Patchett’s most recent decade of writing here on Writers Review across various posts. Maybe you’ve been reading alongside me, but if you’ve yet to read her work, perhaps I might suggest a roadmap ... "

Jon Appleton is a freelance editor and writer. He publishes his research into the history of children's literature in a free e-zine called the gab. Visit: lettersfromrobin.com/the-gab

There is a moment about 50 pages into Whistler, Ann Patchett’s new novel, her tenth, where the narrator, 53-year-old Daphne Fuller, is speaking with Jonathan, her husband of two decades, and her senior by almost as many years. Jonathan is adjusting to retirement but Daphne isn’t ready for that change. They’re talking about their lives – what’s worked for them so far, and what may work for them in the future. Or not.

Jonathan looks at Daphne and says, ‘This is the time we have.’

Later in the novel, ‘They had nothing but time’ is even more resonant.

For me, these are a-ha moments, where a decade of reading thrillingly coalesced. I’ve actually been a fan of Ann Patchett for much longer than that – since her Women’s Prize-winning novel Bel Canto – but my appreciation has deepened over the last five books, a mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

Patchett’s novels are about the time we have available to us and the memories we can fit within the framework of now. These aren’t ‘what if’ scenarios but ‘what can we do with what’s happened’. She once wrote of her own personal experience: ‘we were so in the middle of history that we had no way to understand what we were seeing.’*  Her novels reveal a process of restricted reclamation. That means rejecting a bunch of things that don’t fit – and people, too. The people we can make room for aren’t necessarily our nearest and dearest. That often makes things … awkward.

Jonathan was widowed when he and Daphne met. Weirdly enough, they met in a professional capacity – surgical Jonathan treated Daphne’s dad, Buddy Zabriskie, late in life. Jonathan had two daughters with his first wife. Daphne does her best to get on with her stepchildren but she knows the limitations of the relationship. She sees what they see: ‘You make me sad, was what she was saying. You who weren’t supposed to be here.’ But here she is. They’re dealing with it.

Another brilliant line gives us ‘when you start to wonder about who you’ve hurt in this life, you can easily lose your mind.’ That’s Eddie Triplett advising against retrospective angst. He’s the disrupter of the novel. More than 40 years ago, he was briefly married to Daphne’s mother, Abigail, after she’d divorced Buddy, her girls’ father. In divorcing Eddie, Abigail not only banished him from the family but the publishing house for whom they both worked. The reason was apparently simple. One night, when Daphne was nine and her younger sister was fighting for her life in hospital, Eddie took Daphne – whom he adored and was fiercely adored by in turn – for a drive, and ran the car off the road. He smashed his foot and Daphne’s face was cut – she also had to free herself from the wreckage to seek help in deep snow. Nobody died, as Abigail has always admitted. So why the fierce ejection? Could there be another reason?

After Daphne meets Eddie unexpectedly one day in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in the first pages of the novel, they have to address that reason.

She also has to finally explain that night to Leda, her brilliant sister, and so, alongside the story of Daphne and Eddie’s renewed acquaintance, we revisit the events of January 1980 and ultimately learn the story of a story Eddie told Daphne in the smashed-up car about a horse called Whistler which illustrates the many ways we fail each other and what a truly spectacular – yet almost mythic – thing it is to be capable of offering unequivocal loyalty.

Most of us will never manage that. We might be ‘decent people, smart people’, like the characters in this book, but acts of transcendence are generally elusive.

This dilemma applies to the characters in Tom Lake, Patchett’s previous novel, set during the Coronavirus lockdown where a mother reclaims her family – no mean feat, in the circumstances – and bows to their request to explain her past. It’s true, too, of Commonwealth, Patchett’s glorious seventh novel, which also concerns a moment in the past that shatters the status quo and a reciprocal moment in the present which has its own deep repercussions. But Commonwealth delves and weaves between the decades in a way that Whistler doesn’t. Whistler felt like a slighter novel as I read it – it’s certainly shorter – but the funny thing is, it’s stayed in my mind more vividly than any other Patchett novel I’ve read. Whistler makes fewer promises but to my mind it delivers most assuredly on the pledges it makes.

And actually, if you read Whistler (which I hope you do), you might agree with me that Buddy Zabriskie, though perhaps a failure as a husband and father, manages the transcendental.

While we’re speaking of fathers, I should mention that Daphne and Leda had a third – after Eddie, Abigail married again, an author, and lived with him for forty years, bearing him two sons. Daphne hasn’t ever felt attached to Lucas, but there he is, in her life, anyway, and in her story. And I should also mention that Ann Patchett herself has had three fathers. She wrote about them in an essay called Three Fathers in her essay collection, These Precious Days. She also has an older, surgical husband, and has narrated the audiobook of Whistler. Know that her non-fiction and fiction flow into each other unapologetically. It’s the time she has, right?

I’ve reviewed Ann Patchett’s most recent decade of writing here on Writers Review across various posts. Maybe you’ve been reading alongside me, but if you’ve yet to read her work, perhaps I might suggest a roadmap.

I would start with Commonwealth, and then segue into the essays in These Precious Days.

Then I’d dive into her exotic novels – where she comes as close to ‘what if’ as she dares – Bel Canto and State of Wonder.

Then I’d read The Dutch House.

And then Whistler – and hope you’ll feel as willing as I do to go where she’ll take us next.

Whistler is published by Bloomsbury.

Jon's other reviews of Ann Patchett:

These Precious Days and This is the Story of a Happy Marriage

Commonwealth

The Dutch House

Tom Lake

*From ‘These Precious Days’, These Precious Days by Ann Patchett, Bloomsbury, 2021

Guest review by Nick Manns: THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH LANDSCAPE by W G Hoskins

 

"Once you’ve spent time in Hoskins’ company, you start to interrogate a familiar world in a new way..."

Nick Manns taught English in comprehensive schools in south London and the Midlands for 20 years. He is the author of four novels for young adults, including Control Shift and Dead Negative, and is a founder and director of Dyslexia Lifeline, a company based at De Montfort University, Leicester. 

The stump of an old windmill can be seen a couple of hundred metres from the A43, just outside Easton on the Hill in Northamptonshire. The mill is situated at a high point on the upland that looks down on the Welland valley and its sails would have been turned by winds coming from the west.

The relic is a mile or so north of RAF Wittering, which is marked by the rotating clam-shell radar dish at the end of the runway. The aerodrome, originally constructed for the Royal Flying Corps, dispensed with the acres of arable farmland that would have given the windmill its reason for existing.

This process of picking up signs in the landscape and reconstructing a past world is at the heart of Hoskins’ book. Published in 1955, it expanded the notion of ‘landscape’ from simply an idea of ‘nature’ to include how people have interacted with (and changed) the natural world. In the case of RAF Wittering, that change could have been more than simply retiring an old technology: a Valiant bomber accidentally dropped a thermo-nuclear device onto the runway in the late 1950s.

Hoskins came from a family of Exeter bakers but after studying economics at the University College of South West England, he became a lecturer in the subject at University College Leicester, subsequently Leicester University). His research into local history and articles on ancient farming, deserted medieval villages and so on led (in 1948) to his appointment as head of the newly formed Department of English Local History. He became convinced that visual evidence was vital to understanding the historical landscape.

In the preface to his study, Midland England (1949), he wrote:

‘… the whole of the English landscape is a manuscript written on again and again, a palimpsest with endless discoveries waiting to be made; and one can learn, with sufficient patience, skill and imagination, how to decipher this manuscript and make it yield its hidden meaning.’

The phrase, ‘one can learn’, is inclusive. People don’t have to be academics to ask questions and seek answers, however tentative. And although it might be tempting to rely on the internet to find answers to questions about localities, sometimes those localities raise their own questions.

For example, three miles below the nuclear near miss at Wittering lies the market town of Stamford. It’s small and compact and largely consists of 17th and 18th-century houses. They’re made from the local limestone, weathered to a honey colour. One of the interesting features about the town is the great width of some of the streets. One of them is called Broad Street, and another, Sheepmarket. The town layout, the width of the streets, reflects its medieval past as a major market for sheep and wool. Great herds of sheep would fill the town on market days.

These observations are entirely in keeping with Hoskins. At the end of his book, he writes: ‘towns …ought to be approached for the first time on foot. For only on foot does one detect the subtle rise and fall of ground to which the earliest settlers were so sensitive, or alignments in the town scene that may throw light on some fundamental change of plan: or the names of streets and lanes that set the mind working at once.’

The Making of the English Landscape is, in modern parlance, a ‘mash-up’: it combines different elements that are normally encountered separately. With-it French cultural theorists in the 1960s would have regarded it as a work of bricolage and that Hoskins was a bricoleur. A bricoleur, since you ask, is an odd-job person who uses whatever is at hand to complete a project. A project is usually a problem-solving exercise: why was this village built here? How old is it? Why is the church on the edge of the settlement?

Consequently, once you’ve spent time in Hoskins’ company, you start to interrogate a familiar world in a new way, the book working as a kind of exemplar. He’s at home when commenting on the use of hawthorn to demarcate fields; ruminating on the significance of place-names; considering the bits of pottery found in his back garden. And he’s not afraid to express sympathy for past calamities that would seem strange in the pages of a standard academic work. When reflecting on the many abandoned medieval villages across England, he notes that rural depopulation following the Black Death meant that it was more cost-effective for some landowners to switch from arable (and labour-intensive) farming to pastoral practices. Large, open fields could be parcelled up into smaller units and tenant farmers evicted. Hoskins writes:

‘The village houses were demolished – an easy business, for above their rubble foundations they mostly had mud walls – and men, women and children departed in tears to find a new livelihood elsewhere.’

Easton on the Hill is not a site of dereliction: a compact village of limestone houses that date from the 18th century. Hoskins writes that hill-top villages are ‘suggestive of great antiquity’ where height (working like radar) might allow the early identification of hostile forces, but the oldest buildings here are the Priest’s House (late 15th century) and the charming All Saints Church (12th century). The name, Easton is probably Anglo-Saxon (the ‘-ton’ suffix indicating farm or settlement). So, what attracted the early settlers?

All Saints Church, Easton on the Hill: Les Hull (WikiCommons)

Part of the answer can be found if you park just off the main road, south of the village. Hoskins had emphasised the desirability of walking as an aid to discovery and the wisdom of those words was immediately apparent on the day of my visit. There was a stiff westerly wind blowing across the upland, but Easton lies below the crest of the escarpment, on gradually sloping ground. It is largely sheltered from the elements.

The village is clustered around the junction of Church Street and High Street. There’s a war memorial there now, but it’s probably the site of the village green. The streets themselves are narrow, originally designed for the passage of farm carts. That world is evoked by the sign on one of the houses, The Old Forge.

Google Easton on the Hill and you’ll find it’s recorded in Domesday Book and that Romano-British objects were found in various digs. It’s therefore quite possible that Easton on the Hill replaced an earlier name.

So, what drew the various settlers to this (obviously) desirable site? There’s no clue on Wikipedia, but on the village map, Spring Close pocket park is identified. Walk there, to the very northern edge of the village, and you’ll discover a grassed area and a pond, surrounded by flag irises and ragged robin. A sign warns of Deep Water (and danger to children). Although inconspicuous, this is the spring that explains thousands of years of settlement: the omphalos of the community – the centre of their world.

Hoskins noted the importance of ‘patience, skill and imagination’ as qualities necessary to make sense of a landscape and he went on to say: ‘I am not much interested in surface impressions. The three visible dimensions of a building or landscape are not enough: they may entrance for the moment, but they make no abiding impression on the mind. One needs the fourth dimension of time to give depth to the scene: one wants to know as much as possible about the past life of a place, about its human associations, and to feel the long continuity of human life on that spot before it can make its full impression on the mind.’

The Making of the English Landscape is published by Little Toller Books.

Photographs by Nick Manns

More of Nick's choices:

The Antidote: Happiness for people who can't stand Positive Thinking, by Oliver Burkeman

The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars by Paul Broks

Billy No-Mates by Max Dickins

H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald