Guest review by Ignaty Dyakov-Richmond: FROM GAS STREET TO THE GANGES by Simon Wilcox

"This is not an ordinary local history book, albeit written by a professional journalist with a degree in History. This is more like The Thousand and One Nights ..."

Ignaty Dyakov-Richmond wears several hats (apart from a deer-stalker and a faux-fur Russian hat). A Chartered Linguist, he has authored a series of unconventional Russian and ELT textbooks, which help students learn grammar and vocabulary through fun-to-read detective stories. They are now used at universities and schools all over the world, US, UK and France being the biggest markets. Ignaty is currently on the Management Committee of the Society of Authors, where he also chairs the Educational Writers Group.

In recent years, after he qualified as a life coach and Ayurvedic consultant, he has set up a health and wellbeing coaching practice in the Midlands. He works on a one-to-one basis, delivers talks and workshops and writes articles on a holistic approach to health, complementary therapies and coaching methods. More information can be found on www.lifesensei.uk or on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/lifesenseiuk/

In his spare time, he loves writing and reading short stories, walking, vegan cooking and a bit of DIY.

I must admit this wouldn’t be a book I would look for in bookstores; in fact, I wouldn’t seek to search books on this topic, not at this stage in my life. It was just that at a chance authors’ meet-up in a cafe I saw Simon Wilcox giving a copy of this book to someone else. I had finished conversing with a fellow writer and thus had a moment to look around and try to catch what others were talking about; that’s when I spotted the first words in the title, From Gas Street to the Ganges, and the cover. The cover did it for me: two pictures - one of warehouses along the canal and the other of a splendid, yet clearly vacant Oriental palace on a river bank. I knew then that I wanted to learn about the connection, the reason why these two pictures were placed next to each other.

This is not an ordinary local history book, albeit written by a professional journalist with a degree in History. This isn’t a Wikipedia-style collection of facts, albeit it has lots of facts and lots of references, methodically noted. This is more like The Thousand and One Nights - an easy-to-read collection of stories, stories which once happened but of which we might not have known all the details if not for the research coupled with the imagination and experience of the author. These stories always start in Birmingham and then take us on journeys to far-away countries. We meet protagonists, like James Chance of glass-manufacturer Chance Brothers, John Sumner of Typhoo Teas, or indeed Ron Wilcox, journalist and Simon’s father. We follow them to India, Sri Lanka, or Australia; we can almost see these places with their eyes, through the imaginative writing of Simon Wilcox. I find this is the best way to learn history - through personal history. Through emotions you might understand and remember the past better.

The book starts with a brief insight into Simon Wilcox’s biography, his childhood in Birmingham and then his escape into the open world, then coming back to see his birthplace decades later. I cannot deny that I was relieved to learn that I wasn’t the only one who hadn’t understood and who had disliked Birmingham. My wife, who lived in Harborne, Birmingham, when we met four years ago, says to everyone that one of my first questions on our first date was, ‘Why on Earth do you live in Birmingham? Let’s get out of here!’ I am glad that having now read Simon’s book I understand the place better and look forward to coming back there and exploring it further, checking on all those places I have now read about.

We then proceed to learn about various prominent people and buildings in the city and the connections they have with other countries within the Commonwealth. Each chapter is dedicated to one country or territory: from Sri Lanka, to India, to South Africa, to Gibraltar. I like how the author weaved in his father’s story and journey to Australia towards the end of the book, almost as if all the research he’d done led him to appreciate his family history more and got him back to his roots – a great circle starting from himself and then bringing him to the generation before him.

Was there anything of note to improve? Well, we all know that publishers these days have to cut down on everything to ensure that a book can still be priced attractively so I can only feel for the time-pressured editor as some paragraphs seemed disjointed from others which disrupted the flow of the text at times. There is only so much that even the most thorough author can notice in their own writing and that’s why publishing a book has always been a team effort. Yet overall, it is a solid work based on good research that mostly reads very smoothly and with ease.

I would also like to learn more about social history and lives of ordinary people in Birmingham and their families in far away lands, so perhaps the second tome would be great to have (no pressure!).

Overall, I liked From Gas Street to the Ganges very much and would definitely have it in mind later this year when the Midlands will be hosting the Commonwealth Games and I might be asked for reading recommendations.

Did I judge this book by its cover? To a degree perhaps, as every time I was ready to read from it, I would spend a few moments looking at the photos and feel how I was transported deep into the past and far into the distance, a good feeling. So yes, I am as partial to the cover as I am to the title, and yet there is so much more inside the book too which makes it a good and educating read.

From Gas Street to the Ganges is published by The History Press.

Guest review by Elen Caldecott: HIDDEN NATURE by Alys Fowler

"It is the story of someone yearning for adventure, yearning for the feeling of being alive and active, but doing so within five miles of their own home."

Elen Caldecott is a writer for young people. She also teaches creative writing in university and community settings. Her latest book, The Short Knife, is an historical drama set during the collapse of the Roman Empire in Britain. It will be published in July 2020 by Andersen Press.

I had decided to write about Hidden Nature before Covid and our state of suspended animation which came with it. But, on re-reading it for this blog, I was struck by its relevance, especially as lockdown lifts and we take small steps towards imagining what normal life might be.

Is this memoir, Alys Fowler writes of her decision to paddle Birmingham’s canal-ways in an inflatable dinghy. She does this in small bursts, over evenings and weekends, catching the bus, or cycling to the next stage of the journey. It is the story of someone yearning for adventure, yearning for the feeling of being alive and active, but doing so within five miles of their own home. It is a memoir in which the plants and animals of the canals and towpaths are companions and friends. They offer reassurance and familiarity to Fowler at a time in her own life when she is coming to terms with her own ‘hidden nature’ as she questions, and finally acts upon, her own sexuality. She emerges from her own state of suspended animation and she does so by meticulous exploration of her own back yard.

I was initially drawn to the memoir as Birmingham is close to my heart. I was an undergraduate there an eternity ago. Local lore had it that Birmingham has more canals than Venice and, while I was a student, many of the canals were undergoing gentrification, acquiring bars and restaurants where there had formally been abandoned warehouses and small-scale industries.

Fowler, who many will know as a gardening writer for broadsheet newspapers, took me on a tour of those familiar paths, but also gave me an education. She is so knowledgeable about the plants and wildlife she sees, and she shares this knowledge in the way friends might share gossip. Buddleia, for example, gets its own few pages. It was, Fowler tells us, an ornamental introduction to the UK that broke free of its garden confines after the Second World War. The urban bomb-sites replicated the exposed limestone of its natural habitat, and the slipstreams of railway embankments encouraged its dispersal until it became ubiquitous. She passes so many of these common, weed-ish, plants as she paddles her dinghy – first ineptly, later with a bit more ept – and she has something wonderful to tell us about each one.

Meanwhile, in the background, her life is quietly imploding. We hear about her husband, his long-term illness and the vicissitudes of caring for him. We hear about the worry of work and moving to a new city. We hear about a growing friendship with someone who will come to be crucial. But none of these threads are the point of this book. Rather, the book shows rather than tells us how the natural world can help to make the Big Problems of Life become a little smaller, a little more manageable.

There is a degree of tension in her descriptions of the people she meets, as opposed to the non-human canal life. Many of the people fishing, barbecuing, smoking, lollygagging about in the liminal spaces of the city waterways, are drawn with a very broad brush. There are some assumptions made about their lives, which aren’t really justified by the brief conversations she reports having with them. But, when Fowler speaks about the joy, the peace and the wisdom to be had by looking for small adventures, close to home, this book is superb.

Hidden Nature is published by Hodder and Stoughton.

Independent Bookseller feature No.2: Tamsin Rosewell and Judy Brooks of KENILWORTH BOOKS choose THE TRICK TO TIME by Kit de Waal

Kenilworth Books is a 50-year-old independent bookshop that buzzes with activity and conversation. It is situated in an historic town in Warwickshire, almost exactly in the middle of the country. This extremely busy, thriving little bookshop is known for its vibrant window displays – which are often requested by publishers up to a year in advance. The bookshop has also gained a reputation for its fearlessly outspoken, challenging blogs; these explore book industry issues in detail, from the effects of discounting on authors’ royalties, to the commercialisation of World Book Day, the exclusion of smaller publishers from industry news and awards, and the commercial devaluation of books. The team at Kenilworth Books also works closely with the many local schools and libraries in Warwickshire and in the City of Coventry, supplying books for school and library shelves.

Connecting the personal and the political in her wonderful 2016 novel My Name is Leon resulted in a bestseller, and many well-deserved accolades, for Kit de Waal. My Name is Leon’s political backdrop was the London riots of 2011, and the events of her new novel, The Trick to Time - which has already attracted the attention of the 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction – are interrupted and shaped by the IRA pub bombings in Birmingham in 1974. Kit de Waal’s own rich, mixed Irish-Caribbean heritage makes her well-placed to both document and comment on the effects of the attacks on Birmingham’s Irish community, as the shock-waves ripple and swell through families and across entire lifetimes.

My Name is Leon and The Trick to Time are very different novels; but in both, Kit de Waal takes an oblique look at an ever-shifting world by focusing on the tiny lives of her characters.

In an unnamed seaside town, on the eve of her 60th birthday, we meet Mona. Her life is quiet, a little mundane perhaps – and from the moment we meet her she seems not unhappy exactly, but restless, sleepless and unfulfilled. From its gentle, humdrum start the story creeps up on us, uninvited and discomforting. Mona has built herself a business selling handmade dolls; each child’s body is made from specially selected hand-turned wood – oak for one beautiful child, pine for a small wisp of a child; all sanded to a fine, silky finish. The clothes are hand-stitched from carefully-selected fabrics picked up in the town’s charity shops: a bit of lace trim taken from an old blouse, a pretty fabric from a discarded skirt. When quiet women turn up, she says that they need only bring her a shawl, a blanket, anything they like – and to tell her the weight of the child. The dolls hint at the tragedy in her own past. Guided by Kit de Waal’s elegant writing, we travel back and forth in time with Mona, and slowly the past and the present become the same thing. We see Mona as a child, brought up in Ireland by a caring father, but bored by the solitude forced on her by her mother’s lingering illness. He imparts the advice, as her mother is dying, that ‘there’s a trick to time – you can make it expand or you can make it contract. Make it shorter or make it longer’.

Mona, however, fails to understand the significance of her father’s words at that time. She makes the exciting move to Birmingham, where she meets the love of her life, the delightful, confident and sweet-natured William. After a blast of love at first sight, a whirlwind romance and a joyful wedding, the couple settle down to build their own family.

There is always love, but there is also always politics, hatred and brutality. The violent intrusion of the IRA’s bombings are the story - and at the same time they interrupt the story. But that is the reality of the political world. It defines us, even when we believe that great events have nothing to do with our little lives.

These are small lives, but it is the small things that enable us to see the landscape more clearly. Kit de Waal deftly draws the characters: the gossipy hairdresser, the slow and sulky teenage assistant, the friend who organises a surprise party, the over-friendly café owner – and we care about them all. This small world is complex though; good and bad shift around, allies and enemies swap places and simple situations suddenly seem more complicated. Mona belongs in her world, she moved to the thriving, cosmopolitan Birmingham with great hope and excitement - but she is also an immigrant. Her and William’s love for each other and hope for their future is contrasted with the hate and destruction that follows the bombings. We see through the life of Mona how the Irish are treated in the wake of the bombings; the blatant racism of the cab drivers, even the midwives, and the anger unleashed on them by the ignorant English who seek revenge on anyone with an Irish accent. The Trick to Time is set both in our own time and in the 1970s – although the events of 45 years ago seem to be occurring today too as external political events unleash blind, uninformed hatred towards an immigrant community. A timely reminder perhaps, or just one of the deeply ingrained failings of the human race?

The Trick to Time is published by Viking