Guest review by Ann Pilling: DRIVING SOUTH TO INVERNESS: POSTSCRIPT TO AN ACTIVE LIFE, by Phoebe Caldwell

"A brave, funny and inspired book."

Ann Pilling has written or edited over 40 books for children and has published three collections of poetry. A fourth, Jigsaw, is coming from Shoestring this October. She is married with two sons, six grandchildren, two cats and half a dog. She lives in the Yorkshire Dales which she calls 'the country of my heart', a phrase first used by D H Lawrence whose prose and poetry she greatly admires.

Not long ago Phoebe Caldwell, for 45 years a highly distinguished practitioner who worked, nationwide and abroad, with people on the Autistic Spectrum, decided reluctantly that she could no longer live independently. Now into her eighties she put her Yorkshire home up for sale and downsized to a small flat in a ‘retirement complex’ in nearby Settle. She can still be alone but help is at hand, should she fall, should the plumbing fail, or should the underfloor heating begin to roast the undersides of her feet. Such catastrophes, and the snail’s paced attempts of the ‘management’ to sort them out , are told with a wry mixture of frustration, humour, and sheer disbelief.

Phoebe dislikes the word ‘downsizing’, a euphemism for shrinkage and prefers ‘editing’ where the emphasis is on selection, rather than contraction. Her problem was to condense a library, a museum and an art gallery into two small rooms. When I first visited Phoebe she showed me round. I was moved by their beauty and enchanted by their diversity and their occasional eccentricity. Everything chosen was of significance to her. I recalled William Morris's  ‘Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.’

This book is the product of a richly furnished mind. It ranges widely, from the author’s knowledge of botany, zoology, chemistry to the workings of the brain. She writes with insight and passion about paintings and ceramics, about music, about poetry. Her descriptions of nature are those of a poet, her observations of the majestic limestone landscape which she inhabits are both precise and powerful. She writes of ‘drumlins, like green bubble wrap’, of how ‘Pen-y-Ghent, Ingleborough and Whernside rise from their limestone plateau like yolks sitting on the white of poached eggs.’

Phoebe married early and had five children with her biophysicist husband Peter. She describes his ‘most astonishing eyes, sea green with a pale circle round the edge, like that slither of light trapped under the crest of a breaking wave’. He died young. Half mad with grief she took scissors, sat on their Emperor size mattress and tried to cut it in half. Unsurprisingly her small curved nail scissors were inadequate. Phoebe sold the rambling ruin they had lived in, and moved to a small cottage and went back to work. She has been working ever since.

What do the old do all day, she asks, apart from continually looking for their glasses? Line-dancing, quizzes, craft-work, all feel to her ‘like colouring books for children, to keep them quiet on a car journey’. But she is realistic. ‘The struggle to keep the mind going is balanced precariously against inertia and the temptation to retire to bed and read thrillers.’ What she longs for is ‘humour, conversation, empathy, and psychological awareness’.

Phoebe has a religious faith. Life keeps posing unanswered questions. To someone whose working life has been given addressing the physical disorientation and emotional isolation experienced by people on the autistic spectrum, there must be so many. She writes of meditation, of the experience of being in ‘Presence’. There may be other kinds of mindfulness, she says, ‘but I don’t care, since it works for me and empowers my life and helps me to help others.’

This is a brave, funny and inspired book. Read it.

Driving South to Inverness is published by Pavilion Books.

THE FACTS OF LIFE by Paula Knight, reviewed by Linda Newbery

"The charm, skill and wit of the drawings, recalling Posy Simmonds, and the cleverness and variety of page design, fully involve the reader in a tale that is very personal but never self-pitying."

Linda Newbery won the Costa Children's Book Prize with Set in Stone, a young adult novel set in Sussex in the late 19th Century. She is the editor of Writers Review.

I don’t have children, and am sometimes expected to account for that to inquisitive strangers. “Oh? Is that from choice, or …?” is a frequent response to what seems to be taken as an admission, rather than a statement, of my childless state. These casual questioners seem unaware that that innocuous “or … ?” might possibly plumb depths of grief or loss (though not in my case) which no stranger has any right to probe. As for the idea of choosing not to have children … such a decision is often viewed as peculiar or selfish. Last year, indiscreet remarks from Andrea Leadsom, then a contender for the Conservative party leadership, prompted explanations from her rival Theresa May about why she’s childless: explanations which no male politician would ever be required to give. Yes, we’re in the 21^st Century (where, as Paula Knight points out, the world hardly needs more inhabitants) but still it seems that women are required to be wives and mothers by default; or, if not, to have some good excuse ready for those demanding to know why not. 

The Facts of Life confronts this head on. I met Paula years ago on an Arvon course and have tracked her progress since as a successful illustrator of children’s books.  This is a new departure: a memoir told and shown in versatile comic-strip form. Referring to herself as ‘Polly’, though it’s clearly her own experience she draws on, Paula traces her early and adult years, from her awareness of bodily functions and sex, on through career opportunities, relationships and friends’ pregnancies (exclamations and congratulations followed swiftly by a sense of inadequacy – this shown so neatly in talking heads and speech balloons, no commentary needed) to conception, loss and finally resignation and adaptation. It’s striking how little the Swinging Sixties and the arrival of the contraceptive pill affected the advice given to teenage girls in the 1970s: ‘Polly’, born in 1969, got from parents and teachers the clear expectation that marriage and motherhood were to be her destiny.

Post-viral fatigue syndrome and the break-up of a relationship take Polly into her thirties, when a new man, Jack, offers a new chance. Flexible page layouts animate her dilemma. While an hourglass trickles down the centre of one page, two Pollys face each other from either side: one a paint-spattered artist, the other smugly pregnant, her baby-bulge counterpointing the inward curve of the glass.  On another page, a Janus-headed Polly looks left and right at the pros and cons of being a mother. “’Sometime later’ was here now … “  While examinations and tests continue, a well-meaning acquaintance tells her, “You’ll never know love quite like it unless you have children,“ – a familiar statement that pushes other kinds of love into second or third place. The excitement of conception is followed swiftly by miscarriage, more than once, and we accompany Polly as she cocoons herself against the platitudes offered so kindly by friends. The graphic approach works brilliantly here, as we see her assaulted by music, noise, words and visions. Finally, when the barrage of tests and the whirlwind of expectation and disappointment become too much, Polly and her very supportive Jack begin to examine their future without children.

In one drawing a crack in the wall behind two talking heads widens and splits as Polly counters the assumptions of a former friend preoccupied with childcare. Facing a campaign poster image of the clichéd ‘hardworking families’ beloved of politicians, Polly reflects, “As a person without kids, you must prepare to be effaced in a society where ‘family’ means ‘children’.” But compensations are to be found in the natural world and in new friendships – and, self-evidently, in art. The decision not to persevere is not an ending, but the start of new explorations and a reassessment of values.

There’s quite detailed medical information throughout, but also humour and a light touch. In one drawing, a deceased Polly sits upright in her wicker coffin to ask, “Um, do you have ‘Farewell Regality’ by Rachel Unthank and the Winterset?” If she doesn’t have children, who will be around in her old age to take care of such things? The charm, skill and wit of the drawings, recalling Posy Simmonds, and the cleverness and variety of page design, fully involve the reader in a tale that is very personal but never self-pitying. This is a tricky balance to strike, and Paula Knight is to be congratulated for producing a book which will be of particular value and comfort to people of both genders whose experience is similar to Polly’s and Jack’s, but should also have wider appeal for its insight into the lives of others and for its exploration into the big questions of life: why are we here? What difference can we make in the world? 

The Facts of Life is published by Myriad Editions.