MarysLibrary

My Slug Farm

My yard is very, very shady. What they call "dry shade," which means it is shaded by something like a garage that does not allow any sun at all to filter through. What isn't dry shade is under a 100-year-old maple tree. I love that tree and so does everyone who gets a look at it, especially if they sit on our patio and look up into it. But it 1) provides heavy shade, 2) it depletes nutrients from the soil, and 3) it sucks up much of the available water. It also drops a varying array of matter from helicopters to spring blossoms to other mysterious thingies, but that just looks messy and isn't a problem for growing anything.

The problems in my yard are therefore really limiting and so I grow almost nothing but a little moss under the tree, which means in most of the back yard. Not even weeds. But there are places where I can grow a hosta or two. Fortunately I really love hostas and over the years I've acquired a dozen or so "specimens," that is, fancy, unusual, (expensive) single plants.

You will see above on the left what remains of a set of three lovely plants. One was called Patriot and was mostly green with white edges. Another was called Fire and Ice, a particularly beautiful plant that was mostly white with a green edge. This third one above has/had an interestingly shaped leaf. I got all three from White Flower Farm, whose hostas, including Patriot and Fire and Ice, you can see here. I say was and had because Patriot and Fire and Ice, which were three years old, two of those years spent in my yard, were eaten to the ground by slugs. As you can see from the photo I am going to lose the third plant this year.

Above on the right is a large pot with a Japanese colt's foot plant and four hostas. You can see the mess Limax maximus has done to those plants. To the lower left is damage done to a regular (dare I say garden variety?) hosta. Most of my hostas have this kind of damage with only three or four large ones in a shape that could be described as healthy.

I have tried spreading broken egg shells, diatomacious earth, and a product called Sluggo, and I've put out many cat food cans of beer. (Our grocery list commonly has on it "gardening beer.") Only the beer works, and as you can see, it doesn't work well enough to save my plants. If you look closely in the photo at the top you can see a couple of medium-sized L maximus who have drowned in the beer overnight. Every morning I harvest from three to as many as nine medium to large slugs, some of them as long as 8 or 9 inches.You can see them in their full beauty by Googling Leopard slugs and on Wikipedia. There is a piece on the sex life of this creature on the Ever So Strange blog, but be warned, it isn't pretty.

If only I could think of a way to run an engine on slug carcases or find a market for the slimy little snail-wannabes. Meanwhile, any suggestions for getting rid of them will be gratefully received. (I'm about to try wood ashes.)

Cluny Brown by Margery Sharp

Cluny Brown is a young girl who has been brought up by her uncle, Mr Porritt, a plumber. It is 1938 and Cluny represents the very soul of Change. She is what the future will be, and for a lot of people in her world the future is threatening. This novel about Cluny's finding her way is a combination of enchanting and unsettling.

I found Margery Sharp entirely by accident. By stupidity, really. Some 30 years ago I was in a used bookstore in Alexandria, Virginia, looking for something by that woman who wrote The Prime of Miss Jean Brody, Muriel something. And there, under S, was Margery Sharp. That's it! I must have had the first name wrong. And so I bought Britannia Mews, took it home, and fell in love with an author whom I found delightful, although by then I realized she was not Muriel Spark.

Who was Margery Sharp? There aren't a lot of answers, although she wrote more than 25 adult novels and about 15 books for children. She was born in 1905 and died in 1991 and was married to an aircraft engineer. Most of her books are out of print, but an article in The Independent about neglected authors reports that there is a stirring of interest in her work, demonstrated by a Virago reprint of her novel, The Eye of Love. She lived at Albany and she almost became an artist in her youth instead of a writer. There is more about her here.

From the moment this book begins with Cluny answering a call for a plumber to unblock a drain, until it ends on the Queen Mary, the reader is never quite sure what is about to happen, but is reassured that she will like it whatever it is. As one Goodreads reviewer said, "If Henry James had a sense of humor . . ." That's going a bit far, but the author is observant and wryly describes things not everyone can see.

Mr Porritt becomes alarmed when his niece takes herself to tea at the Ritz. People like her don't go to the Ritz to tea, says her uncle.

To know one's place was to Arnold Porritt the basis of all civilized, all rational life: keep to your class, and you couldn't go wrong. A good plumber, backed by his Union, could look a Duke in the eye; and a good dustman, backed by his Union, could look Mr Porritt in the eye. Dukes of course had no Union, and it was Mr Porritt's impression that they were lying pretty low.

But Cluny doesn't understand. She is on the verge of getting into serious trouble when her uncle and his sister find her a place "in service." Cluny is very tall and in the late 1930s when young men were too restless to work as footmen the very tall maid is a coveted commodity. Off she goes to Carmel Friars where Lady Carmel is pleased to have her even though she is entirely untrained.

This is not the life Cluny imagined for herself. But as she travels down to Carmel she restlessly walks from car to car on the train and introduces herself to a nervous dog named Roderick in the luggage car. Cluny is crazy about dogs and has always wanted one of her own. When she arrives and the dog's owner, Colonel Duff-Graham from the next estate over from Carmel Friars, is grateful to her for calming his dog and invites her to take the dog for walks on her afternoons off. This shocks the housekeeper, Mrs Maile. She asks Cluny what she is going to do on her afternoon off. Cluny says she is going to the Colonel's.

"The Colonel's?" repeated Mrs Maile blankly

"Colonel Duff-Graham's. To see Roderick," explained Cluny.

Mrs Maile's eyebrows rose. . . . Roderick sounded suspiciously like a chauffeur. . . .

"I love him!" added Cluny enthusiastically.

Mrs Maile asked no more. She felt it quite possible that if she asked who, Cluny might reply not "Roderick," but "The Colonel" and the the idea was altogether too unnerving to pursue.

In her distress of mind the housekeeper . . . remembered some of Mr Andrew's sayings . . . about cracks in civilization, the breaking-up of society, world revolution, the decay of the West; and for the first time, their meaning struck home.

Mr Andrew is the son of the household who has recently brought home Mr Belinski, a pole who he believes is on the run from the Nazis. (He isn't.) The girl Andrew loves, Betty Cream, is also visiting, and the predictable love triangle develops with a little scene from French farce enacted just before Mr Belinski is to leave. All of this elicits a warm smile from the reader if not actual guffaws.

But in the end Cluny Brown finds herself and her place (which is not as a tall maid serving dinner in place of a footman) and the book finishes as well as any story taking place on the eve of World War II can end for a reader who knows what is to come for the characters. (Cluny gets her own dog.)

2012  No 137

Excellent Women

The Excellent Women of Barbara Pym's novel of that name are the middle-aged Church of England spinsters who make up the altar guild, who run the Christmas bazaar and the summer fete, and who dote on young curates. They line up speakers for the Episcopal Church Women lectures (or the English equivalent) and they lead the Girl Scout troops. Without them the church of the 1950s, when this book was published, would not run smoothly.

Belinda and Harriet of Some Tame Gazelle are typical of the excellent women of the rural parish; those characters are based on Barbara Pym and her sister Hilary, if you can say a book written twenty years before the events take place is "based on" them. In this second published Pym novel we meet some excellent women who come from a city church, including the protagonist, Miss Mildred Lathbury.

As in most of Pym's novels, not much really happens in Excellent Women. Miss Lathbury, who works part time for an organization that aide aged and distressed gentlewomen, is a pillar of her church and very good friends with the sister of the unmarried vicar, Julian Malory. Mildred has no expectations of Julian, but when the Malorys decide to rent their spare room and Julian becomes involved with the widow who moves in there, Mildred realizes that she did have one expectation: that Julian would not marry.

But she has other things to worry about. New neighbors have moved into her building, Helen Napier and her husband, Rockingham. He has been away in the armed service and she has been deeply engrossed in a paper she is writing with another anthropologist, Mr Bone (can't remember his first name.) When Helen decides to leave Rocky, Mildred is perplexed. These people are nothing like the excellent women she is used to.

I'm re-reading these Pym novels with the otherlit subgroup of my online Trollope group and it is enlightening to read old favorites with a group of astute critics. They have brought to my attention so much that I never noticed before. Also, reading the novels of an author in order and in quick succession is rewarding, and, it turns out, especially those of Barbara Pym.

Still Mopping Up 2011

A handful of books that I read in 2011 never made their way to my blog. Let's face it, I'm unlikely to write reviews of them at this late date so I'm going to list some of them here and get them off my pending list.

Duplicate Death by Georgette Heyer. I really liked this mystery and indeed I liked the other Heyer mysteries I've read, which is most of them. Opinions on her crime fiction vary from raves to pans. You need to read her Inspector Hannasyde and then Inspector Hemingway stories, as well as the stand-alone, Why Shoot a Butler? and make up your own mind.

The View from Here by Deborah Mckinlay. This is not chic lit, not exactly. It tells an interesting and sometimes absorbing story about a woman who in her youth got involved with another woman's husband. The results were sobering. A good but not great book. I will be on the lookout for further novels by this author, known previously for her non-fiction advice books for women.

The Field Guide by Holly Black and Tony DeTerlizzi. This first in the children's fantasy series, The Spiderwick Chronicles, is clever and amusing. It was recommended to me by a children's librarian who said the children love it. I didn't, but it's outside my genre circle so that isn't surprising.

Killing Lincoln by Bill O'Reilly is a good introduction to the history of the Lincoln assassination. (Reports that it is filled with errors are spurious; it is not.) It would probably be interesting to a young person unfamiliar with the story, however, rathern than to an adult.

I thought The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst is terrific. It takes place pre-World War One and is old-fashioned in both plot and style. Reviews were mixed and there were some sharp criticisms. Hollinghurst won the Booker in 2004 for The Line of Beauty. That book, which the critics were nearly unanimous in praising I didn't like at all. Make of that what you will.

The Breaking Point by Mary Roberts Rinehart. I read this book in less than two days. I normally like Mary Roberts Rinehard novels/mysteries. I remember nothing about this book. No trace of the plot remains in my memory. I suppose that's a good thing as it means I can re-read the book and it will be fresh and new for me.

 2011  Nos 200-206

Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor

Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor is the first of the Stephanie Barron mysteries in which Jane Austen is the amateur detective. This book was published in 1986 and there are now 11 of them, the last of which was published last year. One hopes there will be at least as many more. The author is Francine Matthews (Stephanie is a pseudonym), who was born in 1963 so one can hope she has many more years to write for us, unlike poor Jane.

This mystery is in the form of a journal, with occasional letters to Cassandra thrown in. (So that's where some of those missing letters went!) Jane is at Scargrave Manor to visit a friend, Isobel, now Lady Scargrave. They met a year earlier, 1801, in Bath where Jane is now living. Isobel had just arrived in England from Barbadoes where she grew up. Now, a few days returned from her wedding trip, Isobel has asked her friend for a long visit.

Shortly after Jane arrives Lord Scargrave gives a ball to celebrate his wedding to Isobel. But he takes violently ill that night and is dead by morning. Shocking, but he was known to have digestive problems, and the local doctor, while puzzled at the suddenness of this death, attributes it to an acute gastric attack brought on by unwise overindulgence.

The next day, however, Isobel receives an anonymous note accusing her and her lover of killing her husband, a note she suspects her maid, Marguerite has sent. She asks Jane what to do and Jane recommends that they send for the magistrate, Sir William Reynolds, an old friend of Jane's family. He, too receives an anonymous note accusing the countess and her lover of murder. The ensuing investigation, including exhumation, determines that Lord Scargrave was indeed, murdered, having been given a great many violently poisonous Barbadoes nuts.

Another death, an inquest, and the finding is murder, perpetrated by Isobel and the heir, Lord Fitzroy Payne (as he was before becoming the new Lord Scargrave at the death of his uncle, Isobel's husband.) The scene moves to London where the two await trial in the House of Lords. Jane is determined to discover the truth about these terrible crimes and save Isobel from the gallows. Jane, and the reader, must question everything said by everybody except Jane herself. One wades knee-deep through red herrings.

A rousing start to a fine series. On to the second book tomorrow.

An Impartial Witness by Charles Todd

Charles Todd is (are?) a mother and son who have been writing a series of mysteries since 1996. Their detective, Ian Rutledge, has never recovered from the trauma of the Great War and his guilt takes the form of the voice of a man he ordered shot for cowardice. It is, of course, his own mind speaking to him, but as the voice comes up with things that Todd is not aware of in his conscious mind he finds this haunting useful. Wonderful books and highly recomended, not just by me.

Well, in 2009 Todd began a second series about which I was initially sceptical as it seemed to be too much like the Ian Rutledge mysteries. It features Bess Crawford, a nurse, and happens during the war rather than after. Turns out I was very wrong and this second series may be just marginally better than the first. You will have to read a book or two from each and figure that out for yourself. (I know, I sound like a drug dealer, and I fear you will respond similarly.)

This second Bess Crawford mystery, An Impartial Witness, begins with Bess accompanying some wounded soldiers, including a badly burned pilot, to an English nursing home. She is given a bit of leave afterwards so she takes a train to London. As she gets off her train she sees a couple parting as the soldier is preparing to board the train for Portsmouth. She is stopped in her tracks when she sees the woman.

It is the wife of the badly burned pilot. She knows the woman's face very well indeed as the pilot has had her photo with him throughout his ordeal in the stations and hospitals of France. Bess would know her anywhere. But something is wrong with the body language. The woman is obviously wretched, sobbing and clinging to the officer, begging him for something. He is staring off into the distance, his hands clenched, shaking his head, no. He quickly kisses her on the cheek and boards the train as it leaves the station. The woman runs up the stairs and out into the rain and disappears before Bess can catch her.

Bess forgets about the incident but a few weeks later, back in France, she comes across an English newspaper reporting that the woman was murdered the night after Bess saw her. Anyone with any information, anyone who had seen the woman that day, is asked to talk to Scotland Yard. Bess writes to the Yard and in return is given leave to visit the detective in charge of the investigation in person.

Bess is a trained nurse and with her honed skills of observation she is an excellent and impartial witness. The detective tells her the woman was three months pregnant and a little counting back makes it obvious that her husband couldn't be the father of her child. It becomes imperative that the police find the soldier she was talking to the day Bess saw her in Waterloo Station. The burned pilot, learning that his wife is dead, kills himself. Since Bess again has a little leave she arranges to visit the family of the pilot and looks about her for the soldier she saw on the station platform.

Scotland Yard asks her to look at some photos to attempt to identify the man, and she shares with the inspector in charge some other information she has picked up. She meets a charming officer with a badly injured shoulder, the vicious sister of the dead woman, and the sister of the dead man. This woman is trying as hard as Bess to figure out who killed her sister-in-law.

Her father's sargeant-major, Simon Brandon, again assists Bess in her quest, while trying to discourage her more reckless forays into criminal investigation. We learn in this second book that Simon is half her father's age and enough older than Bess to have known her as a child. I couldn't help wondering if we had a Mr Knightly character here, but that is not particularly developed, only hinted at.

It's touch and go but Bess is able to identify the murderer at the last moment. There are a couple of scenes late in the book where Bess is apparently in trouble and may be attacked by the murderer, but they are short and she comes out ok. (I'm not giving a whole lot away telling you that as these are essentially cozies.) This was a complicated plot but did not resort to multiple murders, not exactly, in order to torque up the suspense. Bess is one of the most likeable protagonists I've encountered in a while.

2012  No 134

Maps

Wilhelm's dad was a driver in the US Army Air Corps during World War II and he was stationed at Hampton Court. Today he sent me the maps he was issued back then and I've had a lovely time perusing them. They are a little fragile at the folds but in suprisingly good shape for something older than I am.

After D-Day Corporal Kenneth I Drew was assigned to France and he tells wonderful stories of the places he went and the people he met. He was very lucky and we are very grateful that he was a mechanic and was assigned to duty behind the lines.

Methods of Discovery

The Pages Turned blog has picked up a story from theguardian called New Reads: Methods of Discovery. Apparently "discovery" is a hot topic in the book world, with authors and publishers trying to monitor the new ways readers are finding out about books. The author of theguardian piece, Anna Baddeley, found her most recent books browsing in a public library then moving on to a book mentioned in the library book. She stole one from a friend ( ! ), read about one in the newspaper, and picked up a book that was hanging about the house.

So how did I happen to read the last five books I've been reading?

The Time in Between was a recommendation from a friend. She used to live in Spain and has many friends there and apparently they are all reading this book. It's on international best seller lists. It's a five-star book.

Ancient Greece by Anne Pearson is a children's book I found while browsing on the shelves in the library. It's a Dorling Kindersley book with many photos and I picked it up to supplement of my reading of Will Durant's The Life of Greece.

I've have the Durant books collectively called The Story of Civilization for a long time and have read the first few years ago. For reasons too complicated to explain here I started re-reading the series a few months ago and I'm now on the book about Greece.

I've just started reading Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez because the 22nd Avenue Book Club picked it for our September book. We chose that book in the usual sloppy way we do these things in our book club. Jennifer opened 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die at random and we considered the title on that page.

The first book she found was Zola's Germinal, but we didn't think we could take that so she tried again. I don't remember the second book but it was another did so she tried a third time and Garcia Marquez' book seemed like a good choice, in part because Maria loves the movie and we read almost exclusively books that have been made into movies.

I'm reading The Years with Ross by James Thurber because I mentioned it in my own blog and was reminded how much I enjoyed it 40 years ago and decided to re-read it.

Finally, I read Esprit de Corps because Jennifer (again) was visiting Sunday and we got talking about humor and Wilhelm mentioned the Durrell books and went to his office to get our copies. We lent the single-volume collection to Jennifer and I started in on Esprit de Corps.

Esprit de Corps Redux

When I was talking about this book yesterday I really should have mentioned a couple of other scenes in the book that I found entertaining.

There was, for example, the time the case containing the bishop's crook got mixed up with the case carrying the brigadier's Purdy. The reactions at both the baptism and the shoot were not positive.

And there was the French New Year's Eve party when the butler replaced the saki in the bottles of the Japanese ambassaror and his wife with bad Scotch whisky. The couple chose that night to dance the Viennese waltz but they got a few bars ahead of the orchestra, which tried to catch up with them. They danced ever faster and so the orchestra played faster. Not a good idea as it turned out.

But the most affecting of Antrobus' stories was the night the British gave a party on a raft made up of logs stapled together. Somehow (the naval attache was suspected but nothing was ever proven) the raft came away from the shore and the party found itself floating down the Sava to its confluence with the Danube where a whirlpool awaited them.

This took them past Belgrade Castle where the commander, Comrade Pithecanthropus Popovic, had been warned by a keen-eyed infantry observer that "a large armed man-of-war full of Czech paratroops in dinner jackets and ball-dresses" was bearing down on the city." Popovic, picturing himself being awarded the Titototalitarian Medal of Honor with frogging, rolled out the castle's gun, left behind by departing Visigoths.

You'll need to read the book to find out how that one turned out.

Esprit de Corps

Where do I begin? Esprit de Corps, a short (89 pages) collection of stories about life in the Foreign Office, especially as lived in the Balkans, is one of the funniest I've encountered, and I've encountered James Thurber, P G Wodehouse, Saki, and many others. It is the first of three little books collectively called Antrobus Complete. It is almost impossible to believe the author of the Alexandria Quartet (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea)j which is so dismal I've been unable to get through even the first of the books, could have written these lively, sardonic, ironic, and ludicrously hilarious stories.

These stories of British diplomats, some with more diplomatic skills than others, although preposterous and farcical, have enough underlying truth to make them less unbelievable than at first glance, if no less droll. For example, the first story, The Ghost Train, like most of these tales, is told to the narrator by his friend and colleague, Antrobus:

Every nation has its particular idee fixe. For Yugoslavs it is trains. . . . You twig this the minute you alight from the Orient Express at Belgrade because there is something queer about the station building itself. It leans to one side. . . . Moreover there are several distinct sets of ruts in the concrete of the platform which are highly suggestive. . . . Apparently every fifteenth train or so leaps the buffers, grinds across the Freight Section, and buries itself in the booking office. . . . Everyone is proud of this particular idiosyncracy. It is part of the Serbian way of life.

Knowing this, Antrobus and his colleagues are concerned when they are tipped off that the entire Diplomatic Service are to be transported to Zagreb on an overnight train called The Liberation-Celebration Machine. But no further information is forthcoming. "A veil of secrecy (one of the seven veils of Communist diplomacy) was drawn over the subject."

They are seen off by representatives of Yugoslavian heavy industry, "who looked nearly as heavy as their industry." As they set off they realize that the second coach is tilted at a 30-degree angle. "It was clear that the Yugoslav heavy industry had mislaid its spirit-level while it was under construction."

The engine was a very old one. . . . Its gaping furnace was white hot, . . . being passionately fed by some very hairy men in cloth caps who looked like Dostoevsky's publishers. The American ambassador was so overcome that he spent the night singing Nearer my God To Thee. Some said that he had had the forethought to take a case of rye into his compartment with him.

At two in the morning there was a ghastly rending noise as we entered the station of Slopsy Blob. The Hanging Coach somehow got itself engaged with the tin dado which ran along the roof of the station and ripped it off as clean as a whistle, by the same token nearly decapitating one of the drivers. The noise was appalling and the whole Corps let out a unified scream of terror. I have never heard diplomats scream like that before or since.

And on it goes.

My favorite story called Frying the Flag, is about two English ladies who publish the Central Balkan Herald (circulation 500), famous for its abundant and ingenious typos, the fault of the non-English-speaking compositors and the master printer, Icic (pronounced Itchitch), who reduce the news to gibberish: MINISTER FINED FOR KISSING IN PUBIC, WEDDING BULLS RING OUT FOR THE PRINCESS, QUEEN OF HOLLAND GIVES PANTY FOR EX-SERVICEMEN, MORE DOGS HAVE BABIES THIS SUMMER IN BELGRADE, BRITAINS NEW FLYING-GOAT.

We learn about Polk-Mowbray, who has gone all American on them and is spotted in a trattoria drinking Coca-Cola with a straw. ("In Coca-Cola veritas what?") The tale is told of a diplomat who at a formal dinner swallowed a moth, setting off a chain reaction which resulted in the butler dropping a flaming plum pudding on the Yugoslav delegation, who were not amused. "What Communist could believe a capitalist hyena when he says he has swallowed a moth?"

The whole affair was summed up by the Central Balkan Herald in its inimitable style as follows: 'We gather that the British Embassy organized a special dinner at which the Niece de Resistance was Glum Pudding and a thoroughly British evening was enjoyed by all.' You couldn't say fairer than that, could you?

Well, that really doesn't do it justice of course. Just trust me that this book is worth the trouble of finding it. And it is only the first of three. As the Central Balkan Herald might say, it's a Niece de Resistance.

2012  No 133