Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Four Seasons with Susan Hill and Gladys Taber - Susan's winter


The Magic Apple Tree is best book about country life I've ever read, and I've read a fair many. Fellow bloggers have sung its praises for years, and well-deserved they are.

There is a mellowness in Susan Hill's writing that doesn't show up as often in the "book" books. Here she is writing simply about her life with her husband and daughter in the English countryside.
There are five hundred souls in Barley, and more than half of them are over sixty, quite a few well over eighty. It is a companionable village. ... It is only six miles from the city, and feels like a hundred and six, it is so peaceful, so thoroughly rural are its surroundings. There is no through traffic, it is well-shaped and has so many superb views, the houses are modest and pleasing, the size of the place is right, large enough to have some community life and yet not too large.
This book is a tribute to English rural life, the sort of life we Anglophiles dream of. I wonder how much it has changed since publication of the book in 1982. My rural area has not changed too terribly much in those years so perhaps it hasn't either. Her village looks pretty wonderful on the website here!

The book begins with the magic apple tree.
Whether you stand at the top of the stone steps or at any of the windows, you cannot look from this cottage across to the fields opposite, or to your left, away and down the whole, flat stretch of the Fen, without also having the apple tree in your sight, it draws your eyes toward it and balances the picture, a point of reference for the whole view. It is only, perhaps, fifteen feet high, and a most beautiful, satisfying shape.  ... the spirit of the place is in that apple tree.
I wonder if it still stands. I felt this way about the big maple in front of our house, and though we had to have it cut down I still long for its presence.

She worries about the tree.
There is always a wind about here, we are so exposed on all sides ... There have been terrible nights when I have lain awake listening to the roar and boom, hearing branches groan and break ... One February night, a single blast of wind, the eye of the storm, took half our heavy wooden fence, the glass roof of a neighbour's greenhouse, a lilac bush beyond it, two chimney pots and an open garage door, it simply gathered them up into itself and flung them down again some yards away. But the apple tree still stood, resilient, indomitable as some small wooden ship on a stormy sea. After that, I did not worry about it.
The name of the house is Moon Cottage. I do love how the British name their homes. Over here we name farms and ranches, but not homes, as far as I know.

Susan Hill writes of the reasons for their move to a country life.
All through my thirties, since marriage and, most particularly, since the birth of my daughter, I experienced a growing discontent and dissatisfaction with town life. I seemed to be only skimming the surface of things, to be cramped and hurried and tense. I noticed the smell and noise of the traffic more, and I worried above all about the influences of the city upon Jessica, of so much that was ugly and tawdry and meretricious, violent, distasteful, of all the getting and spending. I longed for more space around me, for growing things and time and all the sounds and scents of the natural world on my doorstep, for peace and quiet in which to do my own work, and to provide a counterbalance for Jessica to the time she would inevitably have to spend in the city. I wanted to give her a rich treasure-store of country memories, sights and smells, sounds and colours, on which she could draw for the rest of her life. A friend of mine, who has lived in a north of England city for forty years, feeds off a memory of running through fields, up to her waist in buttercups, on a day's outing to the country when she was six years old.
Susan goes on to say that she actually dreamed about the house before she saw it or knew it existed. Magic, indeed!

It is not a "perfect" house.
It is not, even in the softest of summer sunshine, a beautiful house. It was once three poky labourers' cottages, built of that mottled Oxfordshire limestone, and once thatched, but now ordinarily tiled. It lies at right angles to the lane, facing uncompromisingly north.
Yet, it was just what they wanted, with "two staircases, one on either side of the house, and endless nooks and crannies, oddly-shaped cupboards, sloping ceilings."

She does such a wonderful job of describing the house and the garden that this reader could picture them very well.

As with our house, they made changes but nothing very drastic. She is a firm believer in handling "an old house carefully". To
restrain the first urge to knock down and replace and add on, or even to restore; you need to settle to a place, give it time to speak to you, about itself, rub along with things as they are and see how they work. There has been so much lost, so much alteration and modernisation and ruination at the transitory whim of individual taste and fashion, so many excrescences have been added which are entirely wrong in style, so many plain, sensible features, walls, roofs, window frames, ripped out. ... When you buy an old house, you buy a small part of the past, a piece of history, and yet you do not become the owner of that, and never can, you have only taken it on trust for your lifetime, or more likely nowadays, until you move on and pass it to someone else, in a cash transaction.
In the winter chapter she talks about "wildlife, festivals, food, and the garden". I'm so looking forward to reading about the rest of the year in this wonderful place.

14 comments:

  1. Nan, I gobbled this winter section down except for the last few pages when I realized there were still a few more weeks of winter to go and I needed to stretch it out. And it got covered up with current books on top of it by my reading chair so now I have to go finish it. My favorite too of hers that I've read so far and for basically the same reasons as you. She makes even a story of the local character who supplies their firewood so real and interesting. Why, oh why, do we not see movies and television movies from an author like this? And as with Gladys's books, I know I will enjoy reading it again and again.

    I would love to have been her neighbor. I'd promise not to interrupt her writing.

    Each thing I came across in the story that I loved I would wonder if you loved it too,
    Dewena

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    1. I did!! And aren't you so very dear to wonder that. Yes, the firewood fellow!

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  2. Oh how I love this book! It takes the reader to a very special place, indeed!
    Trees, I think, define your house, making it something more. I remember trees in the house I grew up in, and the house we lived in for nearly forty years until we moved due to health. They are in my dreams. A part of me still grieves for them.
    Mary

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    1. When we moved here, we brought several trees that we had planted at my childhood home. And we brought some of my mother's lilacs. We couldn't bring any locusts which, along with lilacs, were THE trees of my youth. So, we bought a few locusts, and bought some Dutchman's pipe which grew up along the porch so I could sort of recreate my first home with my second. I love how you said "something more". That's exactly it.

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  3. Nan, I'm beyond thrilled that you love this book so much. I always knew you would. It's astonishing really that the book isn't more well-known. Enjoy the rest of it as you read through the year.

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    1. Thanks, Cath! I had trouble expressing how much I love it, so I relied on her words. I am such a fan of this woman, though I'll probably not read her fiction. A little too dark and ghostly for me, but the three nonfiction books are among my most valued possessions.

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  4. I just placed an order for a used copy of this book after reading your blog this morning. Her writing style reminds me of Elaine's blog Parsonage Cottage. Unfortunately Elaine is on a hiatus from blogging right now.
    Thanks for your comments about Mayor Pete. I just ordered his book, too. He definitely is a fresh healthy voice which is needed in this election.

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    1. I'll check into her blog, even if it isn't going at the moment. I'll be interested in what you think of his book.

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  5. I should pick that up: I do like a book about a village, even though I grew up in one and it was a bit rubbish to be a teenager in, and I'm a firm suburbanite now! I loved this: 'She is a firm believer in handling "an old house carefully"' - our house is from 1908 and we always do anything to it carefully and with love, even though it's been knocked around a bit in the intervening years until we got hold of it in 2005!

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    1. That's so great that you think about the house when you do work to it. And I do so love that adjective "rubbish" - I watch a lot of British tv so hear it often, and I always smile.

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  6. Nan, I just finished reading this book and absolutely loved it! What a lovely review of it!

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  7. When we went to live in Germany - this was the most important book...and kept me sane!
    We came back to the UK, and I found 'Moon Cottage', together with the apple tree.....but
    then I wished I hadn't!

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    1. I am so very pleased that you read such an old post, and then took the time to respond! Thank you.
      If you read this, I would love to know why you wished you hadn't seen it!!!!

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