Susan Green

Everywhere is special, in some way. It was not imperative that I should be born in Cheshire; but it was imperative that I should know my place. That can be achieved only by inheriting one’s childhood landscape, and by growing in it to maturity. It is a subtle matter of owning and being owned.

I was sick a lot when I was a child; this experience seems to be a common one for writers. Only upper respiratory tract infections – I was the URTI kid – but pneumonia when I was six weeks old obviously scared my parents so that the idea that I had ‘a weak chest’ meant I was coddled through every cold. I would get taken to the doctor and given antibiotics in the form of a syrup flavoured with raspberry or more often banana which didn’t do much to hide the disgusting taste. I still can’t eat a banana without wanting to retch. I remember long, long days. Razor blade throat, cough, streaming nose, headache and an obscene amount of phlegm (sorry) would give way to a quite enjoyable period of convalescence. My father believed bed rest, soup and napping were the essentials of recovery. Before I could read, I’d look at the pictures in books, and day-dream my way into the stories. Even when I could read, I’d usually be too weak to concentrate for long so I continued to look at pictures. Dad would bring in the transistor radio so I could listen to The Argonauts (a famous ABC children’s radio show) and serial stories. One of the stories was Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisengamen. Primed by fairy stories, folk tales and long hours leafing through my Dad’s Discovering Art magazines, I was absolutely ready to go adventuring with Susan and Colin on and under Alderley Edge, a landscape of myth, legend and wonder.

The above is a roundabout way of saying I’ve been acquainted with Alan Garner for a long time – more than 60 years – and that I can understand the experience of a sick child confined to bed and finding himself in other worlds.

This is a magpie collection of essays and lectures, written from the 1970s to the 1990s, encompassing inheritance and place, family history, local history, mythology, folklore, archaeology, landscape, his research and writing practice, literature, memoir – including a really distressing account of his struggles with depression – and a great deal more. I am re-reading the ones that spoke to me the loudest. And thinking about ideas and phrases. Like ‘The Beauty Things’.

Alan and his wife Griselda have been staying in a house in a Wales while he works on The Owl Service, and he makes friends with a neighbour, an old man called Dafydd.

Dafydd sat me by the the fire, and spoke softly. He said, ‘I think I shall close my eyes soon’. It was a statement of intent, not a prognosis of an ailment. ‘When I am gone, my sons will sell all that they can, and throw the rest in the river. You are to take the Beauty Things now, in case we do not meet again.’

The Beauty Things were a set of horse brasses, a broken fishing rod, his grandmother’s medieval quern stone (I had to look it up; it’s a grinding tool), a grindstone, his father’s rusted adze head, an 18th century mattock, part of a 17th century sundial, a piece of limestone, and more… Alan was in tears; it was ‘junk beyond price’, ‘the essence of Being’. At the time of writing the essay, he’d kept Dayfydd’s Beauty Things for 30 years, but was wondering what would happen to them when he also closed his eyes.

I also had tears in my eyes. I have so many Beauty Things. From my own life, but from my parents and grandparents and perhaps back further. There a few objects that are clearly not junk, and possibly even Antiques but also buttons, broken china, tiny china ornaments, a miniature telescope, scraps of fabric and ribbons, a brooch with a missing stone, Edwardian postcards, 1920s greeting cards, a fossilised eraser in a metal container, a pencil with a tassel on the end. I don’t know (but wish I did) the provenance of them all.

It took me a very long time to finish The Voice That Thunders. There was so much to think about in each essay; they were so rich, deep and nourishing that I wasn’t able to do my usual and bolt through the book. I took so much of it personally, in the best way – to heart.

A wonderful book.

I…lay listening to the mad, abandoned cries of flocks of pink-and-grey galahs that raved over me now and then, rolling and tumbling, revelling in their early-morning aerobatics. Some of them alighted briefly in the slender bare white arms of a solitary ghost gum that stood fifty yards from the foot of my bed. Its pale, smooth trunk gleamed pinkly in the morning sun. The ghost gum is a dancing woman in the Arrernte songs that tell the dreaming stories of the creation of this land. The tree’s graceful from was actually created by the gallantry of generations of amorous cock galahs: they would roost in it, break off the terminal shoots of its twigs with their strong parrot beaks and offer them as love-tokens to the hens, which always politely accept them, then discreetly drop them. the constant pruning causes the branches to grow in curves from their lateral shoots and gives the whole tree the fluidity of a dancer.

I have yet to get hold of Roger Deakin’s first book, Waterlog (1999), but I know that it’s a wild-swimming odyssey around Britain, and it sounds wonderful. He died of cancer shortly after finishing the manuscript of Wildwood, and it was published posthumously in 2007. So there won’t be another book like this…wandering, eccentric, obsessed, unique. He writes in his introduction:

Wildwood is a quest for the residual magic of trees and wood that still touches most of us not far beneath the surface of our daily lives… Human beings depend on trees quite as much as on rivers and the sea. Our intimate relationship with trees is physical as well as cultural and spiritual: literally an exchange of carbon dioxide for oxygen. Once inside a wood, you walk on something very like the seabed, looking up at the canopy of leaves as if it were the surface of the water, filtering the descending shafts of sunlight and dappling everything…

What a pity Roger didn’t live to write another book, about the sea.

He starts with English woods around his home in rural Suffolk and moves outwards within Britain and then overseas in wandering trails of family stories, folk tales, craft and tool-making, history, memoir, environmental and ecological science, zoology, botany, literature, myth and legend, travel, art. It’s the kind of wide-ranging, wondering book I love. Wildwood had a couple of sections on British artists that didn’t interest me all that much, but after ploughing through them I was rewarded by an account of his visit to Australia. He travelled with artist John Wolseley and stayed at Wolseley’s home in the Whipstick forest near Bendigo, not so far from where I live. So while I can imagine in soft focus the European and British forests he writes about, I know the Whipstick landscape well, and that feels quite special.

I loved reading about my own country – Central Australia, the Pilliga forest in NSW, my own Central Victoria –  my favourite part of Wildwood was his journey in Kazakhstan. He wanted to see the wild apple and walnut forests, and to meet the people who live and work there.

…we dip and thread our way through the fruit forest, past a solitary yurt in a wooded glade, then two or three tented settlements of simple farmsteads. Outside a very simple wooden hut, barely more than four or five packing cases, sit a little family with their horses and cattle tethered nearby. Two small girls are braiding their mother’s waist-length hair, proudly brushing it for her as it shines in the sun. Climbing a steep holloway past exposed roots of elms, apples and apricots, we come to a cottage and farmstead in the woods. Here… we are invited to lunch.

It could have been taken from Paddy Leigh Fermor’s pre-WWII adventures. And yes, yes, yes, I know that life in this ex-Soviet ‘stan’ would not have been all apples, apricots and unicorns, but oh, how delicious and paradaisical to imagine.

Not a quibble, just a thought. This genre of book – which I love –  is usually written by a white Englishmen (Robert McFarlane, etc); perhaps my next search is for one by a black woman, for there surely are some, just as there are now books by Black women gardeners. As an aside, I have been listening to lots of gardening podcasts. While definitely enjoying posh Englishwomen waxing lyrical about their borders, it’s also been good to hear, for instance, about the Black Southern agrarian tradition from actual Black Southern women who spring from 8 or 9 generations of farmers and gardeners in the same ‘home place’.

(Crocus)…recall those miniature works of art created by the great Russian artificer Faberge in the luxurious days when the very rich could afford such extravagances… One wants to see them close to the eye, fully to appreciate the pencilling on the outside of the petals; it seems to have been drawn with a fine brush, perhaps wielded by some sure-handed Chinese calligrapher, feathering them in bronze or lilac.

Spring in our Central Victorian garden is almost a frenzy because everything happens all at the same time, with feverish haste, plants erupting into bud and bloom and some of them, already setting seed. I waited months for the crocus – ‘Pickwick’ and ‘King of the Stripes’ – to flower, and they were a joy, utterly exquisite, but after a couple of weeks, they’ve gone and I have two pots of leaves which I must leave to die off and wither away so that I can lift the bulbs for next year’s brief show. The plum blossom, hardenbergia (‘Happy Wanderer’) and tulips have all ‘gone over’ (apparently this is what English gardeners call it) and the weeds and the congested succulents I’ve been trying to thin out are festering in big piles. Grass is growing in the gravel courtyard and between the paving stones; parrots and cockatoos are ravaging the gums trees for blossom, scattering leaves and twigs everywhere I’ve swept. By the end of  a month, it will be dry and browning off. My dreamy vision of roses and flowering perennials will hit reality and I’ll be out there in the evenings watering to keep my plants alive.

So how wonderful, reading Vita Sackville-Wests’s Sissinghurst: The Making of a Garden, to enter the fantasy of a glorious garden in more well-mannered climate, with an Elizabethan tower, stone and old brick ruins, ancient walls, pillars and archways and urns, paved paths, courtyards, orchards, meadows and with every divine, fragrant, romantic plant and flower you can think of in drifts and clumps and swathes and swags…and, it has to be said, with a team of gardeners to keep it all going.

Sissinghurst is supreme in the English pantheon of gardens, and its creator Vita Sackville-West is a goddess, or perhaps a saint. St Vita of Sissinghurst? She is certainly the patron saint of the one-colour garden, and her famous White Garden has sparked innumerable pale imitations. Caught up in my current gardening craze, this book was the perfect bedtime reading. Though I’ve seen lots of pictures and video footage of Sissinghurst, reading about its actual planning and construction was unexpectedly interesting. Though they collaborated, it turns out that Vita’s husband, Harold Nicolson, was mostly responsible for the structure and Vita handled the planting schemes. She loved full, voluptuous, lavish planting – ‘cram’ was apparently her advice to novices and experts alike –  and bought plants and trees by the hundred. Though she did have a team of gardeners, she also dirtied her own hands, and her gardening ‘uniform’ of silk shirt, breeches and long lace-up boots looks both posh and eccentric.

From 1946 to 1957, she wrote a weekly gardening column for the Observer newspaper and Sarah Raven, who is married to Vita and Harold’s grandson, the writer Adam Nicolson, has interwoven her text with Vita’s own words. It’s a lovely combination. Vita writes so lyrically that I don’t actually care if I have no idea what she’s writing about. Fritillaries? Aconites? Bouvardias and auricula? The names are like charms, the descriptions like dreams. Soothing and delightful reading.

I recently stumbled on Jon Appleton’s website when I searched ‘second golden age of children’s books’. It’s a celebration not just of writers, illustrators and books, but of publishers, editors, reviewers and commentators as well. At the time, I was only thinking of British children’s books, and creators like Alan Garner and Brian Wildsmith.  But although Jon has lived in the UK for many years, he is Australian. And so Australian writers, like Gillian Rubenstein and Robin Klein are well represented too.

He produces a limited edition hand-made zine called the GAB five times a year. Luckily it’s available as a PDF (free!) to subscribers. You can contact Jon at via his site and ask to be added to the mailing list.

The latest issue has a review by Brian Alderson of The Thorny Paradise, edited by Edward Blishen: an appreciation of Anne Wood, an unsung heroine of children’s literacy in the UK: a discussion of a book I’d never heard of (but which I’d like to get my hands on as well) by Irish writer Janet McNeill called The Battle of St George Without: and a profile of writer and editor Aidan Chambers.

The garden was a drug and I was hooked. I needed money to finance the habit. I began to understand completely why debtors resort to uncharacteristic, extreme crimes… Every penny spent was more than we could afford, and the knowledge and pressure of this was a constant, grinding burden.

In dire need of solace, I turned to ABC iview for Monty Don. I can’t be the only woman – or man for that matter – with a major crush on Monty. Rhineland Gardens and British Gardens were just the ticket but I should have known that reading The Prickotty Bush was not going to be the soothing experience I was hoping for. It is Monty Don’s first published book, out of print and hard to get hold of – but I did, at stupid expense, from a second-hand dealer in the UK. Worth it? Yes, and no – it is  a beautifully written story of gardens and madness, and so makes uncomfortable reading.

It’s hard to imagine Monty Don as anything other than the amiable lanky fellow in loose blue linen shirts guiding viewers around beautiful gardens, but in the late 1980’s, he and his wife Sarah had a business making high-fashion costume jewellery for the international market. They also had young children and a strong desire for country life as a counterbalance to their high-stress London life. Gardening was already a passion with him, and he’d done a few gardening programmes for TV, but this was before he became famous as a writer and presenter. After looking for a couple of years, they found The Hanburies in rural Herefordshire and Monty set about transforming the overgrown, neglected garden into into something wonderful. With insights from Monty and Sarah Don’s The Jewel Garden, I knew that the garden at The Hanburies nearly broke them both.

Oh the Prickotty Bush, the Prickotty Bush,
Will I never be free of the Prickotty Bush?

With the jewellery business failing, their London house on the market but not selling, a mortgage and a bridging loan to service, after a year or so the Dons sank into deep financial trouble. But Monty remained obsessed with making the garden of his dreams at The Hanburies. He thought of little else. He wrote and planned and drew up planting schemes, and worked in the garden – digging, weeding, clearing, planting – to the point of exhaustion and often into the night. There was massive earth moving work to re-shape the layout. Trees were relocated; walls and terraces built; enormous numbers of plants bought; tradespeople, labourers and machinery were hired. Everything cost more, in time and money, than he’d planned. And he and Sarah were constantly physically overstretched, with small children who hardly slept and Sarah herself unwell. When the financial crunch came, they had to sell The Hanburies.
As Sarah writes in The Jewel Garden,

When it came down to it, Montagu was a loony and I was ill all the time. How did we ever believe we could save the situation?
I suppose the lowest point for me was when I was hidden away on my sickbed while potential buyers traipsed around the house. I found it astonishing that Montagu never mentioned my bedridden weeks in The Prickotty Bush. I can only assume that he was so obsessed with making the garden that I was, during that time, peripheral.
Despite everything, Montagu had the garden and a book. I am sad that I have so little to show for that time. At least the children were happy and healthy. 

Much of the book is beautiful to read. Planning and making a garden is such a creative act, full of hope and belief in the future. And as I know from his later books, Monty is has a gift for what you might call ‘nature writing’. Like this:

…A yellow moon hitched its skirts over the wood and there was the faintest streak of light over the western horizon.
Silence. The noise suddenly swung down the hill again, an excited squabbling yittering. I could just make out the undergrowth moving through the gleaming trunks of the birches. It was fox cubs, tumbling and fighting through the docks, foxgloves and elder.
As I went indoors, I could hear them again, playing their last midsummer games before adulthood.
The greenhouse is overflowing with plants and pots and seed-trays, all growing, growing.

Warning: A big old whinge ahead, so if you’d rather not read it, skip to the next paragraph.
The world is awful. The weather is awful. My back hurts, and I have a toothache and a root canal to look forward to. I have a book on the go, but it stops and starts and stops again. I am low-key vaguely miserable for no good reason. Actually, there is a good reason. It’s been a very grey winter. Usually in Castlemaine we have a fair few frosts followed by bright, sunny, cold winter days, but not this year. So for the past month or so, my pile of new novels is gathering dust, and I’m going through a phase of what I can only describe as ‘restorative reading’. Not comfort reading, which is a pot of tea and too many biscuits while lying on the couch; undemanding, familiar, maybe a bit cloying and sweet, my bestsellers of yesteryear and Elizabeth Goudge. No, this is more like sitting up straight with a bowl of nourishing soup.

I re-read three of May Sarton’s diaries, Journal of a Solitude, The House By the Sea and At Seventy and Monty Don’s The Jewel Garden and My Garden World. Kate Grenville’s Unsettled counts as well. These writers made me want to sit up a little straighter, look at the natural world around me, and to think about my home – house, garden,  my home town of Castlemaine, the area of Central Victoria. They encouraged me to finally investigate the signs of spring, even getting outside on the odd occasion when the rain held off. I walked around the block, into town, did the circuit of theBotanical Gardens. I pulled some weeds, I bought some dill and chive seedlings.  Now I am scouting out new growth, the flowers and blossoms and green shoots; I am trying to encourage myself into a few green shoots as well.

I can’t report on any finished books right now. It’s time to get cracking on my two book group novels, though I know I will be forgiven if I don’t make it to the end. I’m taking my time with Alan Garner’s Powsels and Thrums and The Voice That Thunders. Each essay deserves a little break between the next, time to think and reflect. And Roger Deakin’s Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees and Vita Sackville-West’s Sissinghurst by Vita Sackville-West and Sarah Raven demand pauses as well.

There’s a common thread here, which is a strong sense of place, and that place is England. After our book group discussion of Unsettled, I was talking to Norman, one of our members, and I commented that the landscape in which I feel most at home is right here. The undramatic hills and valleys, the creeks, the paddocks and farms and tracks are set in among tracts of native forest, but you’ll see many non-native – and I guess, feral – trees and plants when you drive along the country roads. Hawthorn, wild plum, briar roses, gorse, broom, clumps of jonquils and daffodils. There are occasionally magnificent oak trees in some of the paddocks, and of course cypress windbreaks. Even the bush, which has regrown after the mining era, is only wild-ish, because it so often contains mine shafts and mounds of disturbed soil and rock, rubbish dumps and the ruins of small dwellings.

I said to Norman that I’d been wondering whether it is some atavistic thing, inherited along with hazel eyes and skin that burns in the sun. He offered another explanation. He said that we were probably in the last generation of children brought up almost exclusively on English culture. When I thought about it, I agreed. My early diet was fairy tales and English children’s books like The Wind in the Willows, The Secret Garden and The Railway Children. When I could read for myself, it was The Weirdstone of Brisengamen, The Dark is Rising trilogy, the Old Knowe series and so many  more. Did they form my inner landscape?

Something to think about…

Deep under the surface, a seam of coal has been burning for who knows how long. The colonists gave the mountain the banal name it goes by on the map (Burning Mountain), but it was burning long before they saw it. Standing there looking at the smoke drifting up from the invisible smoulder, it seems clear that this place of powerful, rather scary presence would always have been a site of story and meaning in Aboriginal cosmology.  

What story? What meaning? Beyond the sketchy account on the tourist information board, I don’t know, and that feels right. It’s not my story, not my meaning, not my world. I don’t have to go under the surface of the smoking mountain to know there’s a world there. Running alongside the known, the familiar, is difference. I don’t want to erase it or make it mine. I don’t need to understand or come up with answers to unanswerable questions. I just need to stand back, as I’m standing back from this burning fissure in the earth, with respect.

When I first read Unsettled, I read quickly – as I do. Too quickly. As I do! I promised myself that I would read it again, and now I have, because it was last month’s Book Group pick. And one of the best discussions we have had all year. Most of our group commented on the gentle, curious and exploratory tone of the writing. How it felt like a personal story; how you could hear Kate Grenville’s voice talking to you, taking you along on her journey, her pilgrimage.

Many of our group are very well-informed about the history of Australian colonisation and Aboriginal dispossession. One of the aspects of the book they liked was the relatable experience of wondering and wandering over their family places. How do our own family histories sit in the big picture? A Jewish member talked about inherited trauma, the legacy of grief that comes with a whole people being likened to vermin, something to be removed and got rid of. We talked about how white, Anglo-Celtic, fifth or sixth generation Australians (like me) feel about this violent history compared to the waves of more recent arrivals – say, the post-war Greeks and Italians, the Vietnamese of the 1970’s, the Indians now. We talked about guilt and shame. About ‘what now?’ ‘What next?’

And several of us noted the beautiful, careful language she uses in describing the landscape, talking about country. We thought she seemed to be seeking to go deeper into looking at the land, beyond the superficial first glance, distinguishing more deeply the colours and textures of vegetation and landforms and rocks, the sensations and also the feelings she experiences. A slower, closer way of looking.

Earlier in the year, we took a drive to Warrnambool and stayed there for a few days. I’d intended to go to the cemetery to find some family graves, and also to a settlement a few kilometres out of town where family first lived when they arrived in Victoria.  I didn’t – it was rainy – but I visited the local historical society’s rooms, where the volunteers immediately found records relating to that branch of the family. So in sunnier weather I will try again. A simple search tells me that the Gunditjmara and Kirrae Whurrong people were the traditional custodians of that country.

And though I’ve known this family story, from my maternal line, for a long time, I had never thought to find out. This was written by my mother, Helen Green, as told to her by her grandmother, Jessie North.

A family story tells how Elizabeth was left on her own with young Joseph while Joseph (her husband) and William drove by dray to Geelong to buy stores for the next three months. A party of Aboriginal people invaded her kitchen and took away young Joseph. Elizabeth was frightened but took comfort from remembering that she and Joseph had always been on good terms with them. It was even more reassuring that they had left one of their own small children with her. But as days passed Elizabeth grew more frightened. At last Joseph reappeared, happy and full of his adventures. Whilst he told his story to Elizabeth, the little Aboriginal boy slipped away. Elizabeth gathered from young Joseph that the Aboriginal men thought Joseph was not being taught the necessary skills of life in the bush. So they had undertaken the task, teaching him swimming, tracking, finding food and shelter. They had done this because Elizabeth and Joseph had shared food with them and had encouraged young Joseph to play with their children. Elizabeth was glad that she had not given way to panic but had gone about her chores and taken care of her young visitor. Joseph never forgot this strange experience of his youth and always spoke up for Aboriginal people and whenever he could helped them. He called them his brothers.

Elizabeth (Jeffcoat) is my great-great-great grandmother, and grandmother of Joseph (Jeffcoat North), the little boy. I hope this relatively benign story is true, however if you think about it it becomes more and more complicated because of course Joseph and Elizabeth were on Gunditjmara land. The Gunditjmara people seemed to be willing to share  resources and skills…but were the Jeffcoats? Unsettled has made me ask new questions as I potter away at my family history.

When the idea of writing a “literary memoir” first sprang up (from whom? Memory shrugs, but it was someone in publishing) I replied to her or him or them: “That would be tedious. You’ve heard the bad joke about the old East Coast fisherman counting fish? ‘One fish, two fish, another fish, another fish, another fish…’ So, my literary memoir would go, ‘ I wrote a book, I wrote another book, I wrote another book…’ Dead boring. Who wants to read about someone sitting at a desk messing up blank sheets of paper?”

I bought A Book of Lives over a year ago, and it waited on the shelf until I had a few days of rainy weather, a slight cold and a grumpy disinclination to move off the couch. It wasn’t tedious, or boring, or really a memoir. More of a full-blown autobiography. The many lives of Margaret Atwood.
Margaret – or Peggy, as she was then; it’s her childhood name – was a free-range kid roaming the forests and lakes of Ontario with her siblings while her entomolgist father worked studying insect infestations, and her gloriously unfussy, athletic and outdoorsy mother made a home for them all in a tent or later, a basic cabin. In autumn, the family retreated to Toronto or Ottawa to avoid freezing, and she transformed into a home-loving young girl who enjoyed sewing, knitting and decorating cakes. As she grew older, she was an academic nerd, then a serious young poet and eventually the successful novelist and much-awarded (inter)national treasure she is now. Along the way she acquired lots of boyfriends, a husband (briefly), a life partner in poet and novelist Graeme Gibson and a daughter. There are many friends and colleagues; in the 1980’s she was active in promoting Canadian writers and was a part of a small press called Anansi. In fact, I have some of her early Anansi publications, a couple of poetry books and a study of Canadian literature called Survival. I was surprised to read that Survival was written to make money for the press, and it did. It sold over 100,000 copies and kept Anansi afloat for many years.
There are a few enemies – “Canadians are prone to be offended by the success of other Canadians” she writes – but very little settling of scores. Though she is harsh about Graeme Gibson’s ex-wife Shirley, rather endearingly she writes to her ‘Inner Advice Columnist’, whose advice is straightforward and bracing. On the question of having a child:

Just go for it. Let other people handle their own hang-ups. Do what you want and live with the consequences. If you are definite enough about your wishes, whatever form those might take, your partner will agree. As for the wife, she will simply have to accept reality, though from what you say she may have difficulty doing that. 

Margaret Atwood has had a very full life, and though there must have been a great deal of time at her desk, writing one book, another book, and another book, she seems to have fitted in an amazing amount off the page. The energy!

…romances, adventures with Graeme, family life, wonderful parents, great sibs, weeding the garden, knitting, birthday-party-staging, pie-making, bird conservation, arts support, human rights advocacy, fundraising and general busybodiness…

She’s one of the great novelists. A prophet?  The Handmaid’s Tale could happen right now in the US. And a witty, wise, warm and funny woman. It was a captivating way to cure my cold.

She finishes her Book of Lives with this:

…Dear Reader. On the one hand, I am here, having travelled with you for over eighty-six years, having shared with you so many strange happenings, incidents of malice, odd dreams, conversations, joyful moments, ghosts, stupid mistakes, and catastrophes. Yes, I am still with you, right here, on this very page. Though on the other hand…
My great-Aunt Abbey, who was completely blind in the final years of her life, took to her bed. One of my younger relatives went to visit her. “What are you thinking about, Aunt Abbey?” she asked.
“I am writing the story of my life,” said Aunt Abbey. “And when I have come to the end, I will close the book.”

Do I really need to read more popular psychology books? Apparently I do, because after seeing this interview in the Guardian, I went out and bought Being: Why It’s Harder to be Human than a Hamster or a Herring. Rachel E. Menzies and Ross G. Menzies, daughter and father, have written a useful addition to my shelf. Two sections in particular stood out.

The Inner Voice. Oh God. Mine is not always horrid, but there are times when it (or is it a she?) just does not shut up. On and on and on and on…commentating, narrating, scripting, stage directing, nagging. If I can divert it, and get it telling stories – especially the story I am working on – it can be very useful. But tiring. The Menzies  believe that it’s essential we change our relationship with the inner voice. They say we need to ‘react to the inner voice as if it were a separate entity to ourselves. Only then can we objectively see the damage that has been done.’

Only then can we judge the effects of the voice dispassionately, in the way that we would judge the same sentences if they were coming from another source, like a bully in the schoolyard. By adulthood, would we really be listening to another person if they’d called us fat and ugly through our youth, told us our mother had forgotten us every day at school pick-up and made up monsters in the dark? 

They also note that the inner voice ‘seems to magnify our sense of personal significance’. We can become overwhelmed by our own private world, and develop an inner realm – a little like a game – where only we are truly special, the main players, and other people are secondary characters. Which is isolating, and lonely.

The other section that I found interesting – worthy of much more thought, and perhaps even a game changer – was in the chapter called The Illusion of Freedom. It concerned anger. They write that humans get angry with each other because of ‘should-based appraisals’. She should have known better, he should have phoned back, they should not be racists or bad drivers or park in the disabled spot, etc etc etc.  They say that ‘if you believe they should have acted differently, presumably you believe they could have acted differently.’

Put plainly, if we accept that people are just playing out their hardware and software as they encounter each moment, given their current levels of blood sugar, hunger, fatigue, relevant hormones and other distributed causes across their cultural and evolutionary history, then anger makes no sense. Getting angry at other people is no more rational than getting angry at any other machine.

This is not a heavy book, but it’s definitely meaty; full of ideas to chew over. I don’t want to be a hamster or a herring, but yes, at times being human is hard and unrelenting work.

…the uncommonly astute author Rachel Cusk tore away another veil for me in her essay ‘Making Home’, describing our houses as a loci of tension and considered design, simultaneously looked at and lived in. She examines our psychological compulsion to make living spaces that reflect us back to ourselves and others – mirages of confected perfection or careless authenticity – and the kudos, pleasure or insecurities from these acts of making as the texts on which we inscribe our dreams and personal mythologies. Reading this, I recognised the subconscious bat squeaks of envy, anxiety and pride that I’ve been half-listening to for much of my grown-up life. Like Cusk, I am fascinated by the stage sets in which we enact ‘home’ ( so-called ‘real homes’, not those made by professional designers), and like her I think this is a subject worthy of examination and  appreciation.

I thought this book was going to be a history of British interiors, and therefore useful for research. Instead, it’s a generously illustrated, very enjoyable, extended sticky-beak into a whole lot of private British homes. Some are artistically dishevelled or even a little slovenly (unmade bed! clutter! leads and cords not tidied away!), some are beautifully curated and arranged, but all look as if interesting people live there. I grew up in a house with old furniture (a few antiques but mostly just old), the creative clutter of my artist father, lots of books, paintings, ornaments and objects, and a distinct lack of vinyl couches and Laminex benchtops. Some of my little friends thought our house was a bit weird, and I became rather ashamed of it. How I envied them, with their modern houses and modern stuff. I think Ruth Guilding could have had a great time snapping pictures at our place.

There are lots of lovely pictures, and an introduction featuring a trio of ‘great British tastemakers’. They are William Morris, founder of the Arts and Crafts movement; the artistic and literary Bloomsbury group; and another group Guilding calls ‘the Spitalsfield Fogeys’, after the people who rescued and restored decaying Georgian buildings in the London suburb of Spitalsfield in the 1970’s and ’80’s.