How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn

Yes, I know that this book’s over 80 years old, and, yes, I know that it was made into a film during the war, and has been adapted for TV; but it was new to me!

We’ve got a small Welsh mining community, in the late Victorian/early Edwardian era; and the story is told, in English but with Welsh idioms/speech patterns, from the viewpoint of a boy called Huw as he grows up.  On the plus side, Huw’s part of a loving family and a close community.  On the minus side, the mines are terribly dangerous and fatal accidents are common, wages are low, the community is divided over union membership and strike action, and the tyranny of the chapel is like something out of the Netherlands or Geneva at their most Calvinistic.  Any young woman unlucky enough to get into trouble is hauled up before the entire congregation and berated for her wickedness –  whilst her boyfriend, natch, gets off scot free.  However, no-one seems to have an issue with the two gay boxers who run one of the local pubs, so at least that’s something.

There are various romances involving Huw’s many siblings, including a love triangle between one of his sisters, the Methodist preacher (who’s actually very nice when he isn’t berating girls in trouble) and one of the mine owners.  And we hear all about Huw’s schooldays – he’s all set to get a white collar job and escape poverty, but then he gets expelled just before his exams.

It’s a lovely book in many ways, but Huw is really rather annoying.  The reason he gets expelled from school is one of the many fights he gets into.  OK, lads get into playground scraps, but Huw beats up the teacher, so badly that the police get involved.  The teacher did ask for it, but still!   And then Huw’s girlfriend disappears.  To be fair, he does ask her brother where she’s gone, but he can’t get an answer.  He doesn’t twig to what’s going on until his sister-in-law tells him that she’s been sent away … hopefully to a place with no chapels.  After that, she’s never mentioned again, and he doesn’t seem to give the baby a second thought.  It’s a bit silly anyway, TBH.  Surely the girl and her family would have tried to make him marry her?

However, despite the fact that Huw isn’t a very appealing protagonist, it’s really a very interesting book.  No dates are actually given, but, from references to the Diamond Jubilee and the Boer War, we can tell that it starts off in the late 1890s.  Strangely, even though everyone is a devoted royalist and they all get incredibly excited when the choir led by one of Huw’s brothers goes to sing in front of Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle, Victoria’s death’s never actually mentioned – we just suddenly start hearing about “the King” rather than “the Queen”!   As is often pointed out, the late Victorian/Edwardian period’s seen as a Golden Age which was destroyed by the Great War; but, for people in working class communities, and especially for women, it really wasn’t that great.  But then there were these very close communities, and that’s something that we’ve pretty much lost now.

This book’s been criticised for being maudlin and sentimental (especially as the author claimed that it was about his own experiences, until it transpired that he’d actually grown up in London!)  and that’s certainly what the title suggests – oh, everything was so wonderful back in the day, the sort of thing we’ve been hearing right back to when William Blake moaned about dark satanic mills.  But I didn’t read it like that – the book did not pull any punches about the conditions in the mines, the struggles by some families to put food on the table, the treatment of “fallen women”, the teacher who got angry with any pupils who spoke Welsh rather than English at school, and so on.  But nor was it a misery memoir like Angela’s Ashes.  Nothing’s all good or all bad, and that’s what this book shows.  Not bad at all!

Now … do I buy the three sequels, and add to my already ridiculously high book mountain?   Still thinking about that!

Britannia, Season 3 – Sky Atlantic

   I’m pretty sure that there’s nothing in my history books about the Roman occupiers of Britain being cannibals, but, according to “Britannia”, they were just that.  Well, one of them was, anyway.  The poor bloke who ended up being served up at a banquet wasn’t even chopped into pieces and put in a stew.  He was wheeled to the table in a long silver dish, intact,  covered in a) all the trimmings and b) his helmet.

It all started off quite peacefully.  New series, new theme tune – Children of the Revolution.  Who knew that Ancient Romans and Celts were into Marc Bolan?   The Roman general with the Scouse accent had now got a nice pad in St Albans, but was in the doghouse all round because he’d lost track of the mysterious girl with magic powers, and wasn’t having much joy getting any information out of the guy who previously claimed to be 10,000 years old.  To add to his woes, his wife turned up.  This was when the rot set in.  First of all, she told him off for putting on weight.  Then she asked him where his sword was.  It was at the polishers, claimed he.  Ah.  Well, what was the sword that’d been found sticking out of a stump, then, asked she, brandishing it about.  He tried to claim that it wasn’t his, but failed dismally because it’d got his name on it  Engraved on it, that is, not marked with a Cash’s name tape.  She also crawled about sniffing the floor for any signs that other women had been in the place.  As you do.

Having found that he did, indeed, have a mistress around the place, she said that it was better than doing unspeakable things with his socks.  Too much information.  And then she had his mate served up for tea.

Meanwhile, Phelan, the dispossessed prince, was training as a druid, and was told to change his name to Quant.  Maybe druids were into Mary Quant make-up as well as glam rock.  Or maybe they just didn’t want their new guy being associated with Pat Phelan.  He was dispatched into the woods to find some moss, but sat around chatting to a centipede and then came back empty-handed.  And then the girl with the magic powers stabbed the guy who’d claimed to be 10,000 years old because he’d forgotten her name.  Or something.

I don’t know what the scriptwriters on this are on, but I suspect that it’s something rather stronger than mead.  Or vino.  And I think they may have had a little too much of it.  But at least it was entertaining.  It was so totally bonkers that you just had to laugh.  I mean, what on earth?!

Break The Fall by Jennifer Iacopelli

This was published in February 2020 but set during the Tokyo Olympics.  Now, I usually only read books which are, as my blog name suggests, “set in the past” (this one was for a Facebook group reading challenge).  Setting a book only a few months into the future wouldn’t normally be much of an issue, but, of course, in this case it was – and the author couldn’t possibly have known what lay around the corner, any more than the rest of us could.  These are the Olympics which we should have had.  For a start, they’re in 2020.  And the events take place in front of capacity crowds, with the athletes’ loved ones there to share the moments with them, with medals being hung around the winners’ necks by VIPs and with team-mates hugging each other in celebration or consolation.

Reading all that was rather strange.  However, it shouldn’t detract from the actual plot, which was about a team of young female American gymnasts getting ready to head for the Olympics, only for it to emerge that their male coach had been abusing two of them and that he’d been abusing other girls, too frightened to speak out, over a period of many years.  Obviously everyone will be aware that this is based on real events within US gymnastics, with over 350 young women affected.

It’s a challenging topic for a book for a teenagers, but the author’s handled it very well.  The protagonist, Audrey, is not one of those affected, but learns that she was almost certainly going to be the abuser’s next target.  So we’re slightly removed from what’s happened, and there are no actual scenes of abuse being perpetrated, but no words are minced and it’s made very clear what’s gone on.

Tied in with this is another main plotline, that, at just 16, our girl Audrey (funny how names come back into fashion – no-one under 50 was called Audrey when I was a kid) is being forced to retire due to a chronic back injury.  And, because it is a book for teenagers, there’s a romance, and there’s a lot of emphasis on the girls in the team falling out but then being reunited and pulling together.

It’s really very good.

It is a difficult subject, though.   BBC 1 showed a three part series earlier this year about child abuse in British football in the 1970s and 1980s.  It struck very close to home, with local lads like Paul Stewart and David White talking about what had happened to them.  How many other sports have been affected by this?   A review into safeguarding in professional tennis has just been introduced.  And, of course, it’s not just sport.  Over the last few years, there’s been one child abuse scandal after another.  It’s horrific, and it was brave of the author to cover this subject in her book.

We start off with the trials.  Then it’s announced that one of the qualifiers has failed a drugs test.  Everyone’s stunned.  And then it turns out that the coach had been abusing her, she’d told him that she was going to the authorities, and he’d tampered with her test results in an attempt to discredit her.  And the other coaches went along with the faked test results.  Later, it turns out that he’d been abusing another member of the team too.  And others come forward.

At the Olympics, the shock of it all, and the fact that the team’s initially divided over whom they believe, means that, despite being favourites, they fail to win a medal in the team event.  But Audrey pulls them all together, and they succeed in the individual events.  And all the other competitors, and everyone in the crowd, shows that they believe the girls who’ve come forward, and that they support them.   It’s a bit too “tidy”, but, OK, it is a novel.

I’m not an expert in gymnastics, but the author goes into a lot of detail and it does all seem to be pretty accurate.  And so is everything she says about top level sport in general – the physical and emotional pain involved, as well as the great rewards.  Audrey will be retiring at just 16.  She will probably have issues with her back for the rest of her life.  And there are questions over whether or not the injury could have been prevented had the coaches cared a bit more.  And, after all those years of work, one mistake, or one bit of bad luck, and dreams could be shattered.  I watch a lot of sport.  I’ve seen so many ups and downs.  I can’t even imagine what it must be like for the athletes themselves.

Random point.  How long have leotards been referred to as “leos”?!  Or is this an American thing?  And, just to add to the confusion, Audrey’s boyfriend is called Leo!

One more thing.  The book tries really hard to be diverse.  Audrey is half-Korean.  Of the other three girls in the main team, one is white, one is black and one is Hispanic.  Kudos to the author for doing that, but … it gets a bit much when, say, we’re introduced to their new coach and immediately told that she’s “a white woman”, etc.  I don’t know how you’re supposed to show that you’re including characters of different ethnicities, except in cases where it’s clear from their names, without actually saying so, but it felt a bit clunky sometimes.

This is a very 21st century “young adult” novel.  Incidentally, don’t think the term “young adult” even existed when I was in the age group for which the book’s aimed.   And, as I’ve said, it’s really very good.

 

 

 

 

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

   This book’s won rave reviews and the Pulitzer Prize, so I was expecting to think it was brilliant; but I’m afraid I didn’t really get it.  I was expecting historical fiction, and that’s what it seemed to be at the beginning; but it then turned into … I’m not sure if it was meant to be an alternative history or sci-fi or an allegory or what, but it just wasn’t what I was expecting.  Each to their own and I’m sure that a lot of people will love this book, but it wasn’t for me.

I’ve read this prior to watching the TV adaptation of it, now showing on Amazon Prime. That’s been praised, as well as the book.  However, concern’s been expressed about the plethora of Auschwitz novels appearing in recent years, and I understand that concern is now growing about the number of films and TV series about slavery in the US.  It’s hard to strike a balance which draws attention to difficult aspects of the past without portraying the history of a particular demographic group as nothing but trauma; but I hope that people aren’t going to criticise individual authors and directors, all of whom I’m sure have genuinely good intentions.  You can’t do right for doing wrong, sometimes.

This started with a young woman, Cora, who was a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia.  It wasn’t entirely clear when it was meant to be set – there were some references that suggested particular dates, but they weren’t consistent.  We heard about her family history, her grandmother being brought from Africa as a slave, and her mother escaping, and we also saw some of the horrors of life on a plantation with a cruel overseer and a cruel master.   Then Cora and a male friend, Caesar, decided to try to escape.  We then heard about a slave catcher, who was determined to catch Cora because her mother had eluded him, and we heard a bit about how being a slave catcher seemed like a good job for a thug with little hope of getting a well-paid job elsewhere.  So that was all very interesting, and that tied in with what I was expecting.  So far, so good.

But then it all moved away from history.  The Underground Railroad became an actual physical underground railroad.  First of all, Cora went to South Carolina, and found that medical schools there were conducting experiments on former slaves: presumably this was meant to put the reader in mind of Josef Mengele.  Then on to North Carolina, which had abolished slavery but was pursuing an ethnic cleansing programme of trying to create al all-white state.  Then she was captured, but escaped, and got to Indiana, which we were told was a former slave state, and lived in some kind of commune.  And then she headed out west – American destiny, Go West?  There’d already been references to the expulsion of Native Americans from lands taken by white settlers.

I’m sure it was all very well-written, and very clever if you like that sort of thing, but it just wasn’t for me.  I was looking for a book about someone reaching freedom with the help of the real Underground Railroad, i.e. the one which wasn’t a literal underground railroad bit was a network of people trying to help escaped slaves.  It started off with a very powerful depiction of the horrors of slavery, but I just couldn’t really take much from the rest of it because I knew that it wasn’t based on reality.

I’ll still watch the TV series, but I don’t really get this sort of alternative/fantasy/sci-fi history.  I don’t particularly get Game of Thrones, but at least that’s not messing about with such an emotive subject.  But, hey, life, would be boring if we were all into the same thing.

 

The Boleyns: A Scandalous Family – BBC 2

Just as if there haven’t been eleventy billion programmes about Anne Boleyn already, BBC 2 have decided that we need some more.  Why talk about any one of the zillions of fascinating but neglected historical figures when you can talk about someone who’s already been (apologies for the bad pun) done to death?   Yes, all right, I didn’t *have* to watch it, but I always watch historical programmes!  Incidentally, is it me or does the woman playing Anne Boleyn look strangely like Wallis Simpson?

Having said all that, this first episode was really rather interesting, because, rather than just talking about the goings-on of Anne, George and Mary, much of it was about Thomas Boleyn’s career as a diplomat, and his dealings with some of the fascinating Continental figures of the time.  He never got to meet Ferdinand of Aragon or the wonderfully-nicknamed Philip the Handsome, but he got rather pally with Margaret of Austria, daughter of the opportunistic Maximilian and sister of the aforementioned Philip, the first of the various female Habsburg regents of the Netherlands.  And he also got to meet Louis XII and Francis I of France.  The dealings of Henry VIII and Francis I always make me laugh.  Talk about “mine’s bigger than yours”.

Also, there was a lot of talk about Cardinal Wolsey.  My best ever mark for an A-level history essay was for one about Cardinal Wolsey, so, for that wholly irrational reason and no other, I’ve got a bit of a soft spot for him.

This series is claiming to be a bit different by focusing on the Boleyn family rather than just on Anne.  And calling them “A Scandalous Family” is really rather unfair.  Yes, Anne, her sister Mary and her brother George were all involved in a number of real and invented scandals, but let’s give the Boleyns a bit of credit for making it to court in the first place, given that, only a few generations earlier, they’d been a family of tradespeople.  Anne’s father and grandfather climbed the greasy pole by marrying aristocrats, but they wouldn’t have been in the position to do that if they hadn’t already done well for themselves.  The courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII weren’t exactly what you’d call meritocratic, but look at the backgrounds of some of the big names there.  Cardinal Wolsey, son of a butcher from Ipswich.  Thomas Cromwell, son of a blacksmith/pub landlord from Putney.   A bit of luck and a bit of nous and there were chances to get in there; and that’s what the Boleyns did.

The programme did make this point, but it contradicted itself all the way through.  We were repeatedly told that the only way into the inner circle at court was through being a member of the aristocracy, and that Thomas Boleyn’s only chance of promotion was therefore through the assistance of his wife’s relatives, the Howards.  But we were also repeatedly told that Wolsey, the butcher’s son, was far more powerful and influential than the Howards were, that being associated with the Howards was actually pretty risky because they kept narking the king, and that Thomas Boleyn got ahead through his own savviness and the friendship of Wolsey.

And it was through his own charm that he persuaded Margaret of Austria to give young Anne a place at her court, and through his own savviness again that he saw that the wind was blowing in favour of an English alliance with France and got Anne a place at the French court.   Anne, equally savvy, made the most of it.

Mary, by contrast, was portrayed as pretty much being pushed into Henry’s bed by Wolsey, who was made to sound like a glorified pimp, scouring the court for pretty women and giving them no choice but to become Henry’s mistresses.  I don’t think that that was a very fair portrayal of what happened, from anyone’s viewpoint.

So, all in all, this wasn’t overly impressive – too many contradictions, and some rather odd takes on things.  But it was still worth watching – whether the second and third episodes, which will presumably just regurgitate all the Mary/Anne/George stuff that’s been said a million times before, will be equally worth watching, remains to be seen.

Come on, BBC.  The Tudors are not the only royal dynasty in English or British history.  Let’s have a few programmes about some of the others, please!

 

Write Around The World – BBC 4

This second episode in Richard E Grant’s exploration of three areas of Europe and the books associated with them (lucky Richard E Grant – I always spend ages reading books about anywhere to which I’m travelling, but it’s now 20 months since I’ve been outside Britain) saw Richard travelling around the South of France.   The first book on his list was one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s less well-known books, “Travels with a donkey in the Cevennes”, about his own journeys.  Stevenson’s donkey had been called Modestine.  Hey, that rang a bell!  Yes, I’d definitely heard of that book.  Gosh, was I cultured and well-educated or what?  Then it dawned on me that the only reason I’d heard of it was that, in “Exploits of the Chalet Girls”, the Chalet School borrows a donkey to star in its Nativity Play, and Head Girl Jo Bettany nicknames it “Modestine” after the one in Stevenson’s book.  I hadn’t the first clue what the actual book was about, other than what it said in the title.  So much for being cultured and well-educated.  Oh well.

This sort of thing has happened a few times recently.  Another example was when an book from the 1860s, “Mopsa the Fairy”, was mentioned, and I thought I’d heard of it … until I realised that I only knew the name because it was given to one of Amy Ashe’s dolls in “What Katy Did Next”.  I always thought that Amy had just made it up.  Another of Amy’s dolls was called Effie Deans, and, whilst I do now know that Effie is a central character in Walter Scott’s “Heart of Midlothian”, I certainly didn’t when I first read the “Katy” books, and, TBH, I think I was into my teens before I realised that “Heart of Midlothian” was a book as well as a football team.  Oh, and yet another of Amy’s dolls was called Peg of Linkinvaddy, and I still don’t know where that name came from.  I’ve just tried doing a Google search on it, but, for some very strange reason, I got a load of answers about, er, male medical issues.

Then there was Ellen Tree, the name given by the March girls in “Little Women” to a fallen branch which they use as a pretend horse.  Ellen Tree was the name of a 19th century British actress.  Did you know that?  No, nor did I until recently.  I’m making myself sound ridiculously ignorant, aren’t I?  I may not have read the donkey book, but I read both “Kidnapped” and “Treasure Island” as a kid, and I can still recite most of “From A Railway Carriage” after being forced to learn it off by heart by an old-fashioned primary school teacher who thought that making kids learn poetry off by heart was still appropriate in the 1980s.

Anyway, we learnt a bit about the Cevennes, and how the Presbyterian-raised Stevenson got stressed out about having to kip in a Catholic monastery because there was nowhere else to stay.   Then we moved on to Marseille, and the prison which inspired Dumas to write “The Count of Monte Cristo”.  I know all about Dumas.  “One for all and all for one, Muskehounds are always ready” … er, OK, I did actually know the story of the Count of Monte Cristo!   Blue sky, blue sea.  Lucky Richard.

Next up, “Tender is the Night” by F Scott Fitzgerald.  Er, I’m afraid that I didn’t know this one.  I did once get a good mark for an essay about F Scott Fitzgerald, although I’m not sure why because I got completely off the point and started waffling about the American Civil War in the middle of it. I don’t really get Fitzgerald. I didn’t get that Leonardo di Caprio film adaptation of “The Great Gatsby” either.  Anyway, this gave Richard an excuse to swan about at very posh hotels on the French Riviera, so it made for rather good viewing.

And then on to Carol Drinkwater, who used to be in “All Creatures Great and Small”, and her books about growing olives in Provence, where she now lives with her French husband.  This was lovely.  I don’t actually like olives, but I love olive groves.  Not quite as much as I love lemon groves and orange groves, but even so.  Gosh, I do miss Southern Europe.  I would give a great deal to be in a Tuscan olive grove just now.  Please, please, let’s get these travel restrictions lifted soon.

And finally, Grasse, the perfume capital of the world.  Ah, lovely!  I love Grasse.  The book concerned was “Perfume”, by Patrick Suskind.  I didn’t know this one, but it sounded very sunny and romantic.  Er, no.  Apparently it was about a man who went around murdering young girls.  Why would you write about so nice a place as Grasse and make it so horrible a story?!   Oh well, we still got to see the parfumeries.

It was a very aesthetically-pleasing programme, and I love the idea of combining books and travel – it’s something I like to do myself.  I just feel sad that I’ve lost two years’ travel opportunities because of this horrible virus.  We only get the legal minimum number of days off work, so it’s not as if I’ll be able to make up for that at such time as, hopefully, overseas travel gets back to some sort of normality.  But it was nice to watch!

Pose (Season 3) – BBC 2

This is the third and final series – or “season”, as our American friends say – of Pose.  It’s going to cover the ongoing difficulties caused by the attitude of religious organisations towards the LGBT community, an area in which, nearly 30 years after this is set, sadly little progress has been made.  And it’s also going to revisit the story of the body in the trunk in the wardrobe: I was really hoping that they’d decided to forget about that, but it seems not!

Well, it’s now 1994, and the gang have reunited to … er, watch O J Simpson being chased by police.  Has anyone ever actually rung their friends to ask them to come round and eat popcorn whilst watching live coverage of a police car chase?!   Oh well, whatever, it worked as a plot device to get everyone together!

The first series, set in the late ’80s, was generally quite upbeat, as we saw people making new lives and forming surrogate families in the ballroom scene in New York, but the second series, set in the early ’90s, was dominated by the effects of the AIDS pandemic.  This series has also started on a downbeat note, as the community continues to lose people to AIDS, others struggle to cope with living with HIV, and a number of major characters turn to drink and drugs.   Meanwhile, the ballroom scene’s becoming increasingly commercialised, and that’s detracting from the community spirit and support that it’s always provided.

However, we’ve got the house mothers doing a superb job of trying to hold it all together – supporting the people who need it, and reminding everyone else of the need to stand by their friends.  A lot of the focus is on the older characters this time, and M J Rodriguez as Blanca, Dominique Jackson as Elektra and Billy Porter as suffering Pray Tell really are putting in very strong performances, as we jump from home scenes to hospital scenes to ballroom scenes.   The 1994 music’s a bit too late for me 🙂 , but never mind!

This has already been shown in America, but I’m not going to try to find out in advance how it ends.  However, I gather that it does end on a positive note, although some characters aren’t going to make it to the last episode.  It’s difficult to find a balance between being too upbeat and being too downbeat when telling the story of a community that’s faced a lot more than its fair share of problems, but this has been really good.  It’s a shame that there isn’t going to be a fourth series, but the producers have said that they feel that this is the right time to stop.  All the best to everyone involved in whatever they do next.

Jungle Cruise

This was great – an ’80s-style good-humoured, action-packed adventure-with-a-bit-of-fantasy film, reminiscent of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Romancing the Stone but with CGI jaguars and scorpions.   In a nod to the 2020s, however, most of the rope-swinging, fighting and shooting was carried out by a female botanist who’d been denied admission to the Royal Society by a load of boring old men, and who also went around liberating captive animals, whilst most of the swooning involved her stock character upper class twit of a brother.  None of it was meant to be taken too seriously though … er, says the person who got upset when they were talking about conquistadors being in Peru 400 years before the Great War.  Lest anyone else get traumatised at the prospect of a film involving people being cursed to live as monsters for 360 years and magical trees providing a cure for all ills not being historically accurate, it should be pointed out that it was later explained that the expedition in question actually took place in the 1550s, so that was all OK.

Our heroine Lily was on the hunt for the legendary Tears of the Moon, a tree with petals that could cure all ills and lift curses – not for self-aggrandisement, but so that she could a) help Britain win the war (this being 1916) and b) work for the general good of mankind, et al.  The legend was that some Spanish conquistadors had tried to find the tree, and had stolen an arrowhead which was the key to its location, but had been cursed by a local tribe so that they could never leave the Amazonian jungle.  The arrowhead had somehow made its way to London and come into the possession of the Royal Society – quite how it had managed that, if the people who stole it couldn’t leave the Amazon, was never explained, but never mind.

Prince Joachim, the dastardly youngest son of the Kaiser, was also after the Tears of the Moon.  After Lily outwitted him and took the arrowhead, he followed her to the Amazon in a submarine, where he was eventually squished by a falling pillar.  It should be noted that none of this was historically accurate 😉 – although the Kaiser’s youngest son was indeed called Prince Joachim.

Lily was accompanied by her twit of a brother, MacGregor, who took along his golf clubs, tennis rackets, expensive booze, numerous changes of clothes, et al – as I said, stock upper class twit character, but he did have his moments of heroism.  It was later explained that he was accompanying Lily because the rest of the family kept trying to force him into marriage with a suitable young lady, and she was the only one who accepted that he wasn’t interested in young ladies.  Sadly, instead of copping off with a handsome Peruvian or Brazilian sailor, he ended up back in London.

Lily and MacGregor were taken up the Amazon by Frank, a wisecracking, tough guy Brazilian boatman who turned out to be Spanish, spoke perfect English with a North American accent, and was being pursed by some Italian mafiosi.  It wasn’t very clear why the Italian mafiosi were in Brazil.  Nor indeed why Lily and MacGregor hadn’t started off in Peru.  But never mind.  Frank spent his time taking rich, gullible American tourists for stage-managed adventures up the Amazon, but he was also after the Tears of the Moon, for reasons which became clear later.

So off we went.  The film was “inspired” by the Jungle Cruise rides at Disneyworld and Disneyland, those wonderful places where we used to go in the days when you could actually travel abroad without it being nearly as much hassle as sailing through dangerous Amazonian rapids and dodging snakes, and so we encountered piranhas, snakes, scorpions, et al.  And we also encountered a tribe of cannibals – who turned out to be play-acting because Frank had paid them to.  I’m so pleased that films like this are still being made, and that the film industry hasn’t been entirely browbeaten by the woke brigade, because I can imagine some people seeing this and screeching about racism and stereotypes and cultural appropriation and “evil” colonialism and so on and so forth, when it wasn’t like that.  The joke was on the gullible American tourists who fell for all Frank’s stage-managed scenes, and the Amazonian tribespeople, with a female leader, were working with Frank and also assisted Lily in overcoming the various baddies.

Anyway, there were numerous dramatic scenes involving rocks, water, snakes, trees, baddies looking like they’d won but then getting their come-uppance – you know the sort of thing.  It was filmed in Hawaii, apparently, and the scenery looked great even if it wasn’t really South America and a lot of it was probably computer-generated!  And, of course, the goodies triumphed in the end.

This was my first visit to the cinema in 17 months.  One moan!  It costs £4.99 for a standard ticket at Vue.  However, if you book online, you get charged a 79p “booking fee” (why??), so, unless I’m going to see something likely to be very busy, I just pay at the till.  However, today I was told that it now cost £5.99 to pay at the till, and was only £4.99 if you booked online.  Er, no.  If you book online it costs £4.99 plus 79p, i.e. £5.78.  So films now do not cost £4.99.  I understand them putting up prices to try to recoup some of the losses suffered over the past 17 months, but I object to them not being honest about it!  Otherwise, everything was fine.  Some people came in wearing masks, but no-one kept them on – but it was early on Sunday morning, so it wasn’t that busy.  I didn’t feel at all uneasy about being there.  And roll on the long-awaited release of the new James Bond film!   As for Jungle Cruise, if the August weather carries on being like this and you’re looking for somewhere to go where you can stay dry, give it a go!

Mrs England by Stacey Halls

A young woman takes a position at a large house in a remote part of Yorkshire, and soon realises that something very strange is going on.  No, there aren’t any mad wives in the attic, and the house doesn’t get burnt to the ground (despite an unexplained incident with a gas leak); but why do both Mr and Mrs England, her employers, act so strangely all the time, why do doors get locked and letters disappear, why is their eldest daughter suddenly sent away to school, what is their connection with the mysterious local blacksmith, and why do they all seem so uncomfortable around Mrs England’s wealthy relatives?  And what is our Norland-trained nanny herself, our protagonist Ruby, hiding about her own family background?

I’m not going to give the game away, but I will say that one character meets a sticky end at Hardcastle Crags, near Hebden Bridge: the location is an important part of the book, and very well-described.

The book never actually mentions Hebden Bridge, just refers to “the town”, although the name is given in the afterword.   Readers from West Yorkshire and East Lancashire will pick up on the location very early on, though: the house is called “Hardcastle House” and there’s a reference to the Rochdale Canal.  Then we are actually told that we’re near Hardcastle Crags, and of course the crags then play a crucial part in how events play out.  Also, the Englands’ mill is obviously Gibson Mill, the mill (now owned by the National Trust) by the crags: it’s a cotton mill rather than a wool mill, unusual on the Yorkshire side of the Pennines, and we’re told at the end that it’s to be turned into an entertainments venue.  The story of the Englands –  with a touch of The Thorn Birds, as well as Jane Eyre – is fictional, but Ruby’s back story is based on real events.

I wonder if the choice of name signifies anything.  You do come across people whose surname is England – football writers used to have great fun with headlines in the days when Mike England was the manager of Wales – but it’s unusual.  It doesn’t seem to have any particular significance, though: I don’t think that the plot would have been any different if the mistress of the house had been called Mrs Bloggs!

It’s a domestic novel, so, if you’re expecting references to the suffragettes, the free trade debate, the Entente Cordiale or anything else relating to 1904-05, when the book’s set, you won’t get it, but it’s very much an Edwardian novel.  Just to be picky, I don’t think that even the wealthiest of Cottontots would have looked down on a lawyer’s son – professions trump trade! – and I’m not sure that anyone at the time would have referred to “West Yorkshire” rather than “the West Riding of Yorkshire”, but that really is me being picky 🙂 .

I did really enjoy this book, and I was very keen to find out the answers to all the mysteries, but I felt that it could have gone a lot deeper.  That’s partly because it’s all told from Ruby’s viewpoint, so we only see the complexities of Mr and Mrs England’s relationship from the necessarily limited perspective of an outsider, but Ruby’s own back story isn’t really integrated into the main plot, and the other characters – the other servants, and Mrs England’s relatives – flit into and out of the story but always seem like they’ve got more to say if they get the chance … which they don’t.

However, I did enjoy it, as I said.  The suspense and the mysteries drew the reader in and I was certainly very keen to find out what was going on; and the descriptions of the area were very well-written.  In fact, I really must pay a visit to Hardcastle Crags and Gibson Mill some time soon.

I had this on my Amazon wishlist, and I was very impressed when the Amazon app on my phone sent me a message to say that it was temporarily on offer, meaning that I got the book for £1.99 when the current price is £10 for the hardback edition or £7.19 for the Kindle edition.  So thank you to the app for that, and thank you to Stacey Halls for another interesting read.