The Girl in the Pink Raincoat by Alrene Hughes

This isn’t a particularly well-written book, but it was on a cheap Kindle offer; and there’s an awful lot of local interest in it for anyone from the Manchester area.   It includes some very evocative scenes of the Manchester Blitz.  It also covers the largely-forgotten story of the internment camps at Warth Mills (in Radcliffe, near where Newbank Garden Centre is now), where many members of the local German/Austrian-Jewish and Italian communities were taken during the Second World War, and how many of them were tragically killed when the SS Arandora Star, taking them to Canada, was torpedoed.   There are also some vivid descriptions of Heaton Park before the war, of town, and of the factories both in the Strangeways area and in Trafford Park.

The storyline’s not particularly convincing, but it’s all right.   Gracie Earnshaw works in a raincoat factory, where she becomes involved with the boss’s nephew, Jacob Rosenberg.   His family aren’t keen, because he’s Jewish and she isn’t, but the two agree to marry … only for him to be taken off to an internment camp just as she was waiting at the registry office.   Without wanting to post spoilers, the story then develops with two other men, with an unlikely switch from war work to working in the theatre, and with a secret long kept by Gracie’s mother.

It’s not the best of books, as I said, but it’s worth reading for the descriptions of the local area and the local communities, and also for the inclusion of the story of the Warth Mills camp.  The author makes good use of real events, and her descriptions of Manchester are very much Manchester.  Overall, not bad!

The Great (second series) – Channel 4

This really is a load of rubbish, and yet it’s strangely watchable, because it’s so bad!   I was going to say that it was like a very crude Carry On film; but Carry On films are funny, and this is just stupid.   They’ve deliberately got all the history of Catherine the Great’s life wrong, even things which could have been got right without altering the script, e.g. Catherine’s husband being Peter’s grandson (they’ve said that he’s Peter’s son).

At the start of the second series, Catherine has succeeded in overthrowing Peter – but she’s expecting their heir, who was actually born several years earlier.  And the set-up in this bonkers programme is that Catherine rules part of the palace, but Peter and his supporters are holed up in one wing.  No-one seems concerned with such trivial matters as running the Russian Empire or foreign policy.   Peter has a number of lookalikes, who keep getting shot, and there’s a lot of arguing over food.  And dead bodies are hanging around.  And at one point there was a crocodile running round the court.

It’s so bad.  It’s terrible.  And yet it’s worth watching just to marvel at how bad it is!

Alex by Tessa Duder

 

Having watched a lot of swimming during the Commonwealth Games and European Aquatics Championships, I decided to look for a “Girls’ Own”-type book on the subject, and people kindly recommended this one, written in the 1980s but set in the 1950s, by New Zealand Empire and Commonwealth Games silver medallist Tessa Duder.  Fifteen-year-old schoolgirl Alex wants to make the New Zealand swimming squad for the 1960 Olympics, but there’s only room for either her or her rival Maggie Benton, and Maggie seems to have the advantage.

Unlike a lot of fictional characters, who are entirely devoted to music, ballet, ice-skating or whatever it may be, and have to be persuaded to do other things too, Alex wants to be in the school play, be in the school hockey team, do ballet, pass her piano exams, do well in her School Certificate and also spend time with her boyfriend Andy.

Like a lot of fictional characters, she suffers an accident (in a hockey match) which upsets her training, but it isn’t really a big deal: she just gets on with things.  And we don’t even see that much of her actually in the pool.  So it’s quite an unusual book.  And very 1980s – first person, lots of internal monologue and short half-sentences, and a lot of angst and anxiety.  Alex isn’t super-confident like so many heroines of books are, and spends a lot of time worrying about all aspects of her life and about what other people think of her.

Also, this is national news.  This isn’t just a tale of someone at a school: there’s continuous press coverage of the rivalry between the two girls, who actually get on OK.

Then something truly horrific happens, but Alex vows that it’ll drive her on … but, instead of a big showdown at the end, we’re just told that both Alex and Maggie will be going to the Olympics.   That ending was inevitable, but it’s strange that it just happens like that, rather than with a dramatic account of a very close race.

It’s very 1980s, as I’ve said.  Had it been written in the 1950s or the 1920s, there’d have been a big showdown at the end.   And Alex would probably have been devoted to swimming at the expense of everything else, or maybe had to choose between swimming and one other thing.   Quite unusual.  But I did really enjoy it.  Thank you so much to the people who recommended it!

 

 

 

Wonderland – Sky Arts

This series is an interesting look at the “Golden Age” of British children’s literature.  That’s obviously an extremely subjective topic, but the twelve authors specifically mentioned were J M Barrie, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Lewis Carroll, Erskine Childers (the only one with whose books I’m not really familiar), Kenneth Grahame, Rudyard Kipling, A A Milne, E Nesbit, Beatrix Potter, Arthur Ransome, Noel Streatfeild and J R R Tolkien.  The idea was to cover the 71-year-period from the publication of Alice in Wonderland  in 1866 to the publication of Lord of the Rings in 1937.  You can argue at length about who should and shouldn’t have been included: a four-part series can only cover so many authors.   And they’d chosen quite a range of authors, meaning that most of what was said only applied to some of them: you can’t really compare Ballet Shoes with The Hobbit, or Toad of Toad Hall with Swallows and Amazons.  But a lot of thought-provoking comments were made.

The starting point was chosen as being when children’s books moved from moralising to entertainment; and they had to choose an end point somewhere … even though it meant excluding both Enid Blyton and C S Lewis.  The fact that the authors were all so different inevitably made the programme rather bitty – Ransome’s dealings with Lenin and Trotsky one minute, AA Milne’s differences with his son Christopher Robin the next – but I don’t know how else they could have done it.  Carroll, Ransome and Milne were discussed at some length in the first episode: presumably it’ll be three authors apiece in the three remaining episodes.

For a few awful moments, I thought that the whole thing was going to consist of the woke brigade slagging off all the old favourites, BBC 2-style – but one of the speakers made a point about how annoying it is when people do that, and how it’d be better to discuss any class or racial issues which people may find in the books, without just slagging the books off and saying that kids shouldn’t read them.  Hooray for a bit of common sense!   Another point made was that there are now abridged versions of classic books available for younger children, and how those tend to miss out the “nasty” bits – because all these books have difficult bits, and don’t just set out to create idylls for children to enjoy.

It was suggested that some authors saw childhood as a “protected area”, but others thought that children deserved more respect than they often got.  And a lot of comments were made about how many of the featured authors had suffered tragedies in their own lives, often involving children or their own childhoods- was that why they chose to write children’s books?

A good point was that rural locations are, in most cases, preferred to urban locations – Streatfeild’s books being an obvious exception.   It’s sometimes suggested that that was part of the mentality brought about by trying to recover from the Great War, but even the books written pre-1914 tend to be set in rural areas.  Are the books meant to be a safe space, and is that connection with rural settings?   Or are they meant to be challenging?  Well, probably a bit of both.  Beatrix Potter’s books, with their sweet little illustrations, can be very scary!

There was certainly quite a lot to think about.  My preferred childhood books were the “Girls’ Own” books of the mid-20th century, but I read most of the children’s classics as well, and I like hearing them being the subject of in-depth and serious discussion.   I know that some people don’t like detailed analysis of childhood favourites: each to their own, but I do like to talk about them, and I like to think that the authors would be very flattered to know that their books are still were being discussed so many years after they were published.   Thank you to Sky Arts for this: we get a lot of adaptations of children’s books, but not that much talk about them.  Well, there’s plenty of talk about them in our lovely fora and Facebook groups, but it was nice to have some on TV for a change!

ETA – I’ve gone bang off this since the second episode said that Frances Hodgson Burnett grew up in Leeds. She grew up in Manchester! How on earth did they get that wrong?

 

 

 

Mill Green school stories by Alison Prince

  I read these in the 1980s, when they were first published, and suddenly felt a random yearning to read them again.  They’re written by Alison Prince, who was a scriptwriter for Trumpton.   Brief pause to recite the names of the Trumpton firemen.  OK, back to the point.  The early books were advertised as being similar to Grange Hill; and I think Armada’s reasoning was that, because of the success of Grange Hill on TV, young readers wanted school stories set at co-ed, comprehensive day schools, rather than the traditional school stories set at single sex private boarding schools.  They never quite caught on, though, which was a shame because they really weren’t bad at all.

Mill Green is a fairly new and probably fairly small (it only seems to have one form per year, although, confusingly, one book suggests that there are 800 pupils!) school in an unspecified part of the UK – I think it’s Northern England, but it doesn’t say and they aren’t many clues.  The school itself is in the middle of nowhere, with pupils travelling in by bus from nearby towns and buses.  The bus trips are a big part of the day, which was very much the case at my school but which you obviously don’t get in boarding school novels.  They focus on a group of first years, who later go into the second year, with older kids only really featuring as bullies picking on the younger kids.   A small number of teachers also feature, notably Mr Potter, our gang’s form master; and parents feature in minor roles.

The books wouldn’t win any awards for the quality of writing: the  word “said” appears umpteen times on every page.  However, the main characters are appealing, and the stories, whilst only short, make for entertaining reading.  They aren’t particularly moralising, as traditional school stories are, nor hard-hitting as some of Grange Hill’s are, but they’re strong enough to keep the reader’s attention.  Each book involves a school project/extra-curricular activity, plus a bit of a mystery.  There’s a slight feeling of the Five Find Outers about solving the crimes and mysteries.  In the first book, the school’s trying to promote gardening/farming in the grounds, and there’s an arsonist on the loose.  In the second book, the school’s putting on a pantomime, and there’s a new girl who clearly isn’t what she claims to be.  And so on.

There are only five books in total.   I enjoyed them in the 1980s and I enjoyed reading them again.   But, whilst American books set in “ordinary” schools – Judy Blume, Paula Danziger, etc – seem to go down well, these just didn’t catch on in the way that boarding school books did, and it wasn’t because of a lack of marketing by Armada.   Maybe kids in the UK just prefer reading traditional school stories.

There are five in all:

Mill Green on Fire
Mill Green on Stage
A Spy at Mill Green
Hands off Mill Green!
Rock on, Mill Green

They’re very 1980s, with a lot of the emphasis being on the technology of the time.  I don’t know what kids of the 2020s would make of that!   But they’re really not bad, as I’ve said, and it’s a shame that they never became more popular.  I’ve enjoyed revisiting them..

 

Matrix by Lauren Groff

Marking Manchester Pride, in a month which has also seen the first ever local Prestwich Pride event, this is a review of a book about a lesbian woman in medieval England.   It’s an extremely odd book, actually: there’s a long section about the main character at 17, and then she jumps from being 17 to being 47 within the space of a few pages.   Also, it’s written in the present tense, which is very annoying, and uses some bits of American slang with which British readers may be unfamiliar.  It’s an interesting story, though, about an abbess who makes her abbey into a self-contained, self-sufficient, all-female world.

Marie de France was the first woman to write French poetry, some of it quite controversial in that it was often about adultery and or female power.   However, very little’s known about her.  She was born in France, spent much of her life in England, was known at the court of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, and must have been of noble birth as lower-class women wouldn’t have had the education shown by her work.  That’s about all that’s known, so the story is effectively Lauren Groff’s invention.

She casts Marie as an illegitimate half-sister of Henry II, dispatched to an English convent as a prioress, where she later becomes abbess.  So far, it’s as likely a story as any.

But it becomes a story about an all-female world.  Marie bans men from the convent: the sons of female servants are not even allowed into the grounds, and male beggars seeking alms have to go to a separate building nearby.   Meanwhile, she changes the idea of work being a means of bringing humility to an idea of work being a positive thing: the nuns are assigned tasks to which they’re well-suited, and the convent becomes largely self-sufficient thanks to its successful farming and gardening.  They even have female blacksmiths and carpenters.  That much is OK, but she won’t let priests or monks in, and administers the sacraments herself.  Surely there’s no way that she’d have got away with that?

Marie has quite a negative view of men, possibly because her birth related from Geoffrey Plantagenet raping her mother.  She’s always aware of the danger from violent men.  And she was then forced off her mother’s family’s lands by male relatives who wanted them for themselves.  She behaves in quite a domineering way herself, collecting rents from tenants who can’t really afford to pay, but we learn that she admires powerful women –  the Empress Matilda, the first person to show her kindness after her mother’s death, and then Eleanor of Aquitaine with whom she’s secretly in love.  She dedicates her poems to Eleanor, as a male troubadour would do.

Even the women of the Bible are brought into it: Marie has visions of Eve and of the Virgin Mary, and they tell her to build a labyrinth to keep the abbey safe from the outside world.  The women build it themselves, but the outside world is angry, thinking that they must have some sort of treasure which they want to keep hidden away.   Is there meant to be some sort of parallel with Rosamund’s Bower, built to keep a woman safe for a man?   And are we meant to be thinking that this is, by now, the troubled world of Richard I’s reign, the world of Robin Hood?   I don’t know, because neither Rosamund nor Robin get mentioned, but I’m just putting the ideas out there!   By this point, Marie is all-powerful at the abbey: the other nuns do her bidding, and she’s in regular correspondence with Eleanor.  Later, outside events – Richard I’s capture, and the Interdict in John’s time – do get more of a mention.  That does make the book more believable and more a part of the real world, as the abbey has to pay over part of its wealth to help meet Richard’s ransom.

It’s an unusual and sometimes fascinating  story about a world of medieval women, but I don’t know that it could actually have happened.  I don’t actually think it’s intended to be 100% realistic, but I’m a historian so I look for realism!

It wasn’t really my thing, because I like historical fiction to be “real”; but it kept my attention, and it’s worth a try if you’re looking for something a bit different.

Red Rose – BBC 3

  I don’t usually watch supernatural or horror things, but I’m watching this because it’s set just up the road in Bolton.  It showcases Bolton brilliantly: there’ve been some great shots of the town and its moorland outskirts.  And it’s surprisingly gripping.   We’ve got a very believable and well-acted group of teenagers, looking forward to a summer of fun after finishing their GCSEs, but with friendships being tested by romantic relationships and tensions over who is and isn’t in with the in crowd.

One girl, Rochelle, having a hard time due to family problems, downloads what seems like a fun app.  It’s so, so easy to do.  The link cleverly “phishes” her by purporting to come from a friend.  and, having drawn her in by giving her money and presents, it then starts using her phone to photograph and record what she’s doing, issuing orders and threats, and making it clear that it knows all about her.

Whilst there’s a strong paranormal element to the story, the idea of an app taking over your life by taking over your phone is frighteningly easy to imagine.  Soon, the app has destroyed Rochelle and moved on to her best friend.

Red Rose is the name of the app – the symbol of Lancashire, and also a motif in several fairytales and adaptations thereof.   Clever choice of name.  And the viewers know that it’s already caused the death of a teenage girl in Manchester, but the teenage gang in Bolton don’t.

It’s scary.  And very cleverly done.  I’m really looking forward to seeing how this develops.  It’s made a promising start.

The Newsreader – BBC 2

 

It’s rather worrying that no-one under 40 will even be able to remember 1986, the year in which this series is set.  It’s also rather worrying that Madge from Neighbours featured in the second episode as a woman who remembered seeing Halley’s Comet in 1910.   Surely Madge is only in her mid-50s?!   (The actress is now 79!)   This is the first newsreader drama I’ve watched since Drop The Dead Donkey.  That was a comedy: this is more of a soap opera.  So, are nervous male lead Dale and struggling female lead Helen going to live happily ever after, or is it going to turn out that he’s gay but not out?

There hasn’t been much obvious ’80s nostalgia – not much music, and neither the hairdos nor the shoulder pads are that big! – but revisiting the main news stories of early 1986 has been interesting, and seeing how much technology’s changed since then is frightening!

The characters get your attention even if they aren’t, and presumably aren’t meant to be, very appealing.   They’ve all got things going on. It rather laboured the point about racism, sexism and homophobia in ’80s workplaces but, TBH, there *was* a lot of it around.

I’m enjoying this, and look forward to seeing where it goes.

Meg and Jo by Virginia Kantra

  This is a “modern day retelling” of Good Wives, as the title suggests.  I’m not a great fan of this genre, because it feels as if someone’s just exploiting someone else’s clever ideas, and only read this as part of a Facebook group reading challenge, but I have to say that it was rather cleverly done.  Meg and Jo’s stories probably translate better to the present day than those of many “Girls’ Own” heroines would, because Louisa M Alcott told them so realistically.  In a lot of books, growing up is the difficult part, and setting up home, managing a budget, adapting to living with a partner, looking after young children and or establishing a career just come naturally and easily.  Not so for Meg and Jo, and that’s why they work well in the 21st century, having the same struggles as many other women in their 20s and 30s.

The action has been moved not only from the 1860s to the 2010s but from Massachusetts to North Carolina.  I’m not sure whether that’s because the author lives in North Carolina and preferred a Southern setting or because Massachusetts tends to be at the forefront of culture wars and therefore might not have fitted in with the story, but I thought it was a bit of a shame.  The Marches belong to New England.

Beth and Amy have got their own book, and only appear briefly in this – Amy as an intern with Louis Vuitton, later becoming a handbag designer, and Beth as a country and western singer who becomes a YouTube sensation (seriously?!).  I’m not sure that I fancy that book: it sounds a bit OTT.

This one works OK, though.  Meg has worked in a bank but is now a housewife, with young twins Daisy and DJ, and Jo is living in New York, writing a food blog and working in a restaurant whilst trying to get her books published.   Laurie, rechristened Trey (again, seriously?!), works at a car dealership owned by Mr Laurence, along with John Brooke, still hopes to get back with his high school sweetheart Jo, who only wants him as a friend.  He’s not really involved, though.  Presumably he features more in the Beth and Amy book.

Mr March is an army chaplain, and Mrs March runs her late parents’ farm and does everything for everyone else … rather less sanctimoniously than Marmee ever did.  There are no dead canaries, and no-one guilt trips Meg for wearing a fancy frock.  In fact, Mrs March helps with the dresses for the ball … which has become a school prom on which Meg looks back.   And she’s very much presented as the person who holds it all together, and Mr March as being selfish and only considering what works for him.

That’s an interesting interpretation.  I often think like that about Pa Ingalls, but I’ve never really thought of Mr March as always putting himself first.  Maybe that’s because a) Little Women’s set in wartime, so volunteering as an army chaplain seemed selfless and b) we don’t know how he lost his money.   But this book doesn’t offer an explanation for the loss of the money either.  It just casts Mr March as someone who’s far more concerned about his work than about his family.  Maybe he’s based more on the real life Mr Alcott than on Mr March?  That would makes sense, but it wasn’t what I was expecting.  Mr March in the Little Women books is a Good Egg, if rather patronising towards his daughters.

Professor Bhaer is now plain Eric Bhaer, the head chef at Jo’s workplace, and they get together after various misunderstandings.   That all translates to the present day quite well.  Various other characters, notably Aunt March and Sallie Gardiner, also appear.  Hannah is recast as a kindly neighbour.   And Fred Vaughn as a singer in a British boy band whom Amy followed on You Tube.  That really was a bit silly.  No Hummels.

BTW, is the term “family meal” a thing in the US now?  We have endless arguments in England over whether your evening meal is tea (we Northerners), dinner (ordinary Southerners) or supper (posh Southerners), but “family meal” is a new one on me!

To get back to the point, a lot of the story revolves around Mrs March being ill and Meg being the one to look after her, so that’s *not* from Good Wives, but the characters of Meg and Jo and how their lives are going very much are.   And it says a lot about the timelessness of the original story that that comes across so well in a book set nearly 150 years after it.

It’s well-written, but doesn’t quite have Louisa M Alcott’s charm.   Without the Good Wives connection, it’d just be basic chicklit – which isn’t a bad thing, just not something I’d usually read.  But, *with* the connection, it was far better than I was anticipating.  I suppose it doesn’t hurt to try something different sometimes!

India in 1947: Partition in Colour – Channel 4

It would have been nice if, to mark the 75th anniversary of “Freedom at Midnight”, one of our TV channels had shown a programme focusing on everything that India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have achieved since independence.  But no.  Instead, we have to rake over whether or not Nehru was having it off with Edwina Mountbatten, and slag off Mountbatten, Nehru and Jinnah for not making a better job of an impossible situation.   Don’t get me wrong: the violence and the refugee crisis that followed partition was horrific.   But something focusing on the more positive aspects of independence, and the 75 years since then, would have been a lot more welcome.  The colourised pictures were interesting to see, but only really formed a backdrop for the negative narrative.

No-one got a good press in this, but, as I’ve said, it was an impossible situation by 1947.  I’m not sure that anyone could have done much better, and I’m not sure how helpful it was just to go on about the alleged faults of the three main leaders.  Gandhi, incidentally, was completely ignored.

Mountbatten was slagged off over the partition plan, but the programme claimed that he had nothing to do with it anyway, and it was all the work of the civil service.   Both Mountbatten and Nehru were slagged off for having a close personal relationship and leaving Jinnah out in the cold.  Or, rather, out in the heat, when the others took off to the Hills.  And of fiddling the border decisions to suit India.

Jinnah didn’t get a very good press either.  It was pointed out that Islamic fundamentalists tried to assassinate him because they were so angry about partition.   But other Muslims didn’t want to be a minority in a mainly Hindu India.  Jinnah was in a no-win situation: they all were. The programme also talked about complaints regarding the borders, but, wherever the borders had been, a lot of people would still have felt that they had to move.

Even the British Army came in for criticism.   Excuse me, but how were 50,000 troops supposed to deal with violence on such a scale? And the head of the Boundary Commission was criticised for having dysentery.  Oh, and for not being “an Alpha Male”.

The one person who got a tiny amount of praise was Edwina Mountbatten, but they were far more interested in her relationship with Nehru than in her work with refugees.

The narrators did concede that, by mid-1947, the fear and violence were out of control, and there wasn’t much that anyone could have done to improve things.   But they just seemed determined to be negative about everything.   The programme didn’t even point out that Freedom at Midnight created the world’s largest democracy.

And it said nothing that we haven’t heard a hundred times before.  I’d far rather have seen a programme about how India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have progressed since 1947, and I’d really have liked to have heard just one word of positivity.   This was almost 100% negativity.  Two hours of negativity.