Virago: Family Money by Nina Bawden

 

Yes, it is my goal to read more Australian Women Writers but I have also been collecting Virago Modern Classics or Viragoes for a very long time.  I have trained my son to buy me 2nd hand copies for my birthday and Christmas.  And this year I was lucky enough to participate in the Virago Secret Santa run on Librarything.

So here's my review of the first one of the 12 books I scored this Xmas.

To the best of my knowledge/failing memory, I have not read a Nina Bawden since I was a child. On my kid's bookshelf at home, the only volume I have of Bawden's is The Witch's Daughter. I don't remember reading Carrie's War and I must have liked The Witch's Daughter or I don't think I would have kept it.

This slim volume (at 250pp) is the ideal post-Xmas read. Nothing too demanding or heavy but sufficiently interesting and thought-provoking. I knocked it off in 24 hours. Mostly because I'm under doctor's orders to rest a bit (I have an aggravated shoulder injury) and so what can one do but read?

Bawden wrote this in 1991 when I was pregnant with my first child. It is set in London. Property is the currency of the day and as you can imagine, those with property or the prospect of inheriting property in London would be rubbing their hands together with glee.

Our heroine is Fanny. Fanny has been recently widowed. Her husband was in the diplomatic service so most of their married life has been spent overseas, entertaining and living in quarters with staff.

She is now living in their London pied-a-terre - a somewhat run-down Georgian terrace which, at five storeys, could be considered rather excess to her needs and not wholly suitable for a person who might need a wheelchair or some sort of assisted living in the future.

Fanny is the younger sister to Delia. Fanny was pulled out of school early and sent to secretarial college once it was established she had no great intellect fit for further education.

But Fanny is feisty and has a strong desire to do what is "right". She goes to the aid of a young man who is being bashed in the street late at night on her way home alone from a restaurant and, for her trouble, is knocked unconscious and loses her memory of the inciting incident.

I won't tell you anymore because that would ruin the story. It is, I guess a bit of a thriller, but also a bit more than that. Maybe it's just my age but, as I head towards pensioner-land, I am acutely aware of how, like dominoes, just one accident or slip can lead to a certain vulnerability both physically and mentally. It is so annoying not being as strong or self-sufficient as I used to be. And pain makes you cranky and miserable. As my father says, "Old age ain't for sissies!"

I was particularly fascinated by Bawden's description of Fanny's increasing anxiety. Her description is spot-on; the crippling effect of not being able to go anywhere or do anything because your legs (or rather your mind) just will not take you.

Lest you think this all doom and gloom, I want to assure you that Fanny receives help from some unexpected quarters, including her own gumption and survival instinct.

I was saddened to read that Bawden and her husband were in a very serious train accident in 2002 - the Potters Bar rail crash. Her husband Austen Kark was killed. Bawden suffered a broken ankle, arm, leg, shoulder, collarbone and ribs. Can you imagine? Her testimony was instrumental in ensuring justice for the victims of the crash.

I suspect much of the material in this novel was taken from real life as Bawden's husband was a managing director at the BBC (Fanny's son works for the BBC) and Fanny lives on a canal as did Bawden and her husband at Islington.

I commend Family Money to you.

Book Review - The Overlanders by Dora Birtles

I picked up The Overlanders as my first read for 2020 for a number of reasons.  It was on my TBR list last year (but never got read), it was a reasonably slim volume at 212 pages (achievable) and it was also a Virago (of which I read precisely zero last year - sad face). 

Early on in my reading, I reported to my son I was already enjoying it despite being only being nine pages in; “Let’s watch the movie together. It could be fun.” I said.  “Read the book first,” he intoned “The movie might spoil it.”  We tend to assume the book was written before the movie was made but in this case, it was quite the reverse.  Dora Birtles was originally employed as a researcher by the movie’s producer/writer Harry Watt.  Her role grew to become more of script adviser and casting consultant.  The movie was made in 1946 and the book published in 1947.  Dora says: “The book had great success.  Ten editions.  I got a station wagon, one of the first six in Australia, out of it.  No more bicycling.”  The film was also a great success.  Dora called it “The Crocodile Dundee of its time.”

I grew up on a steady diet of Seven Little Australians et al, so the writing is familiar, if sometimes politically incorrect.  Aborigines are referred to as Abos or blacks.  It’s set during WWII and the Japanese are called Japs.  But the female characters are strong and hardy.  They can catch and throw down a steer when required and head off a stampeding mob; very satisfying indeed.

Dora reminds us that “Patriots in Sydney were very fond of Russia in those days. At that time the Russians retreating from the German eastern offensive were said to be destroying what they could not carry with them.”  The filmmakers wanted to create a story that would enshrine the scorched earth policy and is based on a real cattle trek that happened during the war.  Apparently, the Minister for Food’s slogan was “Bully beef not bullets” but I'm having trouble finding that easily in Trove.  An army marches on its stomach and all that.

So why, in this day and age, read this book?  Well, for a start, it’s a cracking good read.  The plot is compelling and rolls you along from one drama to the next.  There’s fording of rivers, trapping of brumbies, stampedes, broken bones, daring rescues and impossible feats of bravery and above all dogged perseverance, laced with dry humour. 

Birtles builds her characters up beautifully, from the somewhat gormless, shell-shocked Scottish sailor who abandons ship in Wyndham and decides to try droving, despite never having ridden a horse, to the wily old cattleman/trickster, Corky aka J. Claverhouse Corkingdale aka Jimmy the Snoot who realizes his droving days are numbered and is desperately looking for a get-rich-quick scheme.

Birtles’ language of the day had me googling furiously, looking up Rolls Royce station wagons: did such things really exist?  Yes, they did!  What on earth is a thorough brace waggon?  And so on.  But I enjoyed the hunt and I loved the writing.  Here’s a particularly evocative description of the homestead:

“He went in for a last look around the kitchen, opening the shallow drawer at the far end of the white-scrubbed kitchen table.  Ma’s cookery books lay in it.  He took one out, the mottled-covered, thick exercise book in which she had written out every special recipe ever since they were married, with the donor’s name on the top of every recipe.  It was like a garland of Ma’s friendships through the years: Rosa’s sago plum pudding and Miss Woodget’s special orange cake. “

Above all, there’s passion and love for the country which rang particularly true for me during these heartbreaking times.  Here is an impassioned speech by Dan McAlpine, the drover, which you could be forgiven for thinking was taken from an Extinction Rebellion protestor today:

“Exploitation’s wrong.  That’s the trouble with the whole caboodle down south.  That’s the trouble with the whole of this country from the coast to inland.  We’ve torn the heart out of it.  We’ve lost the timber and we’re losing the soil.  We’re losing the rivers and we’re losing the grass.  All these get-rich-quick exploiters think of nothing but money, how to make money as quickly as possible, and now how Australians are going to live twenty, thirty years from now.  Exploit men if you like, they can fight back, but the land can’t fight back.  Punish it too much and it gives up.  The desert creeps in.  I love the Territory too much to see it go the way of a lot of the rest of this country.  And it won’t take so long to ruin it.  It’s a peculiar country.  It’s got to be handled right by people who know it and can use it to the best advantage for the future as well as themselves.”

Australia’s population lives mostly on the eastern coast of Australia, clinging to its edge like limpets and bearing a deep love for the mysterious “outback”; rugged but beautiful terrain which is mostly inhospitable to humans.  You can imagine our real terror when we face the loss of what is usually considered “safe” country – the coastal strip - and are faced with the large, empty abyss of the interior.  Birtles’ tale reminds us that we have faced testing times before and that our national character will stand us in good stead in the toughest of times. Here's one more quote from her Afterword:

"War breeds a strange state of mind.  There is all the anxiety, the fear, the dread, the burdens of being alive and keeping going and the sudden need of pleasure, of real friendships, of hilarity.  In that climate, we made The Overlanders."

I hope you enjoy this book as much as I did.

PS I have since tried to find the movie on the net.  I looked for it on Kanopy, SBS On Demand, ABC iView, Netflix, Stan etc.  I could only find it on Daily Motion which is just hideous, full of ads, so I can only recommend that you try finding a copy at your local library or, in Australia, at one of the National Film and Sound Archives' Access Centres.  Gold Coast City Council Library has a copy on DVD which I have ordered or keep an eye out for it on free-to-air.  It's sure to pop up again sometime soon. 

Smile!

It is Virago Reading Week this week hosted by the lovely Rachel at Book Snob and Carolyn at A Few of my Favourite Books .  I was meant to be reading I Will Not Serve by Eveline Mahyere but I seem to have mislaid it - silly me - so I am reading F Tennyson Jesse's The Lacquer Lady instead.

There are all sorts of competitions this week  running in conjunction with the Virago fest and I of course love entering competitions.  One of them is to take photos of our Virago collection....so here I go.  I don't have many Viragos which is why I'll be hitting the Lifeline Bookfest with a vengeance today...

This photo, believe it or not, took a bit of work.  For a start I've got a pretty clunky camera.  Secondly I don't hold them as still as I used to - not that I'm ancient or anything just hopeless at staying still.  So it took 13 photos to produce one focussed one!!  And what I really want you to look at is the leaf....don't you think it looks like a smile or a mouth?  I do.  I took 13 photos of the wretched thing.  I found it on the carpark stairs at New Farm.  See I am really turning eccentric - picking up leaves because they look like mouths.

I went to a business breakfast yesterday morning and got into conversation with a fellow businessperson.  He asked me if I smile in interviews.  Do I?  I don't know.  I think I do.  Maybe I don't.  I don't have a mirror with me at the time.  Anyway - the point is - Viragos make me smile.  Why?  Because their familiar green cover assures me a good read is inside (and yes, I know the covers have changed) so now it is the logo that assures me - that naughty apple wot Eve gave Adam when all the trubble began.

Trubble does begin with Viragos - washing up doesn't get done, bathrooms don't get cleaned, Men of Wrath are ignored....such trubble it's a wonder the world continues to function whilst we metaphorically eat apples.  Viragos are a window onto someone else's world - I can see, feel and hear their story.  Sometimes I have to look hard or look twice, as I did with my leaf, because the author has found things that I haven't thought of or recognise but the effort is always rewarding.

What makes you smile?  I sit in an office on my own all week so delight in silly things people post on Facebook or on their blogs or send me via email.  This week two videos about animals made me roar with laughter.  I hope you enjoy them.  Animals make me smile all the time.  Aren't we lucky to have them in our world?