I’m sorry I didn’t join you all last week. Things happened. I was going to put a post out today saying ‘Temporarily Out of Order’ because as a result I’m so preoccupied, but then I thought ‘Come on, you can do this - for a start it’s heaps more enjoyable than what is taking up your time’. So here I am.
Weatherwise we have been blessed with a little sunshine almost every day, so we’ve managed to walk and do a bit of tidying in the garden, plus we have had my sister for a visit. Which is lovely, but tiring.
I’ve been looking at trees lately. I like to look at trees all year round, but at the moment they are particularly interesting. I like it when the leaves start to drop, enough to start to see the structure of the tree. Beech leaves start to drop fairly early in the season. Leaf drop has a lovely sibilant name: abscission. Abscission. Ssssss. Surprisingly, abscission starts in the spring, when a layer of cells—the abscission layer—forms where the leaf joins the stem during the active new growth of the leaf. The trees also have a hormone called auxin which it produces in line with the growth of the tree, and as long as the auxin levels are steady the abscission cells remain connected and the leaves stay on the tree. And then, autumn comes along; the days get shorter, the temperatures start to drop, and auxin levels fall. As a result, the cells in the abscission layer get a bit wonky and elongate. The elongation causes the layer to fracture and before the tree knows it, the leaves start to break away from the plant. They fall in the stronger winds, or drop under their own weight. So there you are—leaf fall. Abscission. It’s such a lovely word. In the picture below is a beech tree where leaf drop has just started, showing off the lovely smooth silvery trunk and branches; and below that, an oak tree that is still in full leaf. They’re about 50yards from each other in our local botanic garden.
Fiction reading this week has been another Miss Marple - The Moving Finger - and again, lulled into the sense of Miss Marple’s omnipresence by TV adaptations, I had forgotten that here she doesn’t put in an appearance until almost the end. When, of course, she has the murders solved very readily indeed. Reacquainting myself with Christie is proving to be a delight. Sleeping Murder is next up. Also last week or the week before, there was this post from
reminding us how clever and perspicacious Agatha was, but how irritatingly underestimated.And speaking of Ms Thompson, I’ve just finished reading her 2015 book on the Mitford sisters—Take Six Girls—and thoroughly enjoyed it. Since the 1980s I must have read every book ever written on these six women. My fascination began when a friend lent me a copy of Jessica’s Hons and Rebels and I was entranced and enthralled/appalled by this family. Hons has since been criticised for its ‘borrowing’ from Nancy’s novel The Pursuit of Love, but it started me on the Mitford trail. I have read (and re-read) all of Nancy’s novels, searching for the lesser known ones in second-hand bookshops, collecting them (except Wigs on the Green), in the Hamish Hamilton editions. I love her writing, fiction and non-fiction, it is so undoubtedly her. She is arch, funny, and perfectly of her time and of her society surroundings, which she comments on ruthlessly, and often tongue-in-cheek, in her writing. Her own life did not follow the expected path for the eldest daughter of an aristocrat (‘good’ husband and lots of children), but rather she clawed her way to independence and empowerment through her writing. She always seemed to be enjoying herself and never seemed to feel sorry for herself publicly—noblesse oblige and all that. Laura Thompson’s earlier book about Nancy’s life: Life in a Cold Climate, is an excellent read too, with great insight into the two consuming loves of her life—the city of Paris and Gaston de Palewski—and the cruelty of love. Nancy was also an entertaining and rather good historical biographer of subjects including Louis XIV, Madame de Pompadour, and Frederick the Great. I think you can probably tell that my admiration for Nancy is considerable!
Over the years I have gathered up any and all books about the family—and there are plenty of them, an internet search will reveal a long list. The Six are a fabulous group of subjects—’author, countrywoman, fascist, Nazi, communist and duchess’—they beg to be written and re-written about, and they have been. In Take Six Girls Thompson writes of meeting both Diana and Deborah, fascist and duchess respectively, and I squirmed with envy at such an opportunity to converse with these women with their very different places in the family history. Take Six Girls considers them in a contemporary context, for example, suggesting that were Decca alive today she would be big on Instagram; comparing the fanaticism for heinous political leaders to the fangirling and stalking of today; and confronting the communism, fascism and Hitlerism by placing it in the milieu of the time and their class, allowing us to see how such polarised beliefs developed within an early twentieth century, faintly eccentric, fiercely competitive, aristocratic family isolated deep in the Oxfordshire countryside. And it is as a family that Thompson revisits them, bringing the girls/women alive through the inter-relationships and internal cliques that inevitably formed and influenced each individual. It’s bright and breezy, and a very knowledgeable look at the Mitford Girls by someone whose interest in them is obvious, but who is never less than fearlessly honest about their positions, both socially and politically. It’s tough to write about people like this nowadays, when our contemporary sensibilities are a million miles away from those of the early twentieth century upper classes. These days privilege and wealth is despised, the right wing viewed with disdain and distrust, and it’s hard to imagine the world that these girls lived in, a hundred years ago. It would be easy to write ‘another’ book about the Girls with the simplistic ‘good, good, bad, worse, bad, good’ summary of the privileged and yes, increasingly archaic Six, but this book does not play that game. It is an empathetic and critical look at a complex and complicated family and their varied lives and outcomes. Well worth a read if you’re a Mitford fan, and a good introduction if you’re not.
Perhaps the most revealing book about the Six (in my collection and in my opinion) is written/edited by Charlotte Mosley (Diana’s daughter-in-law), gathering together a selection of their letters between 1925 and 2003. The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters is, as you might expect, full of insights, sisterly gossip, a bit of bitching, a lot of laughing, and the kind of truthful admissions that can only arise in personal letters between them. It exposes these women in all their Bright Young glory, all their tragedy, all their ill-fated choices and stubbornness, their in-jokes and laughter, and all their sadness.
When I lived in Oxford I would sometimes motor out (‘motor out’—listen to me, I’m in full Nancy mode!) to the villages of Asthall and Swinbrook where they spent their young lives, and the churchyard where Nancy, Diana, Unity and Pamela are buried, along with their parents. I always think it rather a shame that Swinford churchyard doesn’t have the full set, as it were. If you’re visiting the Cotswolds, it’s a good place to visit—a quintessential village, the big house, a few cottages, a delightful church and graveyard, a good pub—or it was, a few years ago.
This hour long documentary from 1980 on Youtube, consisting of the remaining sisters talking about Nancy, will either irritate you to death, or interest you. The Mitford voice, their similarities, the stories, the teases, and always the creasing up in laughter. Even in nineteen eighty they seemed as though they were stuck between the wars. It’s fascinating; and each sister plays her part in the Mitford myth.
I shall leave you with those Mitford voices echoing in your head, and a period of time long gone revived for a while.
I’ll write soon. x.
I am so glad you are back here. Abscission is indeed a lovely word and I greatly enjoyed this. I have also just bought the Mitford book and now have the documentary to watch too - thank you!
Hello June! Due to your mention of these Mitford ladies, I just inquired and purchased Jessica Mitford's: Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking. :)