GirlyCon

On Radio 4 Extra the other week, I heard a repeat of an edition of Good Reads in which Harriet Gilbert made Patrick Grant read Penelope Lively. Patrick Grant said his mother's book group read a lot of Penelope Lively but he hadn't ever read any and now he would go and read lots more* (Listen to your mother!). Then I saw a Penelope Lively book in a charity shop and thought I should read it. It turned out that the book in the programme was Heatwave (which I haven't read) and the one I got was Consequences. Consequences is always an ominous title but fortunately this one does not live up to the trauma of E M Delafield. The blurb and the cover make it sound terrible "privileged misfit Lorna meets the love of her life", "a penniless and bohemian artist" but "the coming war takes Matt - and with him Lorna's dreams - away" but it is lovely - and goes on through 2 more generations and then it comes full circle and made me cry.

Here I admit that much of its appeal for me came from it being set near where I live. This is understandable because Penelope Lively spent a lot of her childhood with her grandparents at Golonscott House in West Somerset. Here is a piece about Penelope Lively's aunt the artist Rachel Reckitt with a picture of the house at the end. I now need to go on a Rachel Reckitt local tour.* But the book is also about odd families of choice and people making their own decisions and being a bit out of step with their times. Though it is a pity characters have to keep suddenly dying. But it is also a book that loves West Somerset.

The cottage stood beside a lane. At the front, it looked out over the high hedge bank of its garden, across the lane and the sloping field beyond to a wooded valley that reached up into the Brendon Hills. Behind, fields and copses rolled away down to the Bristol Channel coastline; there was a long, thin slice of pewter sea and, on a clear day, the distant shore of Wales. Square and squat, cob and thatch, dug solid into the red Somerset earth, the small building had seen out generations of farm labourers. People had been born here, died here, had heard rumours of wars, had achieved the vote, had sweated over the same patch of landscape and stared at the same sky. Now, the place stood empty, bar the mice and the black beetles and the spiders. Empty and two pounds a month.

And here is Ruth, Lorna's granddaughter:

"The M4. The M5. Comfort stops at teeming motorway service stations through which flowed the August crowds. The nation was on the move and the west country was the place to which it moved.

[...]

And now the directions sent her off sharply into the hinterland. You burrowed into this landscape, she saw. The motorways rushed through it, and the A this and the B that, but as soon as you abandoned those dictatorial highways you had slipped off into another sphere. You were in the lanes, you were in narrow tunnels between high hedge banks, routes that also knew quite well what they were about and where they were going but that was their own immemorial business, and you were now in their domain. You went where they went, and that was that."

Shortly after this she has to reverse for a tractor and scrapes the side of her car on a raised rock. It is the way of things. Then she gets very lost in the lanes and "horror of horrors" ends up back on the A39 again before being able to turn round. That is also the way of things. My favourite quote though in the narrow, high-hedged lanes is "here and there a glimpse through a gate of blue and green distances like the jewelled vistas in medieval painting". Something so familiar here, put into words that make you see it differently.

Otherwise, the album of the current Broadway production of Chess is out. Obviously I am not going to New York to see Chess but I would really like to know what the production did with it this time. Youngest and I have been listening to the album and going "why did they put that song there" and "why is Florence singing Someone Else's Story and why is it at the end?" and Eldest keeps saying "I don't know, take it up with Jonathan from Buffy the Vampire Slayer" because Danny Strong wrote the book. He has in fact done a YouTube video about how he fixed the problems with Chess but it doesn't actually tell me what he did other than that it was very difficult to create scenes that used the existing narrative in the song lyrics to join them all up presumably in a different way? Nor does he mention the Swedish production, which did solve the problems with Chess and I would like to know if he knew about it and what he decided to do differently. This production includes "He is a Man, He is a Child" (sung by Svetlana which is presumably why Florence gets Someone Else's Story) and that originated in the first Swedish production so you would have thought so? The new overture is very good though. I liked that. I assume it hasn't had one before because often people put The Story of Chess at the start instead because it doesn't fit anywhere else unless you are trying to give the audience something to listen to while people play chess.

*He also said reading it had given him an insight into what it must be like to worry about things and be introspective, which is something people close to him have struggled with. I feel probably Patrick Grant should listen to the people he knows rather than what, not believe them until someone puts it in a book? I like Patrick Grant on Sewing Bee but the inside of his head must be so different from practically everyone I know.

**I would also have liked to have seen the exhibition at the museum had I known it was on and had my daughter who works for the heritage trust happened to mention it.