Life must be filled up

The Swish of the Curtain 1941
Maddy Alone 1945
Golden Pavements 1947
Blue Door Venture 1949
Maddy Again 1956

These books follow the lives of three middle class families living in the same road in Fenchester (based on Colchester). Lynette Darwin is striking-looking and dreams of being an actress. Her brother Jeremy plays the violin and piano very well and would like to be a musician. The Fane sisters are very different from each other. Sandra has a lovely singing voice, is calm, sensible and good at domestic arts like sewing and cooking. Maddy, who at nine is by far the youngest of the Blue Doors is bumptious, unsquashable and a glib liar when the need arises. There is great excitement when a new family arrives at the corner house and the four friends spot ‘two red heads and a black one’. These are the Halfords. Vicky is good at dancing and acrobatics, Bulldog appears at first to have no particular talents but comes into his own later. Brother Nigel is good at art and plans to be a commercial artist.

Soon, the seven of them are spending almost all their spare time together. One day, walking down a dreary little street, they spot an unusual building with a faded blue door. After accidentally breaking a window, they snoop around and find that it’s a little hall which, they learn later, was once a chapel. They mend the window themselves, then start to imagine the hall turned into a theatre. After finding out who it belongs to and getting permission to use it, they clean the whole place up themselves while their parents wonder what on earth they’re up to all the time. Their dream comes true and they put on a show, writing the script themselves (mostly Lynette), making all the costumes (Sandra), painting backcloths (Nigel), writing the music (Jeremy). The little show is a great success (although not with their bitter enemy, Mrs Potter-Smith) and they start to think seriously about drama as a career. Their aim is to go to the British Actors’ Guild Academy. Their parents want them to get good, safe jobs and will only think of the Academy if the teenagers win the Roma Seymore trophy in a competition for local drama groups. They do, of course and are overjoyed, apart from poor Maddy who will be left behind. There’s a Christmas pantomime in the Blue Door Theatre and then an exhilarating, secret toboggan ride at night, which ends the book on a very happy note.

Pamela Brown was only fourteen when she started writing The Swish of the Curtain and it shows. She puts in all their scripts and songs word for word, which is tedious, if impressive for such a young writer. Yet generations of girls have loved this book and it was broadcast as a play on the BBC Children’s Hour. I think its popularity is because, in spite of moments of gloom when the Blue Doors think they will be forced into dreary jobs, it conveys brilliantly what fun it is to be young when you come from a comfortable, loving home and are old enough to be allowed out to enjoy yourself with friends. It’s also a wonderful fantasy about a dream which was unlikely to be achieved in real life.

There’s a rather patronising account of a 1980 BBC TV version of TSOTC here.
( the other books )

So far, I haven’t read any of the books I put aside for Christmas reading. The way things are going, I won’t believe in Christmas at all until I hear the carols from King’s on Christmas Eve. Here are two books I’ve been reading thanks to NetGalley: Christmas at Carrington’s by Alexandra Brown and Ten Lords A-Leaping by C C Benison.

Did anyone else watch the Channel 4 series Liberty of London? Rather disappointing, I felt; not as good as last year’s BBC 2 documentary Inside Claridges. Carrington’s, the family-owned department store in Mulberry-on-Sea, is also the subject of a reality TV show, one that is carefully planned and scripted by the producer. Georgie Hart, in charge of women’s accessories, finds herself for a giddying time a media celebrity enjoying fame and freebies. This is the third book about Carrington’s and I’m not the target readership for it. If you use expressions like ‘totes’ and ‘well jelz’, if you hyperventilate at the thought of a high end handbag and refer to the goods you sell as ‘merch’, if you think of nothing but gorgeous (preferably rich) men, this is just the book for you. I am being a little unfair because after all, I did finish the book, did find parts of it entertaining and enjoyed being behind the scenes in a department store. It is a fun Christmas read with a happy ending. There’s a lot of guilt-free cake gorging and even cake recipes! It really needed better editing. I can’t be doing with a ‘wedge of tissues’ instead of a ‘wodge’, ‘bollicking’ for 'bollocking’ or ‘Wedgewood blue’ for ‘Wedgwood’.



Ten Lords A-Leaping is C C Benison’s third Father Christmas mystery. Father Tom doesn’t care for that title and asks people to call him ‘Tom’ or ‘Mr Christmas’. This book opens exactly as the title suggests, with the Leaping Lords, ten Peers who enjoy skydiving, jumping in formation to help raise money for Tom’s church. On this occasion, Tom and the PCC are also jumping, Tom landing with a badly sprained ankle. As a result, he is forced to stay at Eggescombe Hall, the grand home of Hector, Lord Fairhaven, who is one of the Leaping Lords. This introduces Tom to an incomprehensible tangle of family relationships; a family tree would have been very helpful. Soon afterwards he discovers the murdered corpse of another Leaping Lord in the Labyrinth. The victim was a thoroughly obnoxious character, so the list of suspects includes just about everyone in the house. As a priest, Tom finds people confiding in him and has to decide exactly what to tell the police. When there’s a second murder, things hot up and I really only got gripped by the book about 70% of the way through (I was reading it on the Kindle). Yet more complications are introduced, with mysteries and murders going back years and I found it all rather muddling. I wasn’t sure I really liked Tom very much; the nicest thing about him is his devotion to his ten-year-old daughter, Miranda. Her friendship with young Max, Hector’s extrovert sprog, provides the book’s only comic relief. The end of the book sets things up for the next one, which will obviously be called Nine Ladies Dancing. As a priestly detective, I preferred James Runcie’s Sidney Chambers. Ten Lords A-Leaping could have done with a little Britpicking, too.



I picked Ruth Thomas's book up at the library because I liked the cover; as good a reason as any. Luisa McKenzie has failed her Highers, so instead of going to university as planned, she’s living at home and working as a teaching assistant. She doesn’t like the job much, nor is she any good at it. Hardly surprising, as the girl is dripping wet, so much so as to strain one’s patience. I started feeling like her poor, puzzled mother and kept looking out for the mental breakdown. By the end of the book it’s clear that this year in Luisa’s life is just a growing up interlude, and I looked back on the rest with a kindlier eye.
( and now for something more Christmassy )