Life must be filled up

The other day I was a few minutes early for a hairdresser’s appointment, so nipped into the charity shop opposite. There amongst the usual rubbish was the familiar grey spine of a Persephone book. Whipped it out and found it was one I’d been wanting to read. As-new condition, complete with bookmark. Gardener’s Nightcap by Muriel Stuart is the chatty, random thoughts type of gardening book it’s so nice to dip into. Here’s a taster from the beginning:
‘And then to bed, to lie with one’s face to the uncurtained window, thinking of seed-sowing, and pruning and mulching, and slug hunting, and this year’s done, and next year’s doings, and all the other garden preoccupations that obtrude themselves so pleasantly before a gardener sleeps.’

I feel I was meant to find this book.

This is the second new release Persephone have sent me and to be honest I wasn’t much looking forward to reading it because of the heavy subject matter: Ginzburg’s sufferings as a result of Stalin’s Purges of the late 1930s. Anyone coming to this book without prior knowledge of Russian history might think it a work of fiction, so fantastic are the charges brought against Ginzburg and other Party loyalists, so nightmarish the atmosphere of fear and suspicion.

Eugenia Ginzburg was an academic, married and with two children, when she was arrested in 1937, as the Great Purge began. Although completely innocent of ‘terrorism’ she was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment (it turned out to be eighteen years) and this book covers the first three years of her incarceration. For two years she was officially in solitary; then, with other ‘politicals’, she was moved, in a railway truck labelled ‘special equipment’, out to a labour camp which seemed to be at the ends of the earth. She describes the area as ‘neolithic’. If you’ve read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago, the privations described in the book come as no surprise but Ginzburg keeps your interest throughout because it’s such a personal story and she writes so vividly of her fellow prisoners.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of her experiences is the passionate desire to live, when so often it must have seemed easier just to give up and die. Through interrogation, punishment, malnutrition, illness, frostbite, the loss of her family, she never gave up. It’s a great testament to her physical endurance but above all to her mental strength, that she kept going all those years. She stayed sane by reciting poetry, of which she seems to have memorised an astonishing amount. She describes her joy when, officially still in solitary but now with a cell mate, she is able to borrow books from the prison library and the two of them almost go blind, reading, reading, reading in poor light. That was luxury compared with life later on in the camp where so many others died. Once her sentence was completed, Ginzburg was condemned to remain in exile and was not ‘rehabilitated’ until 1955.

There have been criticisms of the book, which Rodric Braithwaite discusses in an Afterword. Ginzburg remained a Communist, blaming Stalin but never Lenin for the ‘mistakes’ which resulted in possibly twenty million deaths. As a Party member, she was perhaps partly responsible for what happened. Fellow survivors have pointed out inconsistencies in her story and have described her as ‘lucky’ or only interested in what happened to her fellow intellectuals. As Braithwaite points out, we who have never lived under a dictatorship have no right to throw stones. Whatever its faults, it’s a remarkable and important book. Into the Whirlwind was first published in the UK in 1967. It makes me angry that even after this and similar testaments appeared, some people in the West, (Eric Hobsbawm, frex), remained wilfully blind to the evils of Soviet rule. As for Philby and his ilk, they are beneath contempt.

A Woman’s Place 1910 – 1975 was part of my recent Persephone trawl. I found it one of the best general books on the subject that I’ve read. Ruth Adam charts the changing attitudes towards women’s work during the twentieth century. Virginia Nicholson’s Singled Out covers some of the same ground; Adam points out that there was already a surplus of women *before* the First World War. Many women, of course, had always worked outside the home: mill girls, agricultural workers, domestic servants and shop assistants. The changes applied to middle and lower middle class women, especially those with professional qualifications which seemed to threaten male bastions. Many people, women as well as men, considered that housekeeping and bringing up children was woman’s highest calling, and the ideal. Two world wars changed that. The new assumption was that homemaking could easily be a part time job while women did war work. This led to further social changes as provision had to be made for looking after children while their mothers worked. For the first time the state became responsible for infant care.

After each world war, everything changed again and once more women were expected to stay at home. It’s depressing to read how (with a few noble exceptions) Labour Party and Trades Union members were a major obstacle to women’s equality at work. Now, we take equal pay for equal work for granted, but many bitter battles were fought over it. (The only job I would except from equal payment is that of women tennis professionals. With Wimbledon starting tomorrow, we shall see again that women players are far less entertaining than male ones.) I found the first part of the book livelier than the second. When writing about the early years, Ruth Adam quotes extensively from novels of the time; H G Wells, John Galsworthy and George Gissing are just some of the authors referred to. (I was immediately fired up to read Ann Veronica and thought I would be able to get it free for the Kindle. Unfortunately not! Yes, I know it’s on Project Gutenberg but I still haven’t found a simple way to transfer files from there to my Kindle.) I think Ruth Adam was perhaps less comfortable writing about the sixties and seventies (she was born in 1907). The quotations disappear and from being sure about what was right and necessary (votes, equal pay), she finds herself on less safe ground and questions whether the sexual revolution was altogether a good thing for women. The back dustwrapper flap of the Persephone edition tells us that Ruth Adam ‘wrote twelve novels … all of them concerned with social issues.’ No mention of her work for Girl comic.
( Girl, Susan and nursing )

List
The Testing of Tansy, Winifred Norling
Superfluous Death, Hazel Holt
Started Early, Took my Dog, Kate Atkinson
Berry & Co., Dornford Yates
A Good Yarn, Debbie Macomber
Few Eggs and no Oranges, Vere Hodgson
Starter for Ten, David Nicholls
Agatha Christie:
The Body in the Library
The Moving Finger
A Murder is Announced
4.50 from Paddington
Troubles, J G Farrell
The Surgeon, Tess Gerritsen
The London Eye Mystery, Siobhan Dowd
The Girls of the Hamlet Club, Elsie J Oxenham
( thoughts )

Lovely picture today on the Persephone Post. What a cold room that must have been, with those enormous windows and a coal fire!

For Christmas, I was given the Persephone Books edition of Kay Smallshaw’s How to Run your Home without Help, first published in post-war, rationed Britain in 1949. No, it wasn’t a subtle hint that an educated person could write their name in the dust on the piano. I asked for it because I am interested in these old housekeeping books. ( Read more... )