memoirists-from-england

"|year=1992|page=9|isbn=9780709049623}} (252 pages; 1st part of quote; 2nd part of quote; last part of quote)"

"Why did I write this book? I have already written a book of s published as long as 1973. It was called ‘’The Escapist Generations’’. If some of my readers remember this other book they will find repetitions. The basic story is the same — childhood scenes in California, memories of — but this time I have written a book of confessions, something I have never done before. I am a private person. For many years I have managed to keep my secrets to myself, protecting the men and women I have loved. Now all my loved ones are dead and no longer vulnerable. No one is left who might be hurt or damaged by these confessions unless it is myself. The time has come to tell a story which requires to be told."

"Every day, sometimes once, or twice, or even three times, she found herself drinking , or whisky, in the , the famous where flashy young s with padded shoulders, seedy old men of past fame, forgotten geniuses, tough young women whose finger-nails were no cleaner than Shute's, and the usual sprinkling of stars and pretenders, met daily, or nightly, for a quick drink, a dirty story, and perhaps a chance contact with someone useful."

"Nerina Shute, who began writing about films in the along with fellow reviewers Graham Greene and John Betjeman, and who, some 60 years later, rounded off her literary career with a frank about her , has died aged 96. Shute, who was the last survivor of a celebrated coterie of film critics of the 1930s, was celebrated also for her openness about her sexuality: she was predominantly lesbian, but married twice. In 1930, when she was 22, she shocked many by a novel which contained what she archly called an "ambisex-trous" woman character, while at 84 she wrote a memoir, Passionate Friendships, in which she was candid about her many love affairs."

"Novels by serious writers of genius often eventually become best-sellers, but most contemporary best-sellers are written by second-class writers whose psychological brew contains a touch of naïvety, a touch of sentimentality, the story-telling gift, and a mysterious sympathy with the day-dreams of ordinary people."

"In the first thirteen years of the food was cheap and plentiful, ... and the development of and which had come about in the latter part of the nineteenth century permitted a great variety of fare. But, in spite of this plenty, inquiry showed that for the most part the lower-paid workers were then considerably under-nourished, the better-paid just sufficiently nourished and the upper classes over-nourished. Though low wages explained to a great extent the under-nourishment, lack of knowledge of what to buy and how to cook it was, as it still is, responsible for some of the malnutrition both of the rich and of the poor."

"There is nothing to be said except about the sheer waste and futility of it all. It is the war all over again, when one is rung up to be told that Rupert was dead, or that one's brother was killed, and one knew that it was only to produce the kind of world we are living in now. Horrible."

"The more complicated the life of a community or the more "advanced" the civilization, the more complicated, incessant, and severe becomes the control of instincts which is demanded from the individual."

"Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to be or remain a civilized man."

"Chocolate Cake ¼ lb. chocolate grated 3 oz. flour. and melted in a basin 2 eggs. in the oven. 4 drops vanilla essence. 3 oz. butter. 1 teaspoonful baking ¼ lb. castor sugar. powder. Beat the butter, chocolate and sugar to a cream, add the vanilla. Beat the eggs and add the flour and baking powder and whip well for 5 minutes. Bake in a moderate oven in a buttered tin for an hour."

"Living in after we married, where we had a small farm with neither nor and where each spring a stallion bedecked with ribbons walked the lanes servicing the mares, we often made the journey between the country and London, a slow and un-trafficky journey through the before the age of motorways."

"Ideally, should be approached from the heights of Whitcliffe Common for views of its and the among the cluttered roofs and chimneys, the rosy-pink bricks, the half-timbered houses and somber gray stone of the ancient town walls. The circling the town is spanned by the medieval and Dinham bridges — the latter immortalized in paintings by . From where I live, beside the renovated 12th-century chapel of St. Thomas of Canterbury and a gnarled magnolia tree, I cross Dinham Bridge to wander alongside water meadows of s, , and grazing cattle. Swans glide on the river, the water roars and tumbles over the weir, and the mercurial flight of a appears like a hallucination."

"It is the habit of s to pick fruit, vegetables, etc., in the morning, and to bring in the day's supply at about eleven o'clock, and on Saturday to provide sufficient for two days' consumption. Except in the case of strawberries (which should be gathered, if possible, on the day on which they are to be eaten) and asparagus (which is infinitely better when cut just before the time for cooking), there is no objection to this plan, provided the garden produce is stored in the best manner. Carrots and turnips, s and onions, should be placed in wire racks; and s should be arranged root-end downmost in a shallow pan of fresh water. s and cauliflower may be treated likewise. should be placed in water as if it were a flower—not soused head over heels in that liquid."

"I imagine that there are to-day no three names better known in our country than those of , , and , and this for the reason that they are connected with the intimate details of our lives! It was they who ordained we should or should not have bacon for our breakfast or for our . When husbands grumbled wives made a whipping-boy of the , and I have heard the demand of a child for jam dismissed with the words: "There ain't none, and if you're not a good boy I'll ask Lord Rhondda never to let you have no more neither.""

"The barbarian is...not only at our gates; he is always within the walls of our civilization, inside our minds and our hearts. In times of storm and stress within any society, his appeal is very strong. He offers immediate satisfaction of the simple instincts, love, hatred, and anger. He offers to help us to forget our own unhappiness by making other people still more unhappy. He shows us how we may forget our sense of frustration and the intolerable burden of responsibility in blind obedience, the beating of tom-toms, and the shouting of slogans. He gives us the simple satisfaction of violence and destruction, the destruction of society, of the complicated network of rules and regulations, standards and morality which constitute civilization and which all of us feel entangling, frustrating, choking our animal instincts and desires."

"... pick up one of those superb books such as Private Gardens of England, by , on a wild, wet afternoon in February when the wind is shrilling outside, moaning through the gaps and spattering the window with rain. Turn to a picture of Saling Hall showing blues and silvers against the static severity of s, or see the black and white photographs of roses, cobbles and at , in which there's a table and chairs glimpsed through an open door in the garden wall. Books such as these are indeed a strong element of the whole pleasure of gardening; they need to be devoured and mulled over as well as those which are carried round in an earthy hand as vital advice flows out on what to do with five hundred s at the s."

"One of the most horrible things at that time was to listen on the wireless to the speeches of Hitler, the savage and insane ravings of a vindictive underdog who suddenly saw himself to be all-powerful. We were in Rodmell during the late summer of 1939, and I used to listen to those ranting, raving speeches. One afternoon I was planting in the orchard under an apple-tree iris reticulata, those lovely violet flowers which, like the daffodils, 'come before the swallow dares and take the winds of March with beauty'. Suddenly I heard Virginia's voice calling to me from the sitting room window: 'Hitler is making a speech.' I shouted back, 'I shan't come. I'm planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.' Last March, 21 years after Hitler committed suicide in the bunker, a few of those violet flowers still flowered under the apple-tree in the orchard."

"Nothing matters, and everything matters."

"I shall not allow the pension… to be stopped by force: I shall resign it,"

"I shall go on making sublime and philosophical discoveries, and employing myself in deep, abstract studies."

"Nobody is such a fool as to moider away his time in the slip-slop conversation of a pack of women."

"I have nothing to fear… I am the sun, the stars, the pearl, the lion, the light from heaven."

"It is only the vulgar who are always fancying themselves insulted. If a man treads on another's toe in good society, do you think it is taken as an insult?"

"A poor gentlewoman, doctor, is the worst thing in the world"

"Amongst other pictures which I remember in was the famous now in the , as well as a fine portrait of and another of e—both presents from the Cardinal and the poet to ."

"Lady Dorothy Nevill is the most interesting of all known and recognized nonagenarians. The very title of her new book indicates the long backward reach of her memory. She was a little girl when died. She has lived to see the accession of She loves the old days, but she is no bigoted admirer of the old ways. She recognizes that, on the whole, the march of progress has uplifted classes and masses alike, though at some temporary loss, among the first, in charm and distinction of manner, and, among the second, in color and atmosphere."

"I remember a story that my great-grandmother, who never drove out but in a carriage and four with outriders, one day met with a mishap, her coach breaking down. In this terrible state of affairs no one knew what to do, my grandmother sitting, ruffled but dignified, in the carriage, the wheels of which seemed damaged beyond repair. Matters seemed at a complete standstill, till a servant of a daringly brilliant and inventive turn of mind ventured to suggest that her ladyship might possibly walk to her mansion, not far away; and, wonderful to relate, she actually managed to do it. As a matter of fact, the rendered exercise almost impossible for ladies."

"Writing a grief-stricken epitaph to Lady Dorothy Nevill née Walpole in 1913, the English poet and then librarian of the , Edmund Gosse observed, ‘life was a spectacle for her and society a congress of little s.’ ... Gosse conjures up an image of Lady Dorothy as a master manipulator, pulling the strings of her many puppets over the years, thus suggesting the influential position this aristocratic woman held in society throughout her long life. Born into the historical dynasty of the Walpole family, Lady Dorothy (1826–1913) was the daughter of the . She grew up at reading the correspondence of , the one-time ambassador to , and stated proudly that ‘like my kinsman Horace Walpole I am fond of collecting’. ... Lady Dorothy gained acclaim as a botanist, a political hostess, one of the founding members of the , an art collector, and a supporter of writers, s, and artists, many of whom she patronized."

"My learned and accomplished friend, , has written a most interesting history, entitled One Generation of a Norfolk House. It is more or less the history of the in early times."

"Among the political squibs in my scrap-book there is one directed against the over-taxation which in long-past days certainly did press heavily upon the people of England. Exceedingly well written, it is, I believe, an extract from an article by Sydney Smith, published in the ' about 1820."

"Not very far from is the quaint old town of , which, I believe, took its name from the de Pydeles, one of those Norman families which came into England with the Conqueror. The church is particularly interesting, being one of the very few unrestored ones in —a county which has suffered terribly at the hands of the . ... If only because Puddletown Church is the church of Mr. Hardy's ', it should be left untouched."

"During my childhood at Islington the vicar of Puddletown was of the fox-hunting sort, quite different to the modern conception of a clergyman. He was popular enough with his parishioners, though I suspect he never saw half of them till they came up to be buried."

"My dear mother was a great friend of the poet Samuel Rogers, and we often went to his breakfasts, which were at that time celebrated, for there were usually one or two great people present. His house at 22, was filled with pictures and curiosities; on a sideboard in the dining-room was a cast of the head of Pope by , whilst between the the fireplace and window was the poet's writing-table; there was an ingenious mechanical contrivance by means of which the larger pictures in the house could be moved from their place so as to be viewed in different lights. The library and drawing-room were on the first floor, the book-cases being surmounted by s, whilst by Sir Joshua Reynolds, hung over one of the two mantelpieces — the other, beautifully carved by , was crowned, I think, by a study by ; altogether, there were six or seven Reynolds's in the house, which was a real haven of artistic rest and repose."

"... I took the ashes out to the , leaving a little trail of cinders from a broken corner of the box. The trouble about housework is that whatever you do seems to lead to another job to do or a mess to clear up."

"With the suit, Christine wore a grey felt beret which had been sold to her cheaply by Mrs Arnold in Millinery, because it had a mark on the back and no customer would buy it. Women were absurdly fussy when they had money to spend. When they were walking along they were just ordinary women, quite meek and obeying the policeman at the crossing; but as soon as Goldwyn's commissionaire, who bought his medals at the Surplus Supply stores in the , had pushed open the swing doors for them, they became customers, and that made them arrogant. Christine had easily removed the mark on the hat with some lighter fluid. Any woman could have done the same; but to have noticed the mark with a shrewd mouth, to have refused to buy the polluted hat made them feel recherché."

"I think, on a , what I’d really appreciate are long books: books as day-by-day companions, to combat loneliness and fear. We have some brilliant contemporary authors who write on the big canvas, yet I feel that desert-island panic might be better combated by novels set in the past, preferably by long-dead authors who had never experienced central heating or modern dentistry. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Balzac’s ' and Trollope’s ' (all with vibrant and courageous female protagonists, to spur me on to valour and fortitude) would be among my front runners. Reading contemporary novels would remind me, hour after hour, of the world I’d lost and might never regain. Tolstoy, on the other hand, reveals to me a universe I may never manage to understand in its entirety, so when I get to the end, I can happily start at the beginning again."

"The road from Boston to Cape Cod is long and straight and ruthless. Two black slashes cutting through the sandy country of pine and scrub oak which never grow to any size before a motorist throws out a cigarette on to the dry grass and levels everything neatly down again. In winter, the cars carry Boston businessmen in hats worn straight and true, and women with plastic statues of the Sacred Heart suctioned to the dashboard. In summer, the cars are full of families, and trail boats and little houses behind them. When the road was made, for the locust families to redouble their assault on Cape Cod, hills were leveled, hollows filled, the landscape brought to order. The bare scrub land is empty since everyone has gone top-heavily to the coast, like passengers crowding to the ship's rail."

"If Monica Dickens means nothing more to you than horsey books and no-nonsense memoirs of nursing and service, then this eloquent novel about the genteel poverty of a widow shunted between her three egotistical daughters is a fine corrective."

"... each page breathes a kind of magic, a sigh of enchantment that’s hard to capture in a short review. Somehow, Tremain has imbued her 16th novel with the freshness – and the intense bitter-sweetness – of a first book of the very best kind. Its themes of adolescence and betrayal, high style and evocation of period, remind me of Françoise Sagan’s equally slim ', though its particular also sets it apart from that book. And while the young Marianne lives in semi-rural Berkshire, and likes horses more than most human beings – the novel’s horsey sections will perhaps seem peculiar to readers who didn’t grow up on Anna Sewell or – its author’s careful delineation of her parents’ brittle, golf-club ways recalls Julian Barnes’s suburban-set . The details are exquisite. Here are bath cubes, and , and sauces made from marmalade to go with baked ham ..."

"In the Refusal Race, you had to trot up to a jump, stop the horse and sail over the jump by yourself on to Anna's spare-room mattress."

"Give history to children in the form of lists of dates or lumps of data and they won’t respond to it at all, but give them an image King Charles II, say, , or a defeated Napoleon staring out at an empty ocean from the cliffs of ) and this could be something which might move and inspire them."

"Eccentricity has not always been encouraged by the prim editors of . Invited to list his recreations, omitted motorbikes and wrote instead: , and tennis. Identifying himself as of provided a greater source of satisfaction."

"The , constructed from rosy bricks and crowned with curved stone s, stands among the meadows flanking the , in the middle of England, a hundred s to the north of London. Starting life as a modest built in the , it was enlarged twice. An ambitious owner redesigned it in the , to incorporate a large carved staircase and a grand reception room on an upper floor. In the 1820s, the House gained a courtyard, a library and a lake. The estate, easily encompassed by an hour's brisk walk, is surprisingly varied in its landscape, incorporating traces of an and a trading post."

"Arthur Benson, one of the coterie of clever, literary-minded younger men whose company the ageing novelist relished, found himself incapable of sharing the enthusiasm of and for ."

"Today, the most famous scene from Mary's life and, perhaps, in is the stormy summer night at the on when Byron, his handsome young doctor , the Shelleys and , who was carrying Byron's child, decided to write for fun. This was the night on which Frankenstein, that best known of all Romantic works, was born. Its author was not yet nineteen. Frankenstein has become part of our lives."

"Usually dismissive of other female writers, Riding had praised Stein in the final chapter of A Survey of Modernist Poetry for using a language of divine ordinariness. It was 's idea that they should invite Miss Stein to publish something with the ."

"In 1928 Edmund Blunden's ' was widely praised for its lyrical, approach. Sassoon's ', also published in 1928, set the scene for the contrast between an idyllic, pre-war world and the savagery of war explored in his ."

"Of course, was an eccentric, and his life story reads like something invented by Edgar Allan Poe with a certain amount of help from Richard Jefferies, but we have always needed the eccentrics to point the way. It was Waterton who warned the Americans, for example, of the ultimate cost of their profligate destruction of their forests. It was Waterton who fought against the beginnings of pollution in the Industrial Revolution. It was he who turned the grounds of into a , even maintaining trees with holes in them in which birds could nest and building a special bank for s."

"In 1812, when he was retreating from the blood and confusion of Moscow and the disastrous , Napoleon had remarked that there was only a single step separating the sublime from the ridiculous. From moment that he was deposited on , until the day when his body was finally removed from the island twenty-five years later, the sublime and the ridiculous were often so closely intertwined that it was impossible to separate the one from the other. The servants and companions who were with him on the island still treated him with all the fear and respect that was owing to an , but the more they bobbed and bowed in Napoleon's presence and tried to maintain the illusion of , the more rigidly they need to shut out any mirror reflection of what they were doing and how they looked while they were doing it."

"The author’s father, , was “a poet and an alcoholic”; her mother, Rosalie de Meric, a painter and an exhibitionist. Both parents were breathtaking narcissists and dirty fighters. Until they divorced, when Julia was 13, they scrapped loudly and vigorously. Rosalie would often thrust Julia in front of her to act as a shield from her husband’s fists. Once a punch missed and hit the child. “So sorry darling,” Thomas said. “No blood I hope?”"