More books I have read during lockdown

‘Bringing in the Sheaves: Wheat and Chaff from My Years as a Priest’ by the Reverend Richard Coles

As is her way, Ruth bought this book some time back and has never actually read it, so I thought I would. Both of us follow the Reverend on Twitter and enjoy his tweets – though they have been rather sadder of late as he lost his partner David back in December to an unspecified illness. ‘Bringing in the Sheaves’ was published in 2016 and was a follow up to the earlier ‘Fathomless Riches: Or How I Went from Pop to Pulpit’, a reference to his earlier career in the 1980s band The Communards.

The book is really a series of anecdotes and reflections, grouped into ‘chapters’ according to themes (‘Hatching’, ’Matching’, ’Dispatching’) and to events in the Church’s calendar (‘Michaelmas’, ‘Epiphany’, ’Passion Sunday’, etc). I enjoyed reading it, though did have to keep stopping in order to look up things: Petertide, Transfiguration, St Egwin of Evesham, and many others. Also ‘thurifer’, which apparently means one who carries the censer in a religious ceremony (Coles: “Mass for Ascension Day, me as thurifer, and I managed to cense the faithful in so violently flamboyant a way they flinch”).

Coles strikes a good balance between expressing his own views on certain topics while managing to keep a light and humorous touch. I’d say the ‘Matching’ chapter is, unsurprisingly, the most strongly expressed, and Coles rails against “the present arrangements in the Church of England, which allow me to bless my friends’ dog but not the gay equivalent of a golden wedding”. He expresses frustration at openly being allowed to marry young heterosexual couples whose union will patently not survive a year, while seeing gay friends who have been with their partners for decades unable (at the time) to get official acknowledgement of their union.

The book’s title (the first part of it) is taken from a 19th-century Gospel song written by a Knowles Shaw, inspired by Psalm 126:6.

‘Treasure at the Youth Club’ by Agnes M. Miall

I picked up a number of old children’s books at the secondhand bookshops in Hay-on-Wye when we used to go there more often. They’re currently languishing in a box at the house and are mostly school stories, although this one isn’t. I should probably formulate some sort of proper plan for whether I’m going to keep them and if so, where I’m going to store them.

‘Treasure at the Youth Club’ was published in 1946 and the action is set in a new youth club that’s just opened in the small town of Osminster. The Tower Youth Club, as it’s called, is based in a historic Tudor tower, formerly part of a nunnery and with some legends attached, one about a ghost and the other about some treasure – jewels – that were apparently buried somewhere on the tower’s premises. Three Club members take it upon themselves to set out to crack the mystery of where the treasure is buried: best friends Blanche and Cherry, and Cherry’s new friend Crispin Gray. As expected, they do succeed in unearthing the lost jewels despite the failed efforts of adults over a number of centuries. They’re almost pipped at the post by a rival hunter, local unsavoury character Victor Step, who has roped in his unwilling stepson ‘Ginger’ to assist him. In the book’s most ludicrous sequence, the teenagers – including Ginger, who switches sides – bind and gag Step and suspend him halfway up the outside of the tower in a basket dangling from a rope.

Everything turns out well and the unhappy Ginger, free of Step’s clutches, is able to return to school with the aim of following his ambition to be an aviator (Step has had him labouring on the farm). Sir George Sakington, the owner of the tower and therefore the jewels, presents the Club with a cheque for a new hall as a sign of his gratitude.

Google reveals limited information on Agnes M. Miall, but she appears to have written a 1916 volume called ‘The Bachelor Girl’s Guide to Everything’, which sounds potentially interesting, as well as a number of books about needlework, which don’t so much.

‘Fever Pitch’ by Nick Hornby

Ray suggested years ago that I read 'Fever Pitch', arguing that it formed a crucial insight into why football is so important to some men. Clearly that recommendation didn’t entice me sufficiently at the time as I’ve only just got around to reading it now, probably about 25 years later.

Nick Hornby became hooked on football, and on Arsenal specifically, when his dad took him to see Arsenal vs. Stoke City as an eleven-year-old in 1968. The book is a personal memoir about his life in fandom – each chapter is framed in the context of a specific match, from 1968 up until the early 1990s. Mostly Arsenal games, but not all. Football clearly provided a way for Hornby and his father to connect (his parents had separated and he lived with his mother and sister) and standing on the terraces with his dad and crowds of other men seems to have additionally provided a way to connect as men – he says of his first match “I remember the overwhelming maleness of it all”.

It’s effectively conveyed – as with 'High Fidelity' (the only other of Hornby’s books I’ve read), Hornby manages to relate feelings and episodes that could reflect unfavourably on him but while still coming across as sympathetic and understandable. An example: bailing on a close friend’s birthday party because it was scheduled for the date of an Arsenal home game, and he HAD to attend all Arsenal’s home games. All the things that can and couldn’t be done as a fan make interesting reading – e.g. how while living in Cambridge for a while he also followed Cambridge United, explaining how this wasn’t disloyal to Arsenal as the two teams were in completely different leagues. It’s also interesting to ponder how the cost of attending football matches must have changed over the decades – could a schoolboy these days attend Premiership games? Hornby relates standing with friends as a young teenager in the Schoolboys’ Enclosure at Highbury, ‘peering at the game through the legs of the linesmen’.

There were some things though that struck an odd note with me, one in particular: when describing the disastrous Liverpool vs. Juventus game at Heysel in 1985, Hornby muses ‘the surprise was that these deaths were caused by something as innocuous as running’. ‘Running’, by which he seems to mean crowds of fans charging the opposing fans, doesn’t sound particularly innocuous to me, and it’s easy to my mind to see how the Juventus fans were scared into running the other way, towards the wall that then collapsed. Hornby maintains that the practice of running was ‘intended to do nothing more than frighten the opposition and amuse the runners’ – maybe so, but as an outsider to football it’s a bit difficult to see.

Ray (a Spurs fan) told me a story of going up to London with his brother Lee (a Chelsea fan) to see Tottenham vs. Chelsea. They separated at the game to go to the opposing ends, and after the game found themselves each in a crowd of their own team’s fans on opposite sides of a road, with mounted police down the middle. Ray recalls stepping over the barrier intending to cross the road to join his brother and immediately being screamed at by police to get back, while Lee apparently looked on in horror from the other side of the road. Ray hadn’t realized that a number of other Spurs fans had crossed the barrier after him, misunderstanding his intention and meaning to join him in charging the Chelsea fans. He and Lee did eventually manage to meet up, I think back at the train station.

‘Fever Pitch’ was published in 1992 and was Nick Hornby’s first book.

‘Lady in Waiting’ by Anne Glenconner

The Guardian journalist Hadley Freeman commented a while back on Twitter that she read this book expecting “posh lolz”, but was taken aback at the strife and tragedy within. That’s pretty much true though it’s not all tragic – the stiff-upper-lipped Lady Glenconner manages to relate the events of her life in a pretty entertaining way.

Anne was born Lady Anne Coke, the eldest daughter of the 5th Earl of Leicester, and grew up at Holkham Hall in Norfolk (as her father contrived to have three daughters and no sons, the rules of primogeniture meant that the estate passed after his death to his cousin). Anne married Colin Tennant, who later became the 3rd Baron Glenconner. My – and quite possibly most readers’ – opinion of Tennant is hard to put into words; you’d have to read the book.

The book is a really interesting read. At her coming-out dance during her debutante season in 1950, Anne wore a dress made from “a dyed pale green and pleated parachute” – post-war rationing meant there were no silks and satins to be had that year. Later, Anne’s mother sends her off on a trip to America to get her over moping breaking up with one Johnnie Althorp (who later became Earl Spencer and the father of Lady Di), a trip from which she is called back after being chosen to be a Maid of Honour at the Queen’s coronation, one of six unmarried aristocratic girls specially picked for the occasion. In the late 1950s Colin Tennant purchased the Caribbean island of Mustique and turned it into a celebrity party island; Princess Margaret had a house built there and evidently spent a lot of time there over the years, and Tennant gave a series of lavish parties; the book includes a photo of Anne on the island in the 1980s flanked by Mick Jagger and Rupert Everett. In the early 1970s Anne became a Lady in Waiting to Princess Margaret, a childhood friend, a role she kept until PM’s death in 2002.

The tragic bits, leaving her husband’s vagaries out of it: Anne’s eldest son Charlie, a heroin addict, died of hepatitis C after causing his parents years of grief (they are obliged to disinherit him to prevent him selling the Glenconner family estate to buy drugs). Her second son Henry, seemingly better adjusted and more successful than his elder brother, leaves his wife and young child after coming out as gay, contracts HIV and dies of AIDS. Her third son Christopher has a near-fatal motorcycle accident while travelling in Central America and spends some time in a coma; Anne throws herself into his rehabilitation which was seemingly eventually quite successful, though it’s implied that there were some permanent after-effects.

Since her husband’s parting shot, which was to leave his entire estate to an employee, Lady Anne has evidently been living at the house near Holkham that her father had advised her to buy for herself years earlier, clearly having sized up his son-in-law early on. In Anne’s words:

I am back at my farmhouse in Norfolk, the place that feels more like home than anywhere else. I owe a lot to my father’s sound judgement all those years ago when he told me I should buy a house of my own due to Colin’s flaky character. If I hadn’t bought it, I have no idea where I would be now.

Thank God for the 5th Earl’s prescience.