Letter
I spent Christmas at Spitalfields, a couple
of miles east of Lamb’s Conduit Street,
in the 1719 silk-weavers house at 13 Princelet
Street owned and let out by The
Landmark Trust. Brick Lane is at the end of
the road and the call to prayer mingles with the
bells tolling at nearby Christ
Church; here my daughter Fran, who works part-time
at Persephone Books when she can, was married
on the Friday after Christmas.
Number 19 Princelet Street houses an old synagogue
and is now the Museum
of Immigration. On the afternoon of Christmas
Day we went for a walk around the neighbourhood,
going first of all along Fashion Street, the setting
for the opening of Children of the Ghetto
by Isaac Zangwill, a friend (and possibly something
more) of Amy Levy’s. And we talked about
the contrast between Zangwill as the chronicler
of the new wave of Jewish immigration of the 1880s
and her being part of, and writing about, long-established
and affluent Anglo-Jewry. Amy Levy was referred
to in the Guardian on December 31st,
in an article
by Geoffrey Alderman about the way, as he
perceives it, Jews are taught ‘to keep our
heads well down, to keep a low profile, and not
to make a fuss’; as an example ‘the
communal outrage that greeted the publication
in 1888 of Amy Levy’s brilliant novel
Reuben
Sachs, portraying the decadent materialism
of the Jewish middle-classes in late Victorian
London, drove her to suicide.’
We then admired 56 Artillery Lane, the best surviving
example of a mid-eighteenth century shopfront
in London – its date is 1756 - and Sandy’s
Row Synagogue, built as a chapel in 1763 but consecrated
as a synagogue in 1870; and walked past 32 Elder
Street with its plaque to the painter Mark Gertler
and 18 Folgate Street, the extraordinary not-to-be
missed house recreated as an eighteenth century
gem by the late Dennis
Severs. Then it was back to Christmas cake
and the fire and the traditional game of Boggle,
as well as Xandra Bingley’s wonderfully-written
memoir of her country childhood in wartime, Bertie,
May & Mrs Fish; her mother, the beautiful
May Bingley, was very much like Cressida in Jocelyn
Playfair’s A
House in the Country in the way she ran
both house and farm with good nature, intelligence
and eccentricity. And another memoir, the late
Gardner Botsford’s book about his life at
The New Yorker, with a delightful description
of Mollie Panter-Downes sending her Letters from
London and short stories ‘in a homemade,
maddeningly English manner. “When the piece
was finished,” I wrote of her later, “and
every comma in place, something close to farce
took over. A local boy on a rattle-trap bicycle
would wheel the copy over to the railroad station,
if he didn’t have a flat tyre, and deliver
it to a train conductor on the 6.43 to London;
this man, in turn, if he didn’t forget,
would trot it over to the cable office, and the
people there, if they hadn’t mislaid the
address, would dispatch it to New York. Over the
years, every one of these possible disasters took
place, but, true to form, muddling through eventually
prevailed.”’ (In fact Mollie would
not have laughed at this: her relaxed exterior
concealed a steely professionalism and when one
of these ‘disasters’ did take place
she would have minded very much.)
Do look at Colleen Mondoor’s blog for the
Twelfth
Day of Christmas in which she writes about
five Persephone books she has particularly enjoyed
– The
Wise Virgins, The
Far Cry, The
New House, Cheerful
Weather for the Wedding and
The
Home-Maker. The latter was chosen as
one of her Christmas books of the year by Amanda
Craig in the Independent on Sunday –
‘I was astonished by the power and intelligence
of The
Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher,
which tackles the issue of working mothers and
the depression caused by thwarted female energies
with brilliant perceptiveness. It’s the
obverse of Lionel Shriver’s deserved Orange
Prize winner We Need to Talk about Kevin
and should be read in tandem.’
The Guardian had the excellent idea of
asking ‘ordinary’ readers to write
in with their books of the year. Catherine Davies
of Belfast chose By the Sea by Abdulrazak
Gurnah and Saplings
by Noel Streatfeild. In the latter: ‘Happy
childhood holidays at the seaside are contrasted
with the dispersal of the children to various
relatives; they narrate their mother’s nervous
breakdown and descent into alcoholism following
their father death. With endpapers by Marion Dorn
evoking Matisse’s decoupage, the volume
is a triumph of content and form; a delight to
read and treasure.’
Finally, we listened with with great pleasure
to the animated and perceptive discussion about
Little
Boy Lost on Radio 4’s A Good Read.
Happy New Year and Happy Reading!
Nicola Beauman
30 December 2006
Lamb's Conduit Street | 
