Letter

          There is snow outside although still only October – but it provides a good excuse to do nothing in the evening except read beside a log fire.  And we are cosy in the shop as we database, serve customers, answer the phone and stuff padded envelopes with books – twelve mail bags a day go out at this time of day.  In any case we are trying to conserve our strength before next week, when we have a stand at the House and Garden Fair at Olympia: we hope some of you will be there and please do introduce yourselves. Indeed offers to help on the stand/fetch cups of tea would be gratefully received.

    Rachel Johnson wrote a piece in the Sunday Times about children being mollycoddled, and began by describing the times when she and her brother (Boris) used to travel on their own from Brussels to school in England. ‘Of course this rugged approach – children were supposed to get on with it and use their initiative – went out of the window long ago.  In the late 1930s there was a bestseller called The Children who Lived in a Barn (reprinted by Persephone Books – nanny recommends) about a bunch of youngsters whose parents got on a plane and disappeared.  The kids then moved into a barn, where they cooked delicious stews in a haybox and – as in the best children’s books – had a high old time sans adult or state intervention of any kind.  Since then, as society has grown richer, we’ve encouraged a complaints culture in which health-and-safety concerns lead to children being wrapped in cotton wool.’

    The Independent on Sunday reviewed Round About a Pound a Week, saying: ‘This reprinted 1913 book tirelessly and humanely examines the causes and effects of poverty, and chronicles the hardship of working-class life in the early 20th century in meticulous and moving detail….The book chronicles what a family need to survive materially but also emotionally,  listing ‘”wisdom and loving-kindness…cleanliness and order” as qualities needed to raise a family on about a £1 a week.’

     The Guardian reviewer said that she finished reading the book ‘in a state of incandescent anger, flared like a gas mantle.’ And John O’Connell of Time Out called it ‘a clear-sighted, respectful field report from poverty-stricken Lambeth Walk.  Its aim was to relay to the condenscending middle classes basic facts about how working-class families lived on the standard wage of £1 a week.  The answer – not surprisingly – was: with great difficulty… A horrific but necessary read, supplemented by Polly Toynbee’s thoughtful Preface.’

      Do look at this obituary of one of the forty-three female Recording Britain artists, Phyllis Dimond. Unfortunately the online version of the obituary does not reproduce any of the pictures but here are Phyllis Dimond and another Recording Britain artist Malvina Cheek  (who is my neighbour) talking on Woman’s Hour last year. And here is an item from the Daily Mail about her and Recording Britain.

   I am rather obsessed with this bit of Schubert at the moment – if I had an ipod it would be on it. (And if, as I hope, I manage to galvanise myself and the brilliant duo of Daniel Becker and Dominic Moore to do a second cd of Café Music, the first being long sold out, this will be the first item, arranged for piano and violin of course.) I have also been laughing myself sick at John Bird and John Fortune’s brilliant interpretation of the credit crunch. Just thinking about this sketch makes me laugh. And here are three of Agnes Jekyll’s Kitchen Essays wonderfully read by longstanding Persephone reader Helen Garlick. They would be on my ipod too.

     Finally, and depressingly, you can read some of Edith Appleton’s diaries here; they will be featured on BBC Radio 4 at 3pm on Remembrance Day, November 11th.

Nicola Beauman
59 Lamb’s Conduit Street
30 October 2008