North America enters the CNV Field of Operations. Or in civilian terms, it’s time for the Code Name Verity online launch party and giveaway!




(Amazon links: Hyperion, USA; Doubleday, Canada; Electric Monkey, UK)


When:

Tuesday 15 May 2012! That’s when Hyperion in the USA and Doubleday Canada both release their editions of Code Name Verity. In addition to taking my teenage daughter to the orthodontist and watching the boy play in a cricket match against his sister’s school, I thought it would be nice to celebrate a little with a North Atlantic Operations party online. Indeed, a worldwide party, open to anyone from the far-flung corners of the globe.


Where:

Well, here on my ridiculously underused blog. But you can pretend we are holding it in the drawing room of Craig Castle, Castle Craig. Or someplace like it.



(that's the drawing room, way over on the left, with the big bay window. And the little short round tower at the extreme left is one of the tiny libraries. Probably the one where the manuscript ends up.)


Guests of Honor

Meet some of the real life spies ’n’ pilots, and, um, a few others, who inspired CNV.

( I kind of went overboard with the spies and pilots )


Refreshments

Sorry, we are out of butter again. Have some virtual whisky. It’s pre-war. If you don’t drink, I’m afraid it’s nowt but cold beans straight from the tin (I am shameless).

ETA: Oh yay, the Moon Squadron has smuggled us some champagne on their return flight. I *knew* this party was missing something.


Entertainment

A sneak peek at the first ‘chapter’ of CNV!

An audio sample of Morven Christie reading Verity. Yes, the whole 10+ hour unabridged audio is this good. I am in love. No, my name is not pronounced Vine, despite the Gaudy Night-ish overtones. The mispronunciation of my name is my punishment for probably mispronouncing estara’s and tiboribi’s names in the ‘Author’s Debriefing’, which they let me read myself. (My name is pronounced Ween, in case you are wondering.)

So, here is an interesting artefact for you. It is an early version of a short story called ‘Findo Gask’, featuring Theo from ‘Something Worth Doing’ (she also makes a cameo appearance in CNV), piloting a Spitfire over Scotland and encountering ghosts. No, it is not historically accurate. It is a draft and was written in 2006. The finished version is much shorter and about a boy (a fighter pilot). I posted it here in 2008 for International Pixelstained Technopeasant Day, but the link is broken. This is the original in all its glory.

And I have a picture to show off, too! Becky Yeager, BLESS HER, has produced a lovely piece of fan art coincidentally in the nick of time. (It was Sara who noticed the character differences in the way their names are written in this picture. I am in love with the neat, smug, not-actually-sleeping-cat expression on Queenie’s face, and her control and poise in spite of her small stature. So perfect.)

Also:


...Sara's mock-up cover from a couple of years ago


How about some music?

‘The Last Time I Saw Paris’ (*sob*)
‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’…
Here’s the Mendelssohn from Colonel Blimp that makes Verity cry. Daft thing. I chose this version not for its sound quality but because I am tickled by the serious earnestness of this student orchestra.


Ready to leave?

If you’re heading out, here’s a list of museum exhibits some of you may be lucky enough to catch:

Women in Aviation: World War II is an exhibition going on at the moment in New York City at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum (it’s on the Intrepid aircraft carrier) – this exhibit closes 8 July 2012. I am SO SORRY to be missing it, so I hope some of you will enjoy it vicariously on my behalf.

Beauty as Duty, Textiles and the Home Front in WWII Britain, is another exhibit it is KILLING me to miss. It is on at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA until 28 May 2012. GO SEE IT OR ANSWER TO ME PERSONALLY. (tiboribi, THIS MEANS YOU.)

The Imperial War Museum, London, has a permanent display on Special Operations and spies during World War II as part of their ‘Secret War’ exhibit.

The ATA Museum in Maidenhead (45 minutes west of London on the train). There is a special permanent exhibit there dedicated to the women of the ATA (the exhibit is called ‘Grandma Flew Spitfires’).


Giveaway: One of each!

I’ve got one US edition, one Canadian edition, and one UK edition to hand out, all signed of course - please let me know in a comment which (ones) you’re interested in, if you’re interested. (Closes 8.00 a.m. British Summer Time on Sat. 19 May 2012; I think that's midnight on the West Coast, right?)


Admission Mission:

This is your chance to join the CNV Special Ops. Here’s what’s going on: A V-Day Invasion. On 15 May, stop in at your local bookstore, your local library, your school library - any place you’re likely to find or borrow or purchase books, and demand they make CNV available to readers. Or indeed, mention any book you’re passionate about. Tweet, Facebook, comment on Goodreads, blog - boast about your encounter and ask all your reading friends to go do the same. Readers in the UK, the book’s already out here, so for goodness sake please join in - your job should be easier here. An Allied Invasion of Literary Establishments!

SO! Get out there in the bookstores and libraries and museums, get tweeting, spread the word about the giveaway, and above all, enjoy.


Minesweeping, for those of you who are still around…


These links are to interviews and discussions that I’ve mostly written myself, not to reviews. So if you want to find out more about How I Wrote CNV, it’s all (mostly) here somewhere.

( Recap of blog tour and CNV discussion )


Disclaimer

IT’S A BOOK ABOUT A PILOT. IT HAS PLANES IN IT. For some reason, this seems to take some people by surprise.

It is 10 years this spring since I started taking flying lessons, and 5 years since my license was current. For the past six months I have been working on revalidating my currency. I am SO SLOW, partly because of my persona as ‘The Flying Housewife’, partly because of the dratted weather. I was slow to get my license in the first place and I am slow to recover it. However, I do a practice test on Thursday. Today I was working on navigation and a diversion. In the rain. What fun! (My instructor said, ‘I love clouds. I really love clouds!’)

Honestly, I spend so much time working on handling, on practicing steep turns and stalls and forced landings - i.e., what to do in an emergency - that it always takes me by surprise when I find myself flying straight and level in the cruise, in trim, hands free, holding a heading toward a destination which won’t appear for another 15 minutes or so. Take a deep breath and look around! The sky is gray and full of cloud, but you can see the squalls and the hills and stay away from them. The fields of eastern Scotland are unbelievably green, except for the bright gold patchwork of oilseed rape here and there.

As I was doing the outside aircraft checks before take-off, a lark was singing over the runway, and I stopped to watch it - rising higher and higher, trilling constantly as it went, until I lost it. They seem to fly straight up.

I have been re-reading some of my notebooks in real time, from 10 and 20 years ago. I hardly wrote anything down during the first six months of 2002, and that is because I had a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old AND I was learning to fly. But sometime in August I did comment on the flying. Bear in mind, reading this, that I hadn’t even soloed yet when I wrote it.

You know what’s missing from this notebook? My flying lessons. Partly I feel like having a few measly old flying lessons doesn’t actually qualify you as learning to fly, and partly I am so swamped with learning it all and studying the books and doing the lessons that I haven’t got time to write anything down, and partly I am just scared out of my wits by it. Although I am not actually scared of the flying: I am scared of doing it wrong, of being on stage, of performing, of Looking Stupid. Isn’t that weird?

My flying is nothing. I have about 15 hours behind me. I can’t navigate, I can’t work the radio, I don’t know the law, I can’t do anything by instinct, I grip the control column in a death grip. But two things: steering the plane on the ground (I mean, how dull and prosaic can you GET?); and landing. They give me enormous satisfaction. In the last two lessons I have actually caught on to landing; and now I’ve been kind of walking around occasionally marvelling to myself, ‘Hey. I can fly a plane.’

Because it’s not cool; it’s massive hard work, and concentration, and boring reading, and humiliation, and disappointment (rain, failure) - and then, suddenly, ‘I can fly a plane.’

A bit like writing a book.

---------------------------------

And here’s part of my notebook entry for 20 years ago today. No kidding:

8 May 1992, Park Town, Oxford. I dreamed that I caught Loki at the tail end of my father’s funeral and, while not exactly outwitting him, managed to make a deal with him. He said, ‘I don’t make deals,’ and something to the effect of, ‘You’re playing with fire and you’re in over your head,’ and I said, ‘I happen to know that you made a deal with the Lord of the Dream World and that he took your hand in exchange for your freedom. Well, I can give you back your hand’ - which I had, right there, this disembodied hand - ‘But it’ll cost ya’ - thinking, Not a bad thing to have Loki in yer debt! …Hmm. I suspect that my part of the bargain has something to do with this short-story I was going to write. Note that my soul was NOT part of the bargain.

I want to say something like… Really, I just write the same thing over and over and over, don’t I?

And no, I’ve no idea what the short story in question was.

Mark has done me a random number generator on Scratch, and applewoman has won the giveaway listed in http://eegatland.livejournal.com/92328.html

I'll do another as soon as I get some copies of the US edition. Watch this space.

I have two weeks.

I would like to write something heroic and inspired before I go up in fireworks, but I am too stupid and sick with dread to think of anything. I can’t even think of anyone else’s memorable defiance to repeat. I wonder what William Wallace said when they were tying him to the horses that would rip him into quarters. All I can think of is Nelson saying ‘Kiss me, Hardy.’

--------------------------

OK, so I’m not really sick with dread. And nothing actually ever happens on a book’s ‘launch day’. You wait and wait and wait and wait, you waste years of your life waiting, and the publication date comes and goes and if you don’t mark it with a handful of confetti of your own, you find you’re actually just waiting again—for reviews or ratings or feedback of some kind—only now the waiting has no demarcated limit and eventually trickles off into waiting for the next book. I know, I know. Special Ops Exec. Write -

I’m not ‘sick with dread’, but I am apprehensive about Code Name Verity in a way that is new to me. It is new to me because it has real hope in it—hope that is gradually sloughing off its gild of cynicism. And that is because people are reading and enjoying this book. I sit here at my computer and I see what’s going on, in the blogosphere and the reviewing world, and I can’t quite believe it. I certainly can’t see where it’s going. I am almost as apprehensive of success as I am of disappointment.

CNV is, for example, an Amazon Editor’s Pick for Best Book of the Month in May. This may generate what a couple of reviewers are calling ‘hype,’ but it isn’t hype in and of itself. Hype didn’t put it there - the book put itself there. And that just makes my jaw drop.

Of course, it’s already out here in the UK. I’ve no idea how well it’s doing—the excitement of the first ‘Book Birthday’ has tapered off, and I don’t know if it’s selling according to plan. A team of guerrilla CNV Special Ops agents send me pictures of the book displayed in the windows of independent booksellers, or occasionally on a prominent shelf in the chains, bearing a handwritten staff recommendation card. I don’t quite know where to file these small triumphs in my brain. They astonish me. When the phenomenal review of CNV in Publisher’s Weekly turned up, and I found it online before my agent or even the publisher knew it was there, I didn’t tweet it for three days because I was sure it must be an error. But it wasn’t an error.

OK, you all know the location of the first aid kit and the fire extinguisher, right? And how to open the hatches in the event of a forced landing? Echo Echo Whiskey, ready for departure.

---------------------------

‘I may be going to hell in a bucket, babe, but at least I’m enjoying the ride.’ - The Grateful Dead

---------------------------

Comment, and we'll do one of our lame 'Sara picks a name out of a hat' giveaways - an autographed copy of the UK edition of CNV. Closes 8 a.m. BST Sat. 5 May 2012 (that's 8 a.m. British Summer Time, so Friday midnight in California, I think. That way I can mail it on saturday morning and you have a chance of getting it before the release date. Yes, I will ship internationally. I am wild that way.)

Thank you to all those who have sent me links to obituaries for Raymond Aubrac, the French Resistance leader who died on Tuesday at the age of 97. Aubrac was much in the news yesterday here in the UK, but it was only while watching the BBC News at 10 last night that I made my own connection with him, which I thought I’d share. It was someone casually mentioning that he’d been rescued from the Gestapo by his “pregnant wife” that made me recognize him.

Here’s the story I know—Aubrac’s escape from France in early 1944, as told by Hugh Verity in We Landed by Moonlight (Ian Allan Ltd., 1978):

On the same night of 8/9 Feburary, [John] Affleck completed [Operation] ‘Bludgeon’ at his second attempt. They landed at their target at [11:30 p.m.]. The field was waterlogged and the Hudson [aircraft] was bogged while taxying back to the take-off point. Affleck had to stop the engines and call for assistance from the team on the ground and the passengers. They all manhandled the heavy aeroplane back to the take-off point and turned it into wind. It was trying to snow.

Once the loads were turned round Affleck started the engines but the Hudson would not move as the tail wheel had sunk in. They manhandled it again to clear the tail wheel. When this was done they found that the main wheels had sunk in up to the hubs so the engines had to be switched off again. A crowd of villagers arrived to help with the digging and pushing. The only French words the crew could muster was the navigator’s ‘Allez-hop!’

Some oxen and horses were then brought to the scene and hitched to the Hudson to drag it forward out of the mud, but they could not move it. At one point all work ceased as a German aircraft flew overhead. Affleck worked out that the latest safe time to take off would be [3:00 a.m.]. If not airborne by then the aircraft would have to be destroyed. He said to Paul Rivière, who was in charge on the ground: ‘If we have to burn the aircraft we’ll stick to you and run like hell for the Spanish frontier.’

He also decided that channels should be dug out in front of the main wheels so that he could taxi forward on the engines. This was eventually achieved. Meanwhile he had to stop the men from the Maquis [French Resistance guerrillas] removing all the guns and ammunition from the Hudson. Affleck attempted a take-off but could not build up enough speed and had to throttle back. While taxying back to line up for another attempt they were bogged once more, but this time managed to extricate the aeroplane quite quickly. He decided to take the minimum load and confined his passenger list to an RAF evader, one Frenchman [Aubrac], his wife and their young son. The man was a resistance worker who, under the sentence of death, had been rescued from a police van by his wife and friends. His wife had attacked the Gestapo in the van, tommy-gun in hand, when eight months pregnant. He seemed to be a nervous wreck. His wife was now within hours of giving birth. She just sat there in the mud.

At [2:05 a.m.], after they had been on the ground two and a half hours longer than intended, a final attempt at taking off succeeded—but only just. When very near the boundary of the field the Hudson hit a bump and bounced into the air at about 50 knots [quite slow for take-off]. Affleck just managed to keep it airborne, build up a safe speed and climb away. He had taken off with rather more than 15° of flap [helps in a short-field take-off but slows flight]. He was cold, wet and covered with mud from head to foot. After half an hour he realised that the Hudson was going very slowly, wondered why and realised that he had forgotten to put his flaps up.

He had no aerials left—they had all been broken off in the struggle on the ground. They found their way home without being able to identify themselves to the air defences of Great Britain. Eventually they landed at base at [6.40 a.m.]. The Hudson, covered with mud and ‘looking like a tank’, was greeted by the Station Commander, Group Captain ‘Mouse’ Fielden. A few days later Flying Officer J.R. Affleck was promoted to acting flight lieutenant and awarded an immediate DSO [Distinguished Service Order].

When he was describing this incident to me in 1975, John Affleck had two thoughts to add. Firstly, that, had he thought about it, he should really have flown all the way home with his wheels down. In the wisdom of hindsight, towards the end of his career as a professional airline pilot, he realised that there was a great danger of that mud-covered undercarriage becoming stuck or frozen up so that he would not be able to lower it for the landing at Tempsford. The other afterthought, looking back, was that he could have almost died of laughing at the struggles of the crew to communicate with the crowd of French helpers without any common language and that his main pre-occupation during this time was to stop these helpers damaging the Hudson.

The evader whom he brought back was Flight Lieutenant J.F.Q. Brough, of Carlisle, who had been with the Resistance since he crashed in France, in a 138 Squadron Halifax on 3/4 November 1943. In his letter to the author, Brough wrote:

‘As well as myself, we also carried Mr and Mrs Aubrac, two top members of the Resistance, and their young son. Mr Aubrac had been elected to the French Consultative Assembly in Algiers; Mrs Aubrac was nine months pregnant and gave birth to a baby girl in Queen Charlotte’s Hospital in London the day we landed at Tempsford.’

This baby girl was named Mitraillette (sub-machine gun).

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Some of you may recognize the name Mitraillette. (I made an LJ post quoting some of this passage in March 2010, when I was deep in the throes of writing Code Name Verity: http://eegatland.livejournal.com/72287.html)

I feel like we have gone completely native now.

Mark played in his first curling tournament on Sunday, the Royal Caledonian Curling Club’s ‘Newcomers’ tournament (for junior players in their 1st or 2nd season of curling). We spent the night near Irvine on the west coast in order to be up in time for his first game at 10.00 a.m., and a good thing too, because the ice rink was in the absolute middle of nowhere (though not far off the beaten track) and caused us some bewilderment in finding it - despite our printed directions from the AA, GPS on Tim’s phone, a Google search and 2 traditional Ordnance Survey maps. The fellow we asked directions from commented, ‘You’re not the first to ask.’

The teams were scratch teams - players mostly from the ‘Central Belt’ of Scotland, though a few were from as far away as Aberdeen. Each team was made up of 4 kids who’d never met each other before, and, in Mark’s case, who’d never played a serious game before. They played 4 ‘games’ of an hour each, which consists of 3 ‘ends’ (rounds, basically) - and then semi-finals and then finals - so by the end of the day they’d actually been on the ice, playing, for 6 full hours, with an hour’s lunch break.




Mark’s team came THIRD out of 18! They were all awarded chocolate Easter eggs as prizes.

The semi-finals were nail-biting. I wouldn’t have believed it, but they were. Each team won an end, and then the third end finished in a TIE. So they had to have a play-off. It was phenomenal. The finals were NEARLY AS BAD. I had no idea curling was this exciting.

I also didn’t realize that it is such a busy game. All four team players are pretty much at work the whole time, and they’re working hard - it’s cold on the ice, the curling stones weigh no less than 17.24 kg / 38 lbs., and when you’re not taking a shot yourself, you’re racing up and down and sweeping as hard as you can. The kids did all their own scoring and organizing, too. It was a fabulous event.

We had supper in the pub down the street from us. Where everybody does really know our name.

So, that’s the curling season finished. Now it’s spring break. ‘Snow Forecast’ said all the variable message signs on the M8 and A9 on the way home, but there isn’t any in Perth, THANK GOODNESS.

On Saturday 10 March 2012, over a hundred small aircraft and their pilots joined in a fly-out from Headcorn in England to Le Touquet in France to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the first flight across the English Channel by a woman, American Harriet Quimby.

I just love the photo of the woman dressed in Harriet Quimby’s purple flying suit.

Meanwhile, other women around the UK and the world participated in Women of Aviation week through an initiative known as 'Fly It Forward'. As a worldwide show of unity, women pilots have been introducing other women to the joys of flight.

Unfortunately I’m still not qualified to carry passengers as Pilot 1, so we had to get a flight instructor to come along so I could let my friend Sarah Carstairs get her hands on the controls. The cool thing about this was that the lovely instructor, Montse Mas Arcos, is Spanish, which made our flight a multinational thing - Sarah being British and me being American.

Sarah In Control

Appropriately (though we weren’t actually crossing the Channel ourselves), we flew north from Dundee to Montrose by way of the North Sea - had a terrific view of the cliffs and Lunan Bay. Scotland is really a very beautiful place to fly. Sarah got to fly back most of the way from Montrose right to the reporting point at Broughty Ferry.

Dundee looking good!

The Angus coast

I handed out the requisite Cadbury’s Dairy Milk after the flight - everybody feeling pleased with themselves. Me for organizing it, Sarah for flying, and Montse because she’d just heard she’s been accepted at Loganair as a commercial pilot.

‘A flying girl! A girl flying an aeroplane!’



That’s me on the left, with Montse (the pilot) in the middle and Sarah on the right. The plane is a Piper Warrior.

For more information about Women of Aviation Week, visit the site at http://www.womenofaviationweek.org

8 March - It’s International Women’s Day!

‘Connecting Girls, Inspiring Futures’ is this year’s theme for the International Women’s Day website.

The first National Women’s Day was celebrated in 1910, and there’s been an International Women’s Day celebrated every year since. But the official date wasn’t fixed on 8 March till 1977.

I find this hard to believe, but it seems to be a coincidence that 8 March 1910 happens to be the day that Raymonde de LaRoche of France became the world’s first female licensed pilot.

Raymonde de LaRoche

It’s hardly surprising then that International Women’s Day falls in the middle of Women of Aviation Worldwide Week (5 - 11 March 2012). Women of Aviation Week aims to ‘celebrate history, raise awareness of aviation’s opportunities among girls and women, and shape the future.’

This year, women pilots around the UK are honouring that event, along with the 100th anniversary of the American Harriet Quimby’s first flight by a woman across the English Channel, with a cross-Channel fly-out and many flights by women throughout the country. (I did actually have a flying lesson on Tuesday... Learning to land using 'point and power' which I am told is how the RAF trains 'em to land, but makes sense, since it gets you in the right place on the runway without a lot of floofing about. I am prone to floofing about.)

Harriet Quimby. Yes, she flew across the English Channel in that thing.

Part of the celebrations include a ‘Fly it Forward’ challenge in an attempt to get as many non-flying women and girls as possible behind the controls of an aircraft this week. Pretty ambitious, but what a fabulous way to apply the theme of ‘connecting girls and inspiring futures’! I’ve done a couple of author library visits this week and have not failed to mention these themes and occasions to all the young people whose paths have crossed with mine, since they are captive audiences anyway. Yesterday's group was all girls, which was a surprise, but a lot of fun.

As a pilot, I've been working at re-validating my own currency requirements and haven’t yet re-qualified to carry passengers on my own, but I have booked a 4-seater Piper Warrior and a female flying instructor and I’m going to take two of my friends along with me. It will be more of a joy-ride than a lesson but at least we’ll be in the air together!

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The overall theme for International Women’s Day 2012, declared by the United Nations, is ‘Empower Rural Women – End Hunger and Poverty’. I like the idea that ‘rural women’ could include many people in my both my homes, the UK and the United States. And of course, the call to arms for empowerment doesn’t just apply to women who are living in hunger and poverty themselves. It can be a call to arms to those who can help others.

Spread the word!

International Women’s Day website:
http://www.internationalwomensday.com/theme.asp

International Women’s Day website theme:
http://www.internationalwomensday.com/theme.asp

International Women’s Day on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Women's_Day

Women of Aviation Worldwide Week:
http://www.womenofaviationweek.org/

I thought what I’d do for World Book Day is a My Favorite Books post; but to make it a little different, instead of a list of my all-time favorites, I’ve tried to pick really off-the-wall favorites and near-favorites in Ten Random Genres. Because I read in a lot of different genres.

Apologies for the lack of pictures. By the time I’d included all the links I’d run out of energy. This might be the longest book post I’ve ever made!

Urban Archaeology, for example!

Hands down, it’s got to be The Lincoln Highway by Drake Hokanson. A customer ordered this book when I was working in B Dalton Bookseller in Strawberry Square, Harrisburg, in 1987. He’d heard about it on NPR. It sat on the customer order shelf for three days before he came in to pick it up and I couldn’t keep my paws off it. I think it was the photographs. The book sparked an obsession with early 20th century auto travel that I have never really outgrown. (I am a charter member of the Lincoln Highway Association and have got a small academic acknowledgement in A Pennsylvania Traveler’s Guide to the Lincoln Highway by Brian Butko, of which I am very proud.)

Middle Grade Horror

Again, NO QUESTION. It’s got to be The House with the Clock in its Walls by John Bellair. OMG this is the creepiest book I have ever read. I still have to put it down when I get to the chapter where his dead Aunt Mattie cranks the mechanical doorbell in the middle of the night. I love the depiction of small-town 1950s Michigan (I am actually a fan of all the books in this series). The magic tricks are off-the-wall and some of it is just fantastically atmospheric. The platonic partnership, or friendship, or what-the-heck-is-it between Uncle Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann, who has a doctorate in magic from a German university! It’s just a fabulous spooky magical adventure with a very sympathetic small bereaved nerd for a hero and loads of quirky supporting characters.

Cookbooks

My mainstay is the 1963 edition of The Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker (which edition I can’t find on Goodreads and am too lazy to add), and I’m probably personally responsible for the global success of Whoopie Pies by Sarah Billingsley and Amy Treadwell, so for this entry I’m going to plug the Pennsylvania Dutch Cook Book by J. George Frederick - originally published in 1935 as The Pennsylvania Dutch and Their Cookery. Most of the recipes in here are uncookable (I do try from time to time) but they’re great reading. I have dog-eared ‘Dutch Festival Doughnuts (Fastnachts)’ and reproduce the recipe in whole under the cut for those of you who are really very ambitious.

( One to plan for next year )

Also includes such delights as Pea-Pod Soup; Dandelion Eggs (essentially eggs Florentine only with dandelion in place of spinach); Tangled Jackets (here’s the recipe in its entirety: ‘1 pint of sour milk, 3 eggs, 1/2 teaspoonful soda, 1 teaspoonful salt, 1 pound flour. Mix and cook in deep fat.’); Philadelphia Pepper Pot Soup (The ingredients begin: ‘1 veal joint, 4 pounds tripe…’ The recipe begins, ‘This is a two-day job of cookery.’ You have to boil the tripe for ‘7 or 8 hours.’); and Dutch Pretzel Soup.

Now I am really hungry for Pepper Pot. If only someone else would make it for me.

Poetry for Small Children

All Join In by Quentin Blake is probably the most memorable poetry book of my children’s toddlerhood. This book isn’t very long, but Sara and Mark, who are now an oh-so-mature teen and preteen, can still recite ‘Nice Weather for Ducks’ and ‘Bed Time Song’:”

We don’t want a lullabye,
WE PREFER A DIN!
NOISY CATS ARE WHAT WE LIKE!
ALL! JOIN! IN!

MEOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW

Toddler Picture Book

Peepo! by Janet and Allan Ahlberg is a CUNNINGLY DISGUISED window into life on the Home Front in urban Britain during World War II. OMG this book kills me. It’s a peekaboo book aimed at kids who can barely speak and takes you through the daily routine, from waking up till bedtime, of a tiny tot in a pushchair. But the discerning reader will spot Spitfires and barrage balloons and bomb damage in the background throughout the book. It doesn’t at all detract from the casual everyday cheeriness of the story. The picture of the baby being carried up to bed by his harassed mum and his Air Raid Warden dad, reflected as a very cozy and safe happy threesome in a hall mirror, has ALWAYS made me teary. It makes me teary writing about it.

One of the other things I have always really, really liked about this book is the slovenliness of this family. Their kitchen is chaotic. The mother of three is clearly exhausted. It’s not a big house and the granny lives there too. Bathwater has to be heated on the stovetop and poured into a washtub. There is drying laundry hanging everywhere. They are clearly battling entropy as far as cleanliness is concerned - in every picture someone is washing windows or dishes or children.

Everything I’ve just described to you is subtext I’ve extracted over many years of studying the pictures. The text is a simple riff on the couplet, ‘Here’s a little baby, one-two-three… sits in his cot, what does he see?’

Autobiography

I’ve been plugging A Childhood in Scotland by Christian Miller so much lately that I’m going to take a more modern and more personal tack here and recommend Jessica Handler’s Invisible Sisters. This is the wrenching story of the life and death of Jessica’s two younger sisters, Susie and Sarah, stricken with ‘diametrically opposed illnesses’ — leukaemia and Kostmann's Syndrome (it's a white blood cell deficit). The nuclear family didn’t survive the blasts. It’s a witty, heartbreaking read from a talented writer who’s keeping alive a family tradition of crystalline prose.

The personal interest I mentioned is that Sarah — the baby of the three sisters and the one with Kostmann’s — was one of my best friends in high school. She died when we were 27. Part of my love for this book is that, 20 years after her death, it gives me a little bit of Sarah back, in a tantalizing filling-in-some-gaps-but-not-others way.

Travel

I don’t think I’ve reviewed or recommended Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Listen! The Wind lately. It’s the very first of AML’s books that I ever read and (the genius of Gift from the Sea notwithstanding), I think it’s probably the most masterful. It documents ten days in the middle of an attempted flight across the South Atlantic in the 1930s on a route-finding trip with Charles Lindbergh. Anne was along as the radio operator and co-pilot. They got stuck in the Cape Verde islands because of the wind, and then had to backtrack to Bathurst in Gambia to wait for a favourable wind for the 16-hour-flight to Natal, Brazil. Loneliness and isolation and the desperate need for communication is an underlying theme of this book, and it’s dealt with so gently. Two incidents stand out in my mind — the decoded Morse radio message from the airbase at Porto Praia in the Cape Verde islands, where they’d been stuck the week before, as they pass over on their final trip out — ‘We listen you all time’ (they never heard from them again) - and how, in the morning after a long night of solitary flight while sending Morse messages to a radio operator on the German ship Westfalen, their flypast over the Westfalen the following morning - with the entire crew standing on the deck waving.

Roaring over her, for one second we were in her world. She there, we here; separated from each other by days of slow sea-travel but for this second together, sharing the time, the place…

I held up my arm and waved frantically, conscious of that supreme thrill of communication. It is the most exciting thing in life anyway, whether you find it in a book or in conversation or in the understanding of two minds. But this, the momentary synthesis of two kinds of communication, was almost unbearable in its intensity. All night and all day I had been struggling to speak over a radio. I had been able to contact people only through my fingers, and my ears, like someone who is blind. But now, suddenly, I could see. A veil had dropped away. I could see, face to face. One of those men waving on deck was the radio operator I had been talking to. I raised my arm again — wonderful!

They climb away. She signals to them in Morse, Many thanks all help.

Mainstream Fiction

Probably my favorite ‘adult’ fiction read of the past ten years is Ian McEwan’s Atonement, but one of the also-rans has got to be Paul Torday’s Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. In some very mysterious mystic way this book was written for me. It may be the only book that I ever saw in a bookstore window and walked in and bought just because of the title.

While it is true that half my novel The Lion Hunter and all of The Empty Kingdom are set in ancient Yemen, and also true that the dream of Fishing in the Desert features in the latter, it is not obvious (I don’t believe) that in my books this is a reference to the Grail Legend. But the title Salmon Fishing in the Yemen just screamed ‘Fisher King Parable’ to me and I wasn’t disappointed. It’s about two men whose lives cross - one a British civil servant, one an Arabian prince - who both share a vision of fishing as a means to break down cultural barriers. The prince is convinced that if he seeds the dry wadi valleys of South Arabia with salmon during the rainy season, the fish will run, and warring nations will flock to catch salmon there together. The two men make the dream come true. It doesn’t end well in one sense; it does in another. It’s a goofy, surreal book, driven by the earnest but somewhat cracked characters, and honestly, it is the only book that has ever made me cry over FISH.

I gave it to a dear friend whose brother used to write for one of the big angling magazines under the pseudonym Kingfisher - and he actually recognized obscure references in this book to people he knew.

Graphic Novel

Technically I suppose Literary Life by Posy Simmonds is more of a graphic collection of short stories than a graphic novel, but in many ways it is the bridge leading to her masterpieces Gemma Bovery and Tamara Drewe. Worth the read if only for the glorious ‘Cinderella,’ where the residents of the retirement home get turned into a collection of tearaway youth, splendidly outfitted in the fashion and accessories (smoking like chimneys) of 65 years ago. And any writers who read it will laugh and cry at the horrible book launches and wasted ink.

…Something a bit more multicultural, since it is World book day, after all

The book is called The Children of Ananse and it’s by Peggy Appiah. It was given to me by an Oxford-raised woman of Indian descent, married to a Jamaican, who happened to be the parents of my best friend when we lived in Jamaica in the 1970s. Ananse is a Jamaican national hero so we were all familiar with him as kids, and this book tells the story of his real Ghanaian roots. It was one of my favorite books as a beginning reader, read and re-read, and it remains pretty clear in my mind. It frames all the standard Ananse tales within a modern story of a child who is a descendant of the first Kwaku Ananse, his strange life in the hidden jungle village where animals can talk, and how he assimilates into modern culture by going to school and learning to read SO THAT, as the headman agrees, he will be able to RECORD the fabulous history of his village. I got all my knowledge of Ashanti culture from this book and made reference to it in a short story published some time ago in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine

You’ll notice I haven’t linked you to the book. It hasn’t got much of an internet footprint, so instead I’ll link you to the author’s Wikipedia entry: meet Peggy Appiah. An English society girl, she married Ghanaian statesman Joe Appiah in 1953. This is the first time I’ve ever found out anything about her and I am overwhelmed by this fabulous woman and her fabulous husband.

Hope some of these are tempting - good luck tracking them down - and happy reading.

Meanwhile, back in the land of the Immortal Haggis…

Burns Night has come and gone and so has Mark’s P7 Burns Supper, which they held on 30 January. They are 11 years old and the two classes put on a REAL Burns Supper - it lasted THREE HOURS, beginning at 6.30 p.m. with a small string orchestra and the whole school brass band playing a selection of Scottish songs including ‘The Dashing White Sergeant’ and ‘Scotland the Brave.’ Then, not quite but nearly the highlight of the evening, the entire P7 year recited the whole of ‘Tam o’ Shanter.’ The way they did this was for each of the 60 kids to recite 4 lines of the poem - they took turns coming to the front in rows of half a dozen to have their say.

Mark doing his part. Yes, he is wearing a sporran. The table decoration is hiding it.

And then they sang a couple of Burns songs including (appropriately, since it was the day before the UK taxes were due), ‘The De’il’s Awa’ wi’ th'Excise Man.’ Also, ‘Scots Wha Hae,’ essentially the Wallace fight song. WHICH MAKES ME CRY. (Well, to tell the truth, ‘Scotland the Brave’ does too. But I am a little strange that way. Of course it is not for the same reason that ‘Highland Cathedral’ makes me cry. The sound of five dozen earnest young voices singing their hearts out for home and beauty always makes me cry.)

Sorry, have I mentioned that the dress code was what we call ‘Touch of Tartan’? Essentially this means you can wear whatever you want, but you have to include something Scottish in your outfit. Most of the boys were in kilts. (It just kills me that when my children go to a party, as many boys as girls are wearing skirts.) The girls were in shiny, skimpy party dresses with tartan sashes over their shoulders. The parents all had tartan ties or shawls (one woman was wearing her son’s boyscout troop neckerchief!) I had my silver thistle kilt pin with the Cairngorm amber flower, which I bought in the Portobello Road market in 1984.

The 120-some parents were seated around tables which had been cunningly arranged by Mark’s math class to provide everyone with a clear view of the stage as well as giving fire access (Mark, as one of the MC’s, was responsible for the ‘safety announcement’ which included a word for word recital of what to do in the event of loss of cabin pressure — that’s my boy) — and also to provide a clear path for the Piping in of the Haggis!

This was the highlight of the evening. Honest to glory, I really cannot do this justice in mere words.

A pretty, [understandably] blushing young dinner lady clothed head to toe in white came marching out of the kitchen carrying a haggis on a paper plate. She was PROPERLY accompanied by a piper, the real thing, playing ‘Scotland the Brave’ again on the bagpipes and dressed in kilt and Jacobite shirt (the casual look—the kind of shirt that laces up at the collar). The piper was in his mid-teens, a cousin of one of Mark’s classmates. Marching with them were the three or four kids whose duty it was to Address the Haggis.

Note charming collection of haggis pompoms...

They marched round and round the assembly hall about three times and then up on the stage, where the kids recited the WHOLE of the Address to the Haggis — ‘Great Chieftain o’ th' Puddin’ Race’ — and plunged a knife into it, and then marched back into the kitchen, and then we got served a full meal of haggis and neeps and tatties, followed by coffee and shortbread decorated with a thistle motif and made by Mark’s teacher, with our children waiting on us. They cleaned up afterward, too.



During coffee the kids performed ‘The Immortal Memory’ where they detail Robert Burns’s life. They had all researched and written these pieces themselves. The entertainment took a nosedive (or an upturn, depending on how you look at it) after that with the ‘Toast to the Lassies’ and ‘Reply from the Lassies’ which got VERY. SILLY.

And then there was dancing.

Scottish country dancing, of course — it was in the gym hall and was also rather silly, but UTTERLY charming. The two classes took it in turns to demonstrate each dance and then to dance with their parents. I am devastated to have to admit that when Mark and his father were dancing together, my camera was in Tim’s pocket. Grrrrr.

Mark dancing with his mother

The evening finished with all 180 of us holding hands in a circle and singing Auld Lang Syne (why yes, Auld Lang Syne makes me sob too! I might have to take a break from Scottish narrators for a while).

Sara disdained to come along to this event and Mark was fairly happy not to have his older sister heckling him, so I had to go next door when we got home to collect her from the neighbors’. When they heard I’d been at a non-alcoholic Burns Supper they were, at first disdainful. Then the questions started coming:

‘I bet they didn’t pipe in the Haggis.’

‘They did! They piped in the Haggis and marched with it round the hall three times! And then they did the whole of the Address to the Haggis from memory!’

‘But they didn’t actually serve you Haggis, did they?’

‘Yes! And neeps and tatties and the children all waited on us!’

‘Did they have other entertainment?’

‘They had a string orchestra and a brass band and dancing and they did the whole of Tam o’ Shanter!’

Everybody wished they had been there.

…

It was the Best Burns Supper EVER. ever ever.



You know, the kids did the whole thing themselves - all the entertainment, arrangement, table decorations, menus, programme, planning, 'hire' of piper and kitchen staff, set-up and clean-up, figuring the cost and giving out the tickets, and I just have to say hats off to the teachers and the school and the Council and the Scottish Government. This was really the Curriculum for Excellence and Cooperative Learning at their shining most successful, I think!



I found the pervasive prevalence of Irn Bru in the decor, as a representative of All Things Scottish, quite hilarious. There was no Irn Bru served at the meal. But it was There In Spirit.