Sticking to what you know

We’re reading The Help by Katherine Stockett in my book group next month and as I’m moderating the discussion I thought I’d better start on some background research.  Everyone I know who read The Help has loved it but there’s also a fair amount of online criticism about Stockett, who is white, writing in the voices of black women.    Quite apart from the claims that the book is racist per se, many people seem to think that as she is white and middle class she cannot possibly enter into the reality of the existences of black, working class women and should not have tried.

Should you then level the same criticism at William Boyd for writing in the first person as a woman in The Blue Afternoon and Restless?    In my opinion it’s probably even more difficult to get under the skin of someone of the opposite sex than someone of a different colour and Boyd does it very well. (I’ve read some truly horrid examples from less skilled authors though.) William Boyd is a very good writer but of course he can’t really “know” what it is like to be a woman, any more than CJ Samson knows what it’s like to be a hunchback lawyer in the reign of Henry VIII, or Donna Leon a Venetian police officer (different nationality and different sex there) and Anne McCaffrey can only guess at the reality of being a brain powering a spaceship.  But then I wrote a novel where my heroine had worked in the City and then went to work for a country estate agent, which is way removed from anything I’d ever done.  So, in a far smaller way I’ve used my imagination to create part of my fictional world in exactly the same way those other, better, authors have.

One of the first rules in any How-To-Write book after ‘show, don’t tell’ is ‘write about what you know’. Like all rules this one is subject to interpretation.  Or being ignored completely.  Some authors stick almost entirely to what they literally know, though this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  Jane Austen is supposed never to have written a scene where there wasn’t a woman present, if she’s describing men together it will be done in reported speech not directly and Nancy Mitford didn’t only write about her own world, she used the people she knew as the basis for nearly all her characters (my cousin knew the man who was the model for Davy, the health food fanatic in The Pursuit of Love and said it was a direct likeness, right down to him helping himself to all the salad at lunch).  Others are prepared to push the boundaries right away from their own experience, science fiction and fantasy are obvious examples, but I suspect that even the most imaginative authors have to include some of what they know to make their books come alive.

Diana Wynne Jones, who has to be one of the most inventive fantasy authors for children (and appreciative adults) of the last fifty years peopled many of her books with splendidly unpleasant and neglectful parents, anyone who has read her biographical details on her website will know where she got the inspiration for them from. William Boyd’s women are articulate and middle class (like him I should think), Katherine Stockett was brought up by a black maid so she would have been familiar with women like her Abilene and Minny, and Donna Leon lives in Venice which is almost as big a character in her books as her detective Guido Brunetti.

In my dreams

I have to admit that I stick fairly closely to what I know, all my main protagonists are women, they all read a lot, like animals, none of them has ever been the most popular girl in the school or good at sport though as I fantasise about being able to dance once of these days I might have a heroine who does a mean tango.  One thing though, my main characters are never short.  I’m tall myself and I’ve got no idea what it’s really like day after day not to be able to reach the top shelf or look at people’s collarbones rather than their eyes.  I remember reading a book where the heroine who was 5’10”, my height, “towered” over everyone else in the room.  I presume the author must have been pretty small because in general I certainly don’t tower over roomfuls, though perhaps my friend Mary who is five foot nothing might think so.

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Cash cows in France

My mother died recently and I’m joint executor for her estate.  Before probate can be declared executors have to swear an oath in front of a solicitor in England, or a consular official abroad, that they’ve read the will and all the councils, sign the will and codicils and have those signatures witnessed.  Our solicitor sent everything to me with a note saying that the statutory charge in the UK is £5 for the swearing of the oath, and £2 per witnessed signature making it £13 in all for my mother’s will and codicils, but it might be a little higher at the consulate.

A little higher, my eye!  When I rang the consulate in Bordeaux to check when I could come in, I was informed that they charged 65€ for the swearing of the oath and 24€ per witnessed signature.  That’s 157€.  I doubt that there’s a single Briton living in France who hasn’t gnashed their teeth in fury over the vast price of renewing their passport through the Embassy in Paris, but, while I have no doubt that a handsome profit is being made, there is some justification for saying that there are extra costs involved in getting a passport issued through the embassy in Paris.

When I went to the consulate I read a short passage off a printed card in front of a charming consular official who then watched me sign four pieces of paper and stamped them with the consular stamp.  We could have done it at the front desk but as she said there was no one else there so we went into a back room where we could sit down. So please where are the extra costs here?  The official is already employed at the consulate, she was on duty at the front desk so I wasn’t taking her away from other duties, the only costs in terms of materials was a little ink on the stamp and she actually spent longer telling me where the nearest cash machine was than she did listening to me swearing the oath or witnessing my signature.

Yes, you read that right.  Directions to the cash machine.  The British Consulate in Bordeaux doesn’t accept cheques or credit cards.   It’s cash only.  No cheques is understandable these days but insisting in cash only?  Just about every two-bit bar in France has a credit card machine, so surely a consulate of what is supposed still  be one of the World’s more powerful players ought to be able to embrace modern technology and accept modern methods of payment.  According to the consular official, who was so nice that it was impossible to remain grumpy, insisting on cash can be very embarrassing for the staff as some customers openly wonder if part of the consular fees go straight into the staff Christmas party fund – they are always meticulous about giving you a receipt for the money.

I can’t see the justification for being charged ten times as much for a legal obligation at a British consulate as my brother was for exactly the same thing at an extremely smart solicitors in London.  Even getting a passport through the Paris Embassy is only twice what it costs in the UK.  Actually I was exceptionally lucky as the consular official declared that as far as she was concerned witnessing my signature was part of the oath swearing so she let me off that part(I said she was nice!)  but not everyone would have done that.

I always had this vague idea that one of the functions of Embassies and consulates was to help and look after the interests of their citizens abroad, I never realised that it included making as large a profit out of them as possible.

Naive or what?

Another for the Desert Island Bookcase

My bookcase is rapidly developing a lot of spaces on the shelves with ‘reserved for’ marked on them as my next choice is yet another book that I can’t currently lay my hands on.  Not because of the spotted book critic’s attentions this time but because I lent it to a friend, pointing out that it was so tatty because it had been read many times by several members of the family and we wanted it back as eventually someone was going to feel like reading it yet again.  That was three years ago.  So Sue, please…

Angels and Men by Catherine Fox is the sort of book I usually wouldn’t bother with as it’s set in a Christian college in a large university town – obviously Durham though it’s not called that – and frankly a story about a heroine damaged by a religious cult, theology students, trainee vicars, potential losses of faith and various other religious dilemmas would generally send me to sleep rather than make me stay up till I’ve finished it.  But this isn’t a book about religion, it’s about students and it’s as warm, as funny and as intense as students usually are.  Mara, the heroine is wonderfully acerbic and prickly, and though, despite herself she’s gradually drawn into the life of the college and to her surprise becomes one of a group of friends, she remains tricky and is sometimes a complete pain in the  neck.  But she’s always interesting, fun to read about and someone you grow to care about a lot.

There’s a superb cast of theology students, the slightly stuffy Rupert with his polished shoes whose father is a bishop and who has decided, against all logic, that Mara would make a good vicar’s wife and his friend Johnny.  Johnny is one of the most unlikely potential vicars you’re ever going to come across, he’s working class in a middle class college, he smokes, he’s rebellious and he’s hot.  There’s a line describing him (done from memory, as of course Sue, I don’t have the book to check the exact wording) – Johnny Whittaker “practically had leg over tattooed on his chest”.  A hot vicar, now that’s not a combination of words that springs readily to my mind.

Religion plays a major part in this book; the characters’ struggles with their faith, their trying to come to terms with what has happened in the past, with the demands that faith puts on them, with the very basic but difficult tenet that unmarried Christians are supposed to be celibate (not surprisingly there’s quite a lot of this) and in less sure hands Angels and Men could have become a “message novel”.  But everything is written with a light touch, Catherine Fox’s writing is warm, engaging, frequently very funny and she’s confident enough not to leave everything sewn up neatly at the end, which may be one of the many reasons that nearly everyone I know who has read this book has reread it again at least once.

Maybe that’s why I still don’t have my copy back…

 

Evacuate the car now…

Tags

cars

Cat ornament, optional

I was on my way back from the supermarket when the car began to beep wildly and one of those warning notices came up on the dashboard ‘STOP!  FRD défaillant’.  The last time I got a warning I decided that it was probably safe to drive the two kilometres back to the house and got a terrific bollocking from my husband, anyway anything that flashes ‘STOP’ at you seems a bit urgent so I drew into a lay by.  For once I’d remembered to bring my mobile with me so I rang him up to say there was a slightly alarming flashing message and what did it mean.

Had I looked in the instruction manual?  Of course I had.  (Rifles quickly through manual, just as I thought no handy list of what flashing acronyms might mean.)  Right, he’ll ring the garage and ask them.  Five minutes later he rings back to say the garage don’t know either but have said I’d better bring it in and they’ll look at it.  So off I set, very cautiously, just in case the signs meant something like ‘The brakes are going to fail as you’re going down a steep hill’ and greatly annoying the boy racer roaring up behind me who didn’t appreciate being kept at a steady 40 km.

One of the things I like about living here is that they still have village garages where you aren’t made to feel stupid for pulling in to have a minor point checked, especially if you’re a woman.  The mechanics, rather than tutting and shaking their heads on seeing your car, and saying, ‘This one’s only fit for the scrap heap, gov,’ seem to look on keeping a venerable old vehicle (aka wreck) on the road as an exciting challenge.  It’s even better if they get the chance to cannibalise some other old wreck and they can proudly say they’ve repaired it for next to nothing.  As the Citroen Pluriel, of the flashing warning signs, is the only new car we’ve ever bought, we’ve had plenty of experience of old bangers held together by string (and parcel tape on one occasion) so really appreciate the French make do and mend attitude.

I arrive at the garage and the two mechanics wander out.  One is short, fat and young, the other, tall, thin and elderly.  I explain the problem and SFY goes to have a look, ‘Your back brake light has gone,’ he says promptly.  Obvious when you know, the Stop light – Feu Arriere Droite – has failed.  I really, really like the way French mechanics don’t make you feel stupid.

Short, fat and young says he’ll get a new one put in straight away.  After a couple of minutes he still can’t get the cover off because a screw is burred so tall, thin and elderly comes over saying he knows what to do.  After a couple more minutes he goes and fetches his special tool kit, the one with the right angled screwdriver.  That doesn’t get the screw out either.  So the owner of the garage comes out of the office and has a go too.  He straightens up and says, ‘How many mechanics does it take to change a bulb?’

And how long does it take to change a bulb?  Twenty four hours.  We had to leave the car there.

Seen from a distance

The first house we bought in France was in Preignac, on the left bank of the

Seen from the other side of the river

Garonne.  In fact the house was on the banks of the Garonne and actually in times of exceptionally high water (that’s another story, and a damp one, for later).  The children used to go to school at Cadillac ten minutes drive away and on the way we’d see a ruined fairytale castle high up on the hillside opposite.  We’d have loved to explore it but there didn’t seem to be any obvious way to get to it so it remained a tantalising mystery.

Fast forward 16 years and my middle daughter is looking for six months work experience to validate her degree in Tourism and The Development of Tourist Sites.  Given that she has an absolute passion for castles and restoration it probably wasn’t that surprising she ended up working for the association engaged in restoring  the fairytale castle, in fact called the vieux Chateau du Cros.  The new one is directly below it and is some 500 years younger.

Needless to say we demanded a visit almost immediately, and it really is a wonderful place to go around.  Sadly there isn’t a lot of the original castle left, the war saw to that, but the location would be hard to beat.  Vineyards to the back, woods to the side and a view of the Sauternais and the forest of Les Landes to the front.

The medieval market with medieval-style entertainment.

One of my daughter’s first jobs was to organise a medieval market in an oak wood clearing nest to the château as a way of publicising to the locals that the château, which had been closed to the public for years for safety reasons, could now be visited.  Despite it being 40 degrees (making wearing medieval costumes a real joy) the market was a roaring success with lots of people coming specifically to see the château and telling my daughter about how they, too, had wondered for years what it was really like.

My daughter was asked to stay on and head up the restoration project which is a job she adores, even if sometimes she is less than adoring about dealing with the bureaucracy that surrounds any project to do with historical monuments.

A Desert Island Bookcase

Am I the only person who while enjoying Desert Island Discs would actually be more interested listening to Desert Island Books?  Not a programme limited to only taking six books of course, being allowed that few on an island surely counts as a cruel and unnatural maroonment and must be included somewhere in the small print of the Human Rights Act.  I’d insist on a large bookcase at the very least, or being allowed to count The Collected Works of PG Wodehouse as one book, even I could make over 90 books last a while.

But would people be honest in their selections, or would it end up like those ‘Book Of The Year’ selections where you get the feeling that the celebs asked to name their three favourite authors are too embarrassed to name Lee Child, Marian Keyes and Dan Brown?    It might sound very intellectual to say that you’ll take the whole of Proust but you wouldn’t know how long you’d be stuck on the island before you could flag down a handy passing steamer, and frankly do you want to have to read about Proust’s obsession with madelaines again and again and again?  And maybe again and again if you’re unlucky and your island isn’t on one of the more populated shipping lanes.

The truth is that my desert island bookcase would be almost entirely populated with books that make me laugh and would probably not have many of the books that have enthralled me the most.  I adored War and Peace when I read it at 15 in one week (when I should have been revising for my mocks which might explain my results), still think Natasha is one of the most engaging heroines ever and have absolutely no desire to go back to it.  But I could read E F Delafield’s Diary Of A Provincial Lady again and again (and have).

I’d love to be able to write a detailed review of The Diary Of A Provincial Lady, with quotes and showing why this story of a middle class woman in the 1930’s juggling her cook, Mademoiselle who looks after the five year old daughter of the house, Robert her husband (typical man, some might say stereotypical and therefore very funny), Our Vicar’s Wife who never knows when to leave and Lady B, Robert’s employer who is as autocratic and tactless as Lady Catherine de Bourgh is so absolutely enchanting.  But I can’t.  Desi, the younger of our two Dalmatians, was keen on literature as a puppy and eagerly swallowed up several of my books includng The Provincial Lady.

A Keen Literary Critic

So you’ll have to take my word for it that The Diary of a Provincial Lady is still as funny as it was when it first started appearing in serial form in Time and Tide which no doubt explains why it’s never been out of print.  The are several further books about the Provincial Lady which don’t have quite the freshness of the original but are still delightful.

Food Cravings

Tags

cheddar, ex-pats, Marmite, pork pies

The ex-pat store cupboard

I discovered by chance yesterday that Lidl were having an English week so I went haring off to buy Cheddar before it all disappeared.  On the way back with my loaded bags , it occurred to me that “Cheddar” seems to invoke an almost Pavlovian response in British ex-pats, even if we didn’t eat a lot of it back in England, now we can’t get it easily we can’t pass it without buying it.

It’s the same with Pork Pies.  Admittedly I grew up near Melton Mowbray so I do know what a proper pork pie tastes like but from being a teenager onwards I practically never let a piece of pork pie pass my lips because I was always dieting. Now, and not just because I’ve got to the sort of age where you aren’t supposed to worry about mundane things like your figure, I come back loaded with pork pies every time I come back from England.

I’ve discovered though that the longer I stay in France the list of grocery essentials to bring back if I’m driving gets shorter by the year.  Stuff for making the Christmas cake, dried fruit is so expensive here and some quite hard to find, mincemeat because I’m too lazy to make my own, English sausages – I like French ones too but it’s nice to ring the changes, various herbs and spices like ground allspice and chilli flakes which are hard to find, Ginger Beer, Golden Syrup and, if the timing is right, hot cross buns.  I can make them but they are better suited as defensive weapons than comestibles.

That’s about it really.  It wouldn’t bother me if I never had another baked bean in my life, I’ve never been a great biscuit eater and anyway you can get a really good substitute for Digestives, good tea is easily available contrary to what a lot of people think (and rather easier to find around here than coffee beans), I now prefer the thin poitrine you get here to English bacon, my husband says the marmalade we find is the supermarket is excellent and most of the other “exotic” aka “foreign, not French” stuff I want can be found in the health food supermarket.

And then we come to Marmite. In this household it practically ranks as one of your 5 a day, there are always at least three large pots in waiting in the larder guarding against the unthinkable – a Marmite shortage.  My middle daughter even has a “Cooking With Marmite” book though it hasn’t had an awful lot of use; her idea of haute cuisine is to add a handful of grated cheese to a tin of baked beans.  One recipe it doesn’t have in it though, and which I discovered in Nigella’s latest book Kitchen is Spaghetti with Marmite.

As Nigella said, why couldn’t I have discovered this when the children were small?  Actually even though it didn’t sound that promising it went down very well with three not-that-fussy adults and didn’t taste too Marmity.  You could even serve it up to a normally Marmite-hating Frenchman so it’s definitely worth remembering for those occasions when my daughter rings up at midday and says, ‘Did I remember to tell you I’m bringing Xavier/Stefan/Julien back to lunch…’

Picked on the First of November…

I can’t believe that I can still get tomatoes from the garden in November (there were rather more but I couldn’t resist eating as I picked) and they taste pretty good too.  Note to those who eat here; the cat is not actually allowed to do her ablutions next to the food but once a cat sees a camera…