Human Flower Project

Wednesday, September 09, 2009

The Book Club

To gardening books read, and to the right places for reading, at last, the others.

Essay and Photos by John Levett

There are times when it’s a fine thing to read books in context—Orwell in Wigan, Plath on a Yorkshire Moor, George Mackay Brown in Orkney, Proust in Montmartre, Patrick Hamilton in Earls Court, Isherwood in Berlin. I’m not sure of the legitimacy of Proust in Montmartre but the idea suits and I only ever got as far as the north bank of the Firth of Forth with G.M. Brown but, with the light in the right place at the right time of day, coincidence can add to words on the page.

Last week I went for a day’s walk and by late afternoon I was sitting on a hill near Fowlmere, a small village south of Cambridge, reading Mollie Panter-Downes’s ‘One Fine Day.’ It describes the commonplace events of a day in the life of a middle-class woman one year after the end of the last war and her balancing between resignation to the petty restrictions and inconveniences of Britain in austerity and the bright certainty of a future. I had arrived at this passage: “… never, even then, had Laura felt quite this rush of overwhelming thankfulness, so that the land swam and misted and danced before her. She had had to lose a dog and climb a hill, a year later, to realize what it would have meant if England has lost. We are at peace, we still stand, we will stand when you are dust, sang the humming land in the summer evening.” There was a dull drone gathering and shortly I was overflown by a Spitfire and Hurricane from (I guessed) the Battle of Britain flight up in Lincolnshire. Check the ration book then home to tea scrapings and margarine on toast.

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