OF CATS AND QUEENS...

 

Ailurophobes look away now: this one is about cats. And queens...

You don't have to be a monarchist to admire a woman who took on a job she didn't ask for and did it with such extraordinary diligence, dignity and warmth for over 70 years - and without, so far as I know, ever once thumping some infuriating politician, minor royal or head of state. I like to think of Queen Elizabeth now, feet up, glass in hand and ghostly corgis by her side, enjoying her well-earned rest while previous wearers of the crown queue up to congratulate her on doing the job a damn sight better and longer than anyone else.

I can't say I ever saw a picture of the Queen with a cat, but then, we all have our failings - not that I dislike dogs and horses, but for me the cat has always been the ideal writer's companion: beautiful, mysterious, comforting and silent (unless hungry) and they don't have to be taken for walks. Nor do I go out of my way to collect cat books, but much like the animals themselves (and with a little help from my friends) they tend to accumulate. 

I can't remember now who gave me this cat diary, but in it I've recorded the lives of all the cats I remember, from long-ago South African childhood pets to the most recently-deceased. Cats quite often use up their nine lives sooner than expected, and the deaths of some of mine still haunt me, but they brought me comfort in the worst of times, and drawing and writing about them has always been therapeutic.

Ptolemy, who came to us 3 months ago, is curious, gentle, a friend to all; and a regular visitor to a nearby house that's home to members of the Camphill Community, who would love a cat of their own. The other day one of the residents knocked at our door. She cannot speak in words that we can understand, but she can paint, and it seems that Tolly had been sitting for his portrait, because she handed me the picture, framed and ready to hang - an unexpected, deeply moving gift, proving that one small cat can spread a lot of joy.

There's some terribly sad writing about cats (Paul Gallico and Colette both traumatised me in my youth) but there's so much more that is gloriously funny - Wodehouse, Thurber, Lear, Twain and Eliot - as well as a wealth of wonderful children's books: Mog, Orlando, The Cat in the Hat. And then there are poems, like Yeats's Cat and the Moon...

    'Minnaloushe creeps through the grass, alone, important and wise,

    And lifts to the changing moon his changing eyes.' 

But my all-time favourite, and ultimate role model, has to be that great survivor, the immortal Mehitabel, creation of Don Marquis, and friend of Archy the typing cockroach...

i was several 

Tolly and portrait

ladies my little

insect says she

being cleopatra was

only an incident

in my career...

but wotthehell

little archy wot

thehell

its cheerio 

my deario

that pulls a

lady through

exclamation point...

...always my luck

yesterday an empress

and today too

emaciated to interest

a vivisectionist but

toujours gai archy

toujours gai and always

a lady in spite of hell

and transmigration

once a queen

always a queen

archy

period

He ends with this: 'her morals may have been mislaid somewhere in the centuries boss but i admire her spirit'.  Me too, Archy, me too.

A SNOWMAN IN HARARE

Thirty-something years ago in Harare, Zimbabwe, the pupils in my son Daniel's class put on a performance of The Snowman. Dan was the narrator, and my de facto other son, his best friend Maruza,  mimed the part of the snowman. It is one of the abiding memories of my life- - even in the school hall of a government primary school in the middle of Africa and the heat of summer, the magic of Raymond Briggs enchanted the audience, most of whom had never seen snow and ice. The Snowman, Fungus the Bogeyman, The Bear, the terrifying When the Wind Blows, Ethel and Ernest: wonderful books, and a glorious antidote to all things saccharine and sentimental.

Briggs died on the 9th of August. Two days later, French illustrator Jean Jacques Sempé also died. I always loved his work, so I'm re-reading my old copy of Marcellin Caillou, which is about the right level for my French, and it's giving me great pleasure. Le petit Marcellin has an embarrassing malady: he blushes all the time, for no reason at all. Luckily he makes friends with René Rateau - 'un enfant délicieux' - who suffers from his own unusual problem: he sneezes constantly. The drawings of these two beleaguered but kind and  philosophical little people supporting each other through daily life are hopeful, captivating, funny - and again, in no way sentimental.

So farewell and thank you, Jean Jacques and Raymond, and thank you Bernie McGill for your new collection of short stories, This Train is For. The title story broke my heart. I rarely cry, but this one did for me. I've only read the first three but they were so good that I'm going to sip the rest slowly - like the finest wine. (Note to self: is this the beginning of a whole new career - matching books to wine?)

The other two novels that have stayed in my mind lately are The Tortoise and the Hare, by Elizabeth Jenkins, and Barbara Kingsolver's Lacuna. The former I had read some years ago, but someone mentioned Hilary Mantel's admiration for the book, so I read it again, with more attention. I'd forgotten what a beautiful writer she is, and I love this book for her insight and language, rather than the characters. They are the products - and casualties - of their time: Imogen is the decorative, gentle, placatory wife and solid, tweedy Blanche the older, assertive countrywoman. Both are in competition for the affections of Evelyn - although why anyone would want him remains a mystery. 

Lacuna, on the other hand, has a central character for whom I felt such affection that despite an initial disinclination to read a 600-page novel, even by Barbara Kingsolver, that featured Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Trotsky (intriguing characters, unquestionably, but all in one book sounded like cultural overload) once I had started, I couldn't put it down. It's also a reminder that books sometimes deserve a second chance: this book has been on my shelf for years but I gave up on the first attempt because of its length.

I began with Zimbabwe - the country that gave me 18 wonderful years and so many lasting friendships - so let me end there. Blind Ambition, a documentary film about four young black Zimbabwean migrants who endure extraordinary hardships to reach South Africa and turn themselves, against all the odds, into award-winning sommeliers. That's the second time this week that I've found myself in tears: heart-breaking, joyous and utterly inspiring - do yourselves a favour and go and see it.

The answer to Wordle earlier this week was 'gecko' - a small hardy lizard for which I have a particular fondness. They flickered across my childhood walls and occasionally dropped from the rafters onto an unsuspecting head or lap. I got the word quickly, which is always partly due to luck, but cheered me up because it seemed to prove I was finally shaking off the COVID caught while visiting our family in South Africa. 

We weren’t surprised when we tested positive: we’d been travelling for the first time since it all began and we did more socialising in Johannesburg in 3 weeks than we’d done in the previous 2 years. Still, we’d had the vaccines and boosters and although the first few days brought all the expected symptoms - hacking cough, brain-fog, pain, fatigue, plus a few more – I wasn't expecting what happened on day 8, when I suddenly found myself barely able to move or talk. Be warned, friends, this thing can turn extremely nasty.

So, while the vote was being counted in Northern Ireland, I was being cared for in A+E. My youngest child was standing for election, and it seemed a terrible dereliction of  maternal duty to abandon my watch, but then it occurred to me that if I actually died, it might cast even more of a blight on proceedings. Anyway, she got in and I got out, and here I am again, a tad more battered but extremely proud that my little daughter (in reality 34 years old, inches taller than her mother and expecting her second child any minute) has been elected a Member of the Legislative Assembly for the cross-community Alliance Party. 

Alliance, and I quote, ‘was founded in 1970 with the objective of healing the bitter divisions in our community. We believe in a shared society, free from intimidation, discrimination and fear, where everyone is safe, can play their part and is treated fairly and with respect.’ Well, for my money, you can’t say fairer than that. I came here myself for the first time in 1970, a period vividly recalled for me by Louise Kennedy’s new novel, Trespasses. I was so painfully reminded of those days – the fear, the bigotry, the violence, and the shocking attitudes to women – that I wasn’t sure I could go on. But once you start reading Kennedy, you can never stop; she breaks your heart but she gives you hope, and I think she is extraordinary.  And 50 years on, we have proof that even in the most bitterly divided of societies, a few good people banding together can eventually bring about change. Alliance is also a party notable for being both led by a woman and represented by an unusual number of brave, principled, and inspiring women. My daughter is in excellent company.

Enough of that. This blog is supposed to be about books, and I’ve been trying to think of a memorable novel about a woman in politics – there are any number about men - but Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife apart, I’ve drawn a blank. Suggestions, as always, will be welcome. My holiday reading was mainly escapist. A Discovery of Witches (witches, vampires and demons living undercover in Oxford - and where better?) was fun at first but 600+ pages of delayed gratification, in every sense, was far too much. The Word is Murder came next, the first in Anthony Horowitz’s Hawthorne-Horowitz series. I'd already enjoyed A Line to Kill, where the action takes place at a literary festival in Alderney (and what writer hasn’t been moved from time to time by literary festivals to thoughts of murder?) and now I'm looking forward to The Sentence is Death. Horowitz sets out to entertain you, and he does it with consummate ease. I also read the third of Amor Towles’ novels, The Lincoln Highway. His second, A Gentleman in Moscow, is still my most enjoyable book of the year; Rules of Civility, his first, was also highly readable, if not in the same class. And perhaps it was partly due to COVID but for me The Lincoln Highway, despite some memorable characters, was in the end too sprawling and unfocused. A pity. 

As so often happens, my back-up book proved best of all. In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje, was hardly escapist, but such a moving, lyrical account of the strange lives and loves of the immigrants, workers and dreamers who were building Toronto in the 1920s, that I couldn’t put it down.

Like so many others, my own family have travelled far from their beginnings. I sometimes think we'd all have been better off if humans had just stayed home and quietly tended whatever corner of the planet they'd been born in, but it's a bit late for that now. All we can really do is remind ourselves that although we are threatened by so much - not least, the older, power-hungry men and women who continue to send the terrified young to fight their battles for them - there is always hope. And cling on for dear life when the walls start closing in. A bit like geckos. 

Every so often I decide to call time on this blog. There are already so many voices out there competing for attention, and in the face of a pandemic, a worldwide climate emergency and a war so senseless and barbaric that it beggars belief, my thoughts on literature and life seem a bit pointless. Then I come across yet another book so intriguing, moving, or just downright cheering, that I just can't help myself...

When I finished A Gentleman in Moscow I wasn't expecting to find anything as enjoyable for a long time to come. But Nobel prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah's novel, By the Sea, is extraordinary. I knew nothing about Gurnah and very little about the history of Zanzibar, and a story of exile and old wrongs wasn't necessarily what I wanted to read right then, but a friend had lent it to me, so I did. And what an extraordinary book it turned out to be: beautifully written, at times almost unbearably moving, but always measured, fascinating, thoughtful, wise.

After that came the pleasures of Silverview, the late great John le Carre's last book; Alan Garner's quirky Treacle Walker; and Claire Keegan's wonderful Small Things Like These - a small Irish masterpiece dealing with other historic wrongs, in this case the Magdelene laundries. Like the Gurnah novel, it's beautifully written, unsentimental, haunting and humane.

Then there was Damon Galgut's The Promise. It's always a great pleasure when a fellow South African is acclaimed for a novel, and this book deserves every word of praise. A wonderfully readable story about the crumbling Swart family and their broken promise to Salome, the Black woman who has worked for them all her life. Powerful, funny, poignant and truthful - I can't recommend it highly enough.

I started reading The Promise - as I do any novel by a compatriot, or a writer I know and like - thinking that loyalty would probably keep me going to the end, even if it turned out not to be one of their best, but both Damon Galgut and Jan Carson were a pleasure from start to finish. In fact I can honestly say that The Raptures had me so enraptured from the start that I could hardly bear to finish. Utterly original, gloriously funny and heartbreaking to boot. And while I accept that magic realism isn't everyone's cup of tea, I'm beginning to think that it's the obvious way to write about Northern Ireland - a place simultaneously so beautiful, warm-hearted, bigoted and mad that you can be forgiven for sometimes thinking you're living in a peculiar parallel universe.

As if all that wasn't more than enough, Rules of Civility - the elegant first novel from Amor Towles - was nearly as enjoyable as his Gentleman in Moscow, and The Lincoln Highway is waiting. I've also got the Spring edition of my regular fix, Slightly Foxed, to enjoy, and I'm currently on Page 117 of A Rising Man by Abir Mukherjee. This is turning out to be an exceptionally entertaining murder mystery set in Calcutta in 1919. I'm starting to run out of adjectives here, but really and truly, my literary cup runneth over...

Which is a good thing, considering the current state of the outside world. I suppose it's no surprise that so many recent novels deal with old hurts and historic wrongs, but at least the above all do so without bitterness or despair. And sometimes exile and displacement bring unexpected benefits. 40 years ago, I met a Ugandan doctor, newly-arrived in Zimbabwe with his teacher wife (who was in hospital, awaiting the birth of their third child) to begin a new life for their family. We were newly-arrived from troubled Belfast, with two small children of our own, and our four little ones took as instant a liking to each other as I had to their father. They came to play a few days later and when I met their mother, I knew at once that we'd be friends for life. And so we have been, despite the geographical distances between us, and our too-rare times together. Then, a week ago, we were stricken by the news of the death in Uganda of our dear friend. His wife and four daughters must now learn to live without this gentle, lovely man, but I can only be grateful for the disruptive currents of fate that once brought us all together, and so enriched our lives.

And one more happy ending - just to lighten the prevailing gloom: a few years ago a young Egyptian engineer walked into the Belfast bookshop I was running, to volunteer his services. He was in exile and alone over the Christmas holidays so I persuaded him to come and join our South African Irish English Indian family party. He duly arrived at our door with a rucksack strapped to his back and his most precious belonging, an Egyptian stringed Oud, strapped to his front. This instrument he played for us one evening that I will never forget. The desperate longing for home that welled up with the music could have broken your heart. But he and his lovely Greek girlfriend later made a new home in Scotland; they celebrated their Muslim wedding in Cairo a while back, and later this year they'll have an Orthodox ceremony in Greece - two people of different faiths and cultures happily brought together by the upheavals of our times.

Sadly, the Four Horsemen of conquest, famine, war and death continue to ride, as they have done for centuries. Like the rest of the world I am currently holding my breath and hoping against hope that somehow Peace will return to Europe, and that all those recently displaced people will regain some sort of life. We also very much hope that later in the year we'll be in Greece to celebrate our young friends' marriage, and to enjoy a reunion with our Greek family. For now though, it's back to Calcutta for me, and the immeasurable comfort of a good book...