ON his regular walk to work, teaching creative writing at Goldsmiths College in south London, Francis Spufford passes a memorial to the 168 people killed by a V2 bomb falling on a Woolworths store in 1944. Sixteen of them were young children, brought by their mothers on a Saturday shopping trip. Prof Spufford began thinking about those children: what if they hadn’t died, what would their futures have been? He imagined five of them, gave them names and characters, and dropped in on their lives every 10, 15, 20 years to see how they were getting on.
The result is his second novel, Light Perpetual, published earlier this year and a palimpsest, you might say, of the latter half of the 20th century. ‘It’s about how, close up, no life is ordinary,’ he explains, ‘and how the destinies of children born in the 1940s exploded in all directions, with opportunities drastically different from anything their parents could possibly have imagined.’
We are talking in the garden of his home, which comes with his wife Jessica Martin’s job as a canon of Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire; above us hang the creamy, scented lobes of a false acacia tree, itself dwarfed by the Gothic west tower of the cathedral only a few yards outside the garden wall. Behind us are the choristers’ boarding houses of the King’s School; beyond, parkland and a meadow grazed by cattle, all circled by the unseen city below: very rus in urbe.
Denne historien er fra July 28, 2021-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra July 28, 2021-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
