Slightly Foxed – The Real Reader's Quarterly

July 2010

The lavender is blooming but we’re all slightly wilting in the London heat although we remain as cheery as ever — helped in part by lunches on the balcony — but mainly by you, our subscribers. We’re always touched and delighted by the little notes, postcards and letters that you send us from time to time. Here are just a few that have arrived recently.

‘First of all I must tell you how much I have enjoyed my copy of the Spring edition. As a new reader I am delighted to have discovered you!’ D.B.W.

You have the very happy knack of dropping a book through my letter-box just when I am casting about for what to read next. Yesterday evening I finished P.D. James’s Children of Men; this evening I shall read A House in Flanders.’ D.J.

‘Thank you for all the back numbers and slipcases – all arrived safely. I’m like a mouse in a cheese shop – everything is so delicious that I cannot believe the heaven I’m in! So hard to pace my reading and not read ALL in one day! I’m thrilled to have every wonderful volume – THANK YOU’ W.H.

‘A House in Flanders will definitely be my book of 2010 . . . The book is so evocative . . . Please keep up the good work finding such books. I will wait keenly for the next edition.’ D.A.

June 2010

Could Summer have finally arrived? It certainly has at Slightly Foxed HQ as the office is full to bursting with copies of the Summer issue of Slightly Foxed and our tenth Slightly Foxed Edition, Michael Jenkins’s A House in Flanders – the perfect summer read. Michael Jenkins is the first living author that we’ve republished in our Slightly Foxed Edition series and we were delighted to be able to relaunch the book in style this month with Michael, P.D. James and many other friends at Slightly Foxed on Gloucester Road. We even bagged a spot in the Evening Standard’s ‘Londoner’s Diary’:

‘BUOYED by her triumph as the Oldie magazine’s Handbagger of the Year — a reference to her demolition of the BBC director-general Mark Thompson — thriller writer Baroness James of Holland Park was at Slightly Foxed on Gloucester Road, the antiquarian bookshop, last night for the launch of Michael Jenkins’s A House in Flanders. “There are some books, not necessarily the longest, in which the author’s intention is so perfectly realised, a seminal experience of life so beautifully recorded that the book becomes a small icon to be treasured not only on the shelf of a personal library, but in the mind,” writes P.D. James in the Slightly Foxed Quarterly. No handbagging there.’

Slightly Foxed 26

P. D. James visits a house in Flanders • Ben Hopkinson praises his outboard motor • Rowena Macdonald tries self-sufficiency • John Keay goes up the Nile • Frances Donnelly learns about survival • Peter Hobday returns to the Empty Quarter • Penelope Lively lives through the dog days • James Fergusson finds a diary in the attic • Christopher Gibson remembers Mr Simmons

A House in Flanders

In 1951, a shy and solitary 14-year-old boy was sent by his parents to spend the summer with ‘the aunts in Flanders’. So began for Michael Jenkins a formative experience which, when he came to write about it half a century later, reappeared to him ‘as in a dream, complete but surreal’.

A House in Flanders, his account of those summer months spent on the edge of the Flanders Plain, does indeed have a hypnotic and dreamlike quality. The dignified old French country house with its unvarying routines; the extended family of elderly aunts, uncles and grown-up cousins (with one of whom he fell boyishly in love); the summer warmth and wide Flemish skies were like an awakening to a young boy whose home in England was a ‘cold and empty place’ and whose parents, he felt, ‘preferred frigid intellectual exchanges to the more complicated and demanding world of personal relationships’.

Yet all was not as golden as at first seemed. The German occupation had left its mark, and in 1951 memories of it were still raw and painful. Gradually, through his vivid portraits of the various members – in particular of the firm but kindly matriarch Tante Yvonne – Michael Jenkins teases out the history of the family and of the surrounding area and uncovers the secret at the heart of the book – the reason he has been sent there.

As Dirk Bogarde wrote in the Daily Telegraph when A House in Flanders was first published, this is ‘a radiant book, a whole spectrum of colours and lights, of delights and elegances, of wistfulness and love’.

May 2010

It feels as though Spring has finally arrived at the Slightly Foxed office in London. The tulips on the balcony are in full bloom, the sun is shining (occasionally), there’s a spring in our step and even the dogs are more perky than usual, which is just as well as Brian (our man with a van) is preparing to make his quarterly journey from our printers in Yorkshire down to London with a van-load of things to keep us busy. He’s bringing advance copies of the forthcoming Summer issue of Slightly Foxed and 2,000 copies of our tenth Slightly Foxed Edition, Michael Jenkins’s A House in Flanders, his account of summer months spent on the edge of the Flanders Plain. ‘A radiant book,’ wrote Dirk Bogarde in the Daily Telegraph, ‘a whole spectrum of colours and lights, of delights and elegances, of wistfulness and love.’ The perfect summer read, in fact.

Slightly Foxed on Gloucester Road

The Gloucester Road Bookshop really is now Slightly Foxed on Gloucester Road and we’re delighted with its new look. We hope you’ll be able to pay the shop a visit very soon and see for yourself, but here’s a preview . . .

Photographs by Tom Bunning

March 2010

The Spring issue has just gone out and copies of the new Slightly Foxed Edition, Ted Walker’s The High Path, have arrived. We were very cheered to receive the following email from a London subscriber on a cold, grey Monday morning . . .

The spring edition arrived on Saturday – one of the first signs of spring – thank you! I jumped on the tube at Tottenham Hale, and noticed that the man opposite was not reading a newspaper like everyone else. I identified it by the print of snowdrops. ‘Excuse me’, I said to him, ‘Snap!’ – waving my copy. ‘Just arrived?’ ‘Yes’, and we both settled down with a smile to read our copies.

Crossword

Slightly Foxed readers were invited to test their literary skills with our crossword in the Winter issue and judging by the hundreds of correct entries we received you truly are a literary lot! Here are the answers.

Across

1 Just beat Miss Woodhouse after noon (3,4) PIP EMMA

7 see 9 across

9, 7 She was penned by a horseman, exhausted (5,7) RIDER HAGGARD

10 Yosser, Dixie, George and Chrissie: his able lads exploded with energy (9) BLEASDALE

11 Irish flower for Tennessee Williams’s Larry (7) SHANNON

14 New Englanders seek any resort (7) YANKEES

16 His Norman lady is welcome, but flare flickers after puff of wind (7,8) GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

18 One caught in thicket, a one caught by the tongue (7) ARAMAIC

20 A clicky true, he might have said (7) SPOONER

22 In us all we turn to a Welsh poet (4,5) ALUN LEWIS

25 I give a card to Wilde’s husband (5) IDEAL

27 John’s mother on a reel, spinning (7)ELEANOR

28, 16 down Strange Thames hankering; energy needed for author of river idyll (7,7) KENNETH GRAHAME

Down

1 Copied from new map edition (4) APED

2 Old essayist needs a doctor after fifty (4) LAMB

3 Happy, almost in heaven, Chas and Ed gave Nick a job (10) CHEERYBLES

4 Encourages breakfast being cooked? (4,2) EGGS ON

5 One seduced Helen, another loved Juliet (5) PARIS

6 Tempestuous woman? Yes and no (7) MIRANDA

8 Sunken river dog, say, swallows shilling (4-3) DEEP SET

12 Italian city goes back in a format so alpine (5) AOSTA

13 His hay fever, a feverish Cold War one (4,6) NOEL COWARD

15 Free-hitting batsman has this – probably two of them (3,2) EYE IN

16 see 28 across

17 Moreish? (7) UTOPIAN

19 Unwell, not succeeding, capital gone (6) AILING

21 Udall’s blustering coward inside a regular alpha male (5) RALPH

23 Benefits of ownership, like Hoggart’s of literacy (4) USES

24 His Bassington – such a kind individual at the start? Not so (4) SAKI

26 Steinbeck’s Trasks east of this project (4) EDEN

February 2010

The shop will be undergoing refurbishment this month and, for one week from 21 February to 1March, will have to close. We’ve very excited at the prospect of these improvements and look forward to welcoming you when they are complete. Among other changes will be some marvellous displays of cards, wood-engravings and new books.

Please visit the shop website for more information.

The High Path

In his prizewinning memoir The High Path, Ted Walker recreates with unusual vividness his secure, happy childhood in the England of the Thirties and Forties, and the influences that made a working-class boy into a poet.

Most telling, perhaps, was his relationship with his father, a carpenter who had come to the Sussex coast from Birmingham in search of work before Ted’s birth. The affection between the two shines out from the tender portrait of him, cruising the last mile home from work on his Ariel motorbike, playing backyard cricket with typical concentration, or struggling to master French with Ted, urged on by their loveably eccentric teacher Mr Jupp.

A sense of history came from magical visits to his father’s family in the Worcestershire countryside, and sensuous pleasure from the grocer’s shop managed by ‘Grandad Harry’ – an Aladdin’s Cave where ‘a wondrous blend of smells: nutmeg and cinnamon, dog biscuits and bran, wax polish, ripe cheese and Brasso all harmonized to give a sense of good things kept in spotless order’. It is a picture of a proud and thrifty working-class world now utterly lost.

With grammar school and a place at university a gap began to open between Ted and his parents. These new experiences brought intellectual confusion, romantic longing, sexual frustration, but the warmth of his happy childhood was still his bedrock. The High Path is a beautiful book, written with all the honesty and sensitivity of the poet Ted Walker became.