In the autumn we launched the first title in our new paperback series – Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School. We’d been thinking for some time of putting into paperback those Slightly Foxed Editions that have now sold out, and when the hardback of Mr Tibbits disappeared from the shelves in record time and orders were still pouring in, it seemed the moment to start.
Now we have also added Diana Holman-Hunt’s My Grandmothers and I (our second Slightly Foxed Edition) to the series. Though we say it ourselves, the new paperbacks are delightful – pocket-sized and elegantly produced on the same good cream paper as SF. So if you missed this title first time round, here’s your chance.
My Grandmothers and I Diana Holman-Hunt
‘One of the funniest and bravest memoirs I have ever had the pleasure to read’ Linda Leatherbarrow
Diana Holman-Hunt’s childhood was spent between two wildly contrasting households. One, in Melbury Road, Kensington, belonged to her paternal grandmother, Holman-Hunt’s eccentric widow Edith, known to Diana as ‘Grand’. The other, on the edge of the Sussex marshes, was the home of her mother’s parents, Grandmother and Grandfather Freeman.While the Freeman household ran on oiled wheels, with a full complement of servants to minister to Grandmother Freeman’s whims, parsimonious ‘Grand’, in her big gaunt house full of treasures and valuable paintings, relied entirely on the services of ‘my good Helen’, a taciturn figure who existed in the damp, beetle-infested basement from which she produced inedible meals of scrag end, Bovril and ancient eggs.
While sweet-smelling, self-indulgent Grandmother Freeman lived for the present, ‘Grand’ lived entirely in the faded splendour of her past. The two mistrusted one another deeply and competed for Diana’s affection while being spectacularly blind to her needs.
Out of an essentially bleak scenario, in which she was passed like a parcel from one to the other and finally left in her teens to fend for herself, Diana has woven a small comic masterpiece of pitch-perfect dialogue and deadpan observation. ‘I have tried’, she wrote, ‘to depict my grandparents and others as they appeared to me as a child.’ In this she has brilliantly and hilariously succeeded.
All prices include post and packing • Paperback • 170×110mm • 288pp
