Plenty of time to catch up on reading. I have just given up on Aldous Huxley’s first novel, Crome Yellow, published in 1921. It seems very dated. I am going to play for safety and re-read Jill the Reckless next – written by PG Wodehouse and also published in 1921.
I wonder what it was like living on a Suffolk farm in 1920/21? Do you remember BBC reporter, Martin Bell, famous for his white suit and being elected as an independent MP? His father was sent to work on a farm when he left school and later he wrote an account of his year. It is truly delightful and a welcome bit of escapism; elegiac, self-deprecating and with wonderful descriptive passages. His first time riding to hounds is a classic of that genre and should be in every hunting anthology. Farms needed many labourers and horses and rural society seems little changed from 1720.
Adrian Bell bought a fifty-acre farm at the end of his year’s apprenticeship and continued as a farmer, writer and Times crossword setter. He sounds an engaging and intelligent character. I nearly forgot, his memoir is called Corduroy and I have a beautifully bound hardback from Plain Foxed Editions.
I wonder what first novels will be spawned by our domestic incarceration this year?
Corduroy is a fine book recommended to me by an excellent English master when I was in my teens and always associated in my mind with Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man by George Sherston ( Siegfried Sassoon), another great lover of the country side, closely associated with Robert Graves in the first world war. It was many years before I made the connection between Adrian Bell and the white suited Martin who seised Neil Hamilton’ seat. I might read Corduroy again in the weeks of free time which stretch ahead.
The excellent Corduroy is the first volume of a trilogy, Silver Ley and The Cherry Tree being the other volumes. Adrian Bell went on to write more than a dozen books on country life as well as editing several volumes of country interest. In 1961 he published a book, My Own Master, which is an autobiography and gives a more accurate picture of his life than the rather fanciful Corduroy, and contains a very interesting chapter on his friendship with Alfred Munnings. Like Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man, Cider with Rosie etc, Corduroy never set out to be a true autobiography though it certainly gives that impression. Nonetheless a very good read, as are the other volumes.