Ysenda Maxtone Graham

The title, the subtitle, the author’s plain name, even the jacket’s photograph of a laughing old lady in sunglasses: none of these is particularly enticing. But the book itself is a delight. Written in the crisp present tense by a 90-year-old with a remarkably clear recollection of the trains of thought of her teenaged and post-teenaged self, it draws you deeply in, so that by the end you feel that you, too, have been to a harsh girls’ school in Plymouth, and then to a keyboard-clattering secretarial college in Surrey and then — best of all — that you have manned canal boats carrying coal from Birmingham to London during the war years with your friends Kitty and Eve.

Author has late-blossoming romance with authoress, both divorcees, and they live together in a cramped house in Harrogate full of stepchildren and then buy a derelict summer house surrounded by vast maize fields in the Charente-Maritime, but are no good at DIY, and they make friends with the locals who help them build a walled garden. They write books. Author is talkative and likes company; authoress prefers silence and solitude. They move from Harrogate to Oxford. One of them has to die first, and it’s the authoress, and it’s cancer, and the author is left bereft and describes the experience all too well. That, in a nutshell, is this book. Good books about being old but feeling young are rare and this is one. Brian Thompson knows how to keep the reader reading.

I read William Nicholson’s new novel in proof before Christmas. ‘The must-read book for 2013 for lovers of William Boyd and Sebastian Faulks,’ it said on the back. Well, I like Boyd and Faulks, but I positively love William Nicholson, so I found that come-on slightly grating. Then I saw what the publicity people meant. Nicholson has broken out of his small, square two inches of ivory. His previous three novels were set over the course of a few days in the southeast of England. A typical chapter was called ‘Saturday’. Motherland spans 11 years, set in Sussex, France, India, Jamaica and New Orleans. Part One is called ‘War: 1942-45’. The pivotal scene of the book is a seaborne raid on the beaches of Dieppe.

The difficult thing about writing a memoir is this: how do you avoid numbing the reader with endless thumbnail sketches of the hundreds of characters who have crossed your path? It’s easier in a novel, where you might have seven to ten main characters and can take time to delve deeply into each one.  In a memoir which spans a long life from pre-war Eton to modern-day Yorkshire, you need to be a very good writer indeed to bring alive, for instance, Mrs Tedder, who did the washing-up at Sunningdale School in 1953. Are you interested? Well, I’m happy to tell you that you are. Wild Writing Granny is a book full of delight. It is shot through with love, anguish, light, darkness and fun.

Dressed up as a child-friendly, pocket-sized hardback, just the right size for a Christmas stocking and with a pretty front-cover illustration of two dear little children in a snowy fir forest, Inventing the Christmas Tree (Yale, £12.99) is actually a learned 90-page thesis on the history of the Christmas tree by the German author Bernd Brunner, who has also written monographs on bears, the moon and snowmen. As it’s translated into American, we have gray, color, luster, skeptics and travelers. But rather than reading it in an American accent, I read it in a German one.

An ordinary woman, rather like yourself.’ These were Peter Fleming’s words when he commissioned Jan Struther to write what became her ‘Mrs Miniver’ columns for the Times. Critics complained then, and have complained ever since, that Mrs Miniver is no ‘ordinary woman’. She rings the bell for tea, takes taxis everywhere, and has a second home in Kent. As I read These Wonderful Rumours, the 1938-1945 diaries of a Derbyshire schoolteacher in her twenties called May Smith, I kept thinking, ‘Here is your perfect ordinary woman.’ And I was not being pejorative. Ordinary does not mean dull. It means unpretentious and normal.

I like books which have their own linguistic microclimate. Fictional first-person narratives are where you tend to find these.  The moment you step inside a good one, you enter a distinctive country as encountered by the narrator, using his or her limited vocabulary. It’s the very constrictedness of the vocabulary that makes the story gripping: it forces you to live inside the narrator’s mind. Blinkered fictional characters created by unblinkered authors can make for surprisingly illuminating books.   How about this for a microclimate to step into? this is my book and i am writing it by my own hand. in this year of lord eighteen hundred and thirty one i am reached the age of fifteen and i am sitting by my window and i can see many things.