We held our second successful ‘virtual’ meeting of the Book Group on 4th May and discussed A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale. As usual opinions were mixed but lots of interesting discussion was had regarding Victorian psychiatry, colonial exile for troublesome individuals and prairie sod-turning!
Next month’s book is The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte. It can be downloaded or read for free at Project Gutenberg or a Kindle edition is available for 99p at Amazon.
Another village Book Club…
In case anyone is inspired by reading Dark Matter to extend their investigations into the unknown!
Novels
Ghost stories are difficult to get right in the novel form, but these do the trick:
Susan Hill, The Woman in Black, even scarier in the stage version but a very creepy book.
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw, like Dark Matter there is a question over the ‘reality’ of the ghosts, but no question that evil is afoot.
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House, a terrifying work by a superb American writer (there is a fiendish film of it starring Claire Bloom, The Haunting, directed by Robert Wise).
Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale, again a bit of a question mark over these ghosts (there was a good tv version with Vanessa Redgrave and Olivia Colman).
Dorothy McArdle, The Uninvited, another well filmed story (in 1944 with Ray Milland) with quite a slow burn and a nasty twist.
Short stories
A variety of stories from a variety of authors and periods (the older ones are available free online with a quick google, and there is often the bonus of an audible version on YouTube, as for the L P Hartley).
M R James, Collected Ghost Stories, especially O Whistle and A Warning to the Curious – this is the master at work.
W W Jacobs, The Monkey’s Paw – a beautifully crafted and horrible tale.
L P Hartley, A Visitor from Down Under – who gets his comeuppance in an unpleasant way.
Richard Barham Middleton, On the Brighton Road – how many times can a ghost die?
D K Broster, Couching at the Door – Ambrose Marchant is another character who deserves all he gets.
Elizabeth Bowen, Hand in Glove – just deserts for a vain young woman.
Fritz Leiber, Smoke Ghost – a scarily modern (well, 1941) kind of ghost or god that must be appeased.
L T C Rolt, Bosworth Summit Pound – one of Rolt’s interesting ‘industrial’ ghost stories, this one set on the Great Central Canal.
H G Wells, The Red Room – what haunts the room where the young wife was frightened to death?
Other classic authors (some of these are ‘mainstream’ but wrote a considerable number of ghost stories) include: Algernon Blackwood; E F Benson; A M Burrage; R H Malden; Walter De la Mare; Oliver Onions; Edith Nesbit; Hugh Walpole; Edith Wharton
Who better to get discussion going on our first meeting than the author herself?
Michelle Paver hosts a YouTube live chat every so often and answers questions from readers. Watch the video by clicking on the link below to see what she suggests as a good starting point for our first discussion – our question is answered first about 4:30 minutes in!
Found today on a market stall in Bristol!
Books chosen to read this year at our meetings on the first Monday of each month starting at 7.30pm in the Bar at The Three Kings, Hanley Castle.
All welcome – there may well be cake!!
Monday 6th April
The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
Monday 4th May
Circe – Madeline Miller
Monday 1st June
A Place Called Winter – Patrick Gale
Monday 6th July
Waypoints – Ian Stephen
Monday 3rd August
Old Filth – Jane Gardam
Monday 7th September
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Bronte
Monday 5th October
Eleanor Oliphant is Perfectly Well – Gail Roebuck
Monday 2nd November
How Far Can You Go? – David Lodge
Monday 7th December
Dancing to the Light of the Moon – Giles Brandreth
George Orwell
Another suggested piece of reading matter from our first meeting. Does it sound familiar somehow?
This material remains under copyright and is reproduced by kind permission of the Orwell Estate and Penguin Books.
My favourite public-house, the Moon Under Water, is only two minutes from a bus stop, but it is on a side-street, and drunks and rowdies never seem to find their way there, even on Saturday nights.
Its clientele, though fairly large, consists mostly of ‘regulars’ who occupy the same chair every evening and go there for conversation as much as for the beer.
If you are asked why you favour a particular public-house, it would seem natural to put the beer first, but the thing that most appeals to me about the Moon Under Water is what people call its ‘atmosphere’.
To begin with, its whole architecture and fittings are uncompromisingly Victorian. It has no glass-topped tables or other modern miseries, and, on the other hand, no sham roof-beams, ingle-nooks or plastic panels masquerading as oak. The grained woodwork, the ornamental mirrors behind the bar, the cast-iron fireplaces, the florid ceiling stained dark yellow by tobacco-smoke, the stuffed bull’s head over the mantelpiece — everything has the solid, comfortable ugliness of the nineteenth century.
In winter there is generally a good fire burning in at least two of the bars, and the Victorian lay-out of the place gives one plenty of elbow-room. There are a public bar, a saloon bar, a ladies’ bar, a bottle-and-jug for those who are too bashful to buy their supper beer publicly, and, upstairs, a dining-room.
Games are only played in the public, so that in the other bars you can walk about without constantly ducking to avoid flying darts.
In the Moon Under Water it is always quiet enough to talk. The house possesses neither a radio nor a piano, and even on Christmas Eve and such occasions the singing that happens is of a decorous kind.
The barmaids know most of their customers by name, and take a personal interest in everyone. They are all middle-aged women—two of them have their hair dyed in quite surprising shades—and they call everyone ‘dear,’ irrespective of age or sex. (‘Dear,’ not ‘Ducky’: pubs where the barmaid calls you ‘ducky’ always have a disagreeable raffish atmosphere.)
Unlike most pubs, the Moon Under Water sells tobacco as well as cigarettes, and it also sells aspirins and stamps, and is obliging about letting you use the telephone.
You cannot get dinner at the Moon Under Water, but there is always the snack counter where you can get liver-sausage sandwiches, mussels (a speciality of the house), cheese, pickles and those large biscuits with caraway seeds in them which only seem to exist in public-houses.
Upstairs, six days a week, you can get a good, solid lunch—for example, a cut off the joint, two vegetables and boiled jam roll—for about three shillings.
The special pleasure of this lunch is that you can have draught stout with it. I doubt whether as many as 10 per cent of London pubs serve draught stout, but the Moon Under Water is one of them. It is a soft, creamy sort of stout, and it goes better in a pewter pot.
They are particular about their drinking vessels at the Moon Under Water, and never, for example, make the mistake of serving a pint of beer in a handleless glass. Apart from glass and pewter mugs, they have some of those pleasant strawberry-pink china ones which are now seldom seen in London. China mugs went out about 30 years ago, because most people like their drink to be transparent, but in my opinion beer tastes better out of china.
The great surprise of the Moon Under Water is its garden. You go through a narrow passage leading out of the saloon, and find yourself in a fairly large garden with plane trees, under which there are little green tables with iron chairs round them. Up at one end of the garden there are swings and a chute for the children.
On summer evenings there are family parties, and you sit under the plane trees having beer or draught cider to the tune of delighted squeals from children going down the chute. The prams with the younger children are parked near the gate.
Many as are the virtues of the Moon Under Water, I think that the garden is its best feature, because it allows whole families to go there instead of Mum having to stay at home and mind the baby while Dad goes out alone.
And though, strictly speaking, they are only allowed in the garden, the children tend to seep into the pub and even to fetch drinks for their parents. This, I believe, is against the law, but it is a law that deserves to be broken, for it is the puritanical nonsense of excluding children—and therefore, to some extent, women—from pubs that has turned these places into mere boozing-shops instead of the family gathering-places that they ought to be.
The Moon Under Water is my ideal of what a pub should be—at any rate, in the London area. (The qualities one expects of a country pub are slightly different.)
But now is the time to reveal something which the discerning and disillusioned reader will probably have guessed already. There is no such place as the Moon Under Water.
That is to say, there may well be a pub of that name, but I don’t know of it, nor do I know any pub with just that combination of qualities.
I know pubs where the beer is good but you can’t get meals, others where you can get meals but which are noisy and crowded, and others which are quiet but where the beer is generally sour. As for gardens, offhand I can only think of three London pubs that possess them.
But, to be fair, I do know of a few pubs that almost come up to the Moon Under Water. I have mentioned above ten qualities that the perfect pub should have and I know one pub that has eight of them. Even there, however, there is no draught stout, and no china mugs.
And if anyone knows of a pub that has draught stout, open fires, cheap meals, a garden, motherly barmaids and no radio, I should be glad to hear of it, even though its name were something as prosaic as the Red Lion or the Railway Arms.
Evening Standard, 9 February 1946
Thanks to everyone for their enthusiastic support of our new venture at our first meeting last night. We now have a list of books to look forward to reading and also a wide range of other suggestions from our first discussion….
Tell us a book that has made an impression on you…
Here are some of the suggestions (apologies for any I have missed) click on the title to find out a little more:
And many others all in just over an hour!
Thanks for the inspiration!
Three Kings Book Group