RANDOM JOTTINGS

Over the last few months I have read some wonderful books, new biographies, mysteries, travel books, histories etc etc and I still have a pile awaiting my attention.  All those authors will have to bear with me and be patient as I have reached saturation point and really cannot take in anything new right now.  This happens to me two or three times a year when no matter how exciting my To be Read pile is, I cannot face opening a new challenge and decide to return to something old and loved.

I recently wrote about Richmal Crompton, following on from an article about her in the Times, and in the past week have read some six titles and reminded myself once again just what a good writer she is and how she has the happy knack of drawing the reader in so that you cannot put the book down until it is finished.

I have now turned to another of my favourite and loved authors, Frances Hodgson Burnett.  I have written about her before on Random (here and here) and I am making no apologies for doing to again.  Apart from The Secret Garden and a Little Princess, which are the books we all know about, we have been lucky in the last five or so years to have reprints by Persephone of The Making of a Marchioness and The Shuttle, two of my favourites, though I think Marchioness takes the top spot.    I have about twenty of her titles on my shelves and most of them are her adult books and I just wish more and more people would discover them and read them.  Most of them are available on the internet and are not too expensive.

The title I have re-read just this morning is T Tembarom, not exactly a title to grab you, but as you read the book you will understand why the hero is so called.  A young boy left an orphan and penniless in the tenements of New York at the turn of the century, struggling to make a living by running errands, selling newspapers, working as a shop  boy and gradually working his way up to a lowly position in a newspaper when the drunken behaviour of a reporter causes him to be sacked and T Tembarom is given a chance to take his place.  It is the 'society' page, not the society of the Three Hundred and Fifth Avenue but on the lower East Side, the reporting of weddings and balls that are never reported in the big papers and it is this column that he is given.  He tramps the streets getting to know bakers who make wedding cakes and who can tip him off about where the weddings are going to be, the dressmakers, he studies the names of laces and satins so he can describe them properly and he works very hard indeed, knocking on doors in all sorts of weather and often meeting with rejection and disinterest.

Back in the boarding house where he lodges, he is popular and well liked and it is here he meets Mr Hutchinson, come to America with an invention and trying to make his fortune, and his daughter known as Little Ann, who seems to mother all the young boys who lodge there and who is loved by T Tembarom. It is she who sits down with him and edits his writing, helping him with his spelling and supporting him all the way.  So, a hard life but he and Ann love each other, he is gradually making his way in the world and he is happy.  And then…..

An English lawyer turns up and informs him that after a two year search they have tracked him down and he is the sole heir to an estate and fortune back in England, where his long dead and feckless father  had been born, and suddenly this rough and ready New Yorker is plunged into the life of an English country squire.

There are twists and turns and another missing heir who was disgraced when he was mistakenly accused of cheating at cards years before and who left the country leaving behind his heartbroken fiance; his reported death in the Klondike; a mysterious down and out who has lost his memory who T Tembarom befriends and the bitter ex-fiance who is thrust upon the new lord of the manor by her scheming mother, desperate for her to marry and escape the dread and fear of a penniless, unmarried old age.   It is full of wonderful characters, some of them of a very familiar type – the outspoken Yorkshire woman full of wisdom and wise sayings straight out of The Secret Garden (Dickon's mum); the crippled boy who cannot get off his sofa in his cottage and is befriended by T Tembarom – my first thought was that he was Colin from the Garden, but on second thoughts he is The Rat, the crippled street boy in the Lost Prince.  For a lover of FHB, this book is a joy from start to finish, a grown up version of Little Lord Fauntleroy (which I read a few months ago for the first time in years and it is not sickly sweet at all), it has the Cinderella quality of the Making of a Marchioness and in T Tembarom, we have a good hearted, honest hero who is doing the very best he can in a situation which is totally foreign to him.

A lovely book which I loved all over again.  I have now started the De Willoughby Claim which has been sitting on my shelves, unread, for about five years.  I have said it before I know, but I will say it once more – sometimes a book waits patiently for the right moment to be read and there is no hurry, it knows that one day I will take it down and open it up and this I did early on this evening.   Ten pages in and I was off.  It is now nearly half past eleven and I am being very strong and putting it down and going to bed, but it will be on my table waiting for me and my early morning cup of tea.

I love Frances  Hodgson Burnett.  Just thought I would mention that in case you had not realised by now…