Growing Up - Angela Thirkell

I've read sixteen of Thirkell's books.  I love them, but I love them so much that it's taken me years to read this many.  They're the kind of book I save for a rainy day.  It's raining today, so maybe I should start another one immediately.

It is probably best to read her Barsetshire Chronicles books in order.  I've tried my best, but when I started reading them back in the 1990s, they were difficult to find.  Now many of them have been reprinted.  There is a character progression in the books and her characters grow up.

Tony Moreland, son of a best-selling author of potboilers (a lovely character herself), was an inquisitive, self-assured child who was obsessed with trains in prior books.  In Growing Up, he's an officer in the military.  Lydia Merton, her married name, found love in a previous book and happiness in her marriage in this one.  She has gone from a loud tom-boy sort to a more tempered young woman.  Her brother is in the military, though, and she worries about him.

Leslie Waring often doesn't hear from her brother and she is anxious for his safety.  Sir Harry and Lady Waring, Leslie's aunt and uncle, have lost their son at war.  Leslie is staying with them after suffering a breakdown from overwork at her important war job. It's a hard time for most people and everyone seems to suffer in one way or another.  Leslie falls in love and the course of love is not smooth.

But not everything is grim.  There's much mild day to day humor.  There's romance all around.  Selina, the ditzy maid, is pursued by several men and is constantly dissolving into tears of sadness or joy.  And, this being a Thirkell book, everyone ends up with the proper partner and the home they desire.

It's a comforting, light read.  Thirkell was an interesting woman.  She was Scottish, her father was the Oxford professor of poetry in the early 1900s and her mother was the daughter of the painter Edward Burne-Jones.  Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Baldwin were her cousins once removed.  It must have been an interesting household.

Busy in Boston

Jack and I have been spending weekends in Boston for the last few weeks.  We rented a condo on Beacon Hill for a month, near where we used to live.  We rented the same condo last fall and had a terrific time.  Because we're self-employed, we can't just go away for a month.  But we did manage to spend nine days there, plus those long weekends.  It's more comfortable and cheaper than a hotel.  This will be our last weekend there for this trip.

We miss New England so much, but my three nieces and their families live much closer to Philadelphia than to Boston.  If I were wealthy, I'd have houses / condos in both locations, but I'm not.  So, this will have to do for now (but I still play the lottery and hope!).

It's nice to have a home away from home.  Eating out is expensive and because I'm a vegetarian all the time and a vegan 99% of the time, it's sometimes hard for me to find good, satisfying food in restaurants.  My husband doesn't eat much flesh, but even he won't eat in restaurants that serve foie gras (diseased duck or goose liver produced by torturing birds), which, sadly, seems to show up on too many menus in Boston and Philadelphia.  So, in the condo, we can cook what we like to eat.

We get to see friends we haven't seen for months or years, we walk or take the T (the subway) all over the city, we visit the magnificent Museum of Fine Arts, the Harvard museums, the Gardner Museum, and we enjoy the sea air.  We love almost everything about Boston.

There are two wonderful used book stores near the condo.  Commonwealth Books has two stores within blocks of each other.  I bought an Angela Thirkell book (County Chronicle), four Mary Stewart paperbacks (that look like they've never been read) for a dollar each, and a handful of Phoebe Atwood Taylor's Asey Mayo mysteries in those atmospheric newish paperback editions.  I won't mention the other well-known used book store where I bought many, many interesting and fine books back in the 1980's because it's not what it used to be.  What a disappointment.  But I did buy two books there:  a Trollope Society guide to Trollope and a nice little 1901 travel book about Hampshire, England, with intact pull-out maps.  I love these old travel books.

There's a wonderful pen store in Boston, Bromfield Pen Shop, also close to the condo we rented.  I love fountain pens, ink, notebooks, etc.  Jack bought me a black Waterman pen there for Mother's Day and two bottles of Noodler's ink:  Walnut and Navajo Turquoise.  They have such beautiful colors and lovely bottle labels.  I need a different pen for each gorgeous color!  My journal is starting to look like a rainbow!

I'll post more photos of our trip to Boston last fall, but I think this is enough for now.  Excuse me, but I must go read!