RETRO READS
GREEN HANDS by Barbara Whitton (Imperial War Museum £8.99, 224 pp)
GREEN HANDS
by Barbara Whitton (Imperial War Museum £8.99, 224 pp)
Talk about hard graft! During World War II, more than 80,000 intrepid women became Land Girls.
One lively volunteer turned her own back-breaking, blister-inflicting stint into this feisty autobiographical caper.
‘It’s no work for women,’ grumbled the farmer, confronted by two inexperienced teenage girls eager to spend 12 hours a day, six days a week shovelling manure, hoeing turnips and digging up spuds. They’d start at 5.30am in rain, sleet, snow, up to the knees in mud, soaked to the skin. At harvest time mice ran up their trousers.
At weekends they relished raucous banter at the village knees-ups. All for a shilling a day and dodgy bed and board.
Laugh? They never stopped. Wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Terrific…
MISS PETTIGREW LIVES FOR A DAY by Winifred Watson (Persephone £10, 256 pp)
MISS PETTIGREW LIVES FOR A DAY
by Winifred Watson (Persephone £10, 256 pp)
Craving for a fluffy, feelgood classic? Miss P, dowdy, middle-aged spinster governess, is sent by a job agency to the flat of a raving showbiz beauty.
Before she has time for introductions, she is plunged into the star’s hectic lifestyle — breakfast cocktails, tell-tale rumpled sheets, nudity and a potential clash between two rival studs. Thrilled! Enchanted!
Miss P’s unimpeachable virtue takes a knock. This is the life!
Over the course of a day she is glammed up, lavishly clad (silk knickers!), whizzed off to nightclubs, gets sozzled, enjoys smoochy dancing and absolutely blossoms. Pure escapist delight, all the more needed these days.
BLACK NARCISSUS by Rumer Godden (Virago £14.99, 272 pp)
BLACK NARCISSUS
by Rumer Godden (Virago £14.99, 272 pp)
Repressed desire is at the heart of this beautiful novel, recently screened as a TV series and the subject of a classic 1947 film starring Deborah Kerr and Jean Simmons.
A group of Anglican nuns led by Sister Superior, Clodagh, arrive high in the Himalayas to set up a remote convent in a melancholy abandoned palace, once used as a haram.
The glorious location energises the nuns to build a school until icy winds, wrecked plumbing, isolation, illness and resentful locals dampen enthusiasm.
Enter Mr Dean — an outspoken, alcoholic handyman whose presence and kindness, greatly unsettling to the nuns, shatters Clodagh’s peace of mind.
‘You have to be very strong to live close to God or a mountain — you’ll turn a little mad,’ warns one character, while frustrated sexual attraction will have tragic consequences.
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